Climate change a long bow
WITH all the publicity about quolls in the media lately I feel I must respond. I do believe in climate change and I am passionately opposed to rubbish being dumped anywhere, especially in our bush. However to suggest climate change is responsible for the huge reduction in quoll numbers is indeed drawing a long bow. I witnessed first hand the effect 1080 foxbaiting had on quoll numbers in areas where quolls were once numerous. Look carefully at the chronological timing of events, 1080 fox baiting began in 2002. The authorities say quoll numbers have reduced 50 per cent in the last 10 to 12 years. Go figure. Anyone who believes laying 350,000-plus 1080 meat baits across Tasmania didn’t affect the quoll population, is in my opinion, delusional.
Borrow to build
THE paper is full of letters and news items on the need for the Government to spend money to finance infrastructure, expand health services and other worthy projects, exhortations met with “We don’t have the money”. Have they never heard of deficit financing. Business would not be able to operate unless it was able to borrow upfront to finance new or innovative projects, and banks would have no business if there were no customers seeking to access the funds they have to lend. It is idle and silly for governments to claim it is somehow immoral to go into debt to fund infrastructure or necessary projects right now, leaving future generations to pay off any resulting debt. So what! If Eric Reece had taken this approach there would not have been a Hydro, and this generation would have been using candles for light and fires to cook. So think about that. Australians, and they deserve the opportunity to become an Australian on Australia Day. As in past years, Clarence’s Australia Day celebrations will occur on the Bellerive Boardwalk, with our Citizenship Ceremony and Australia Day Awards from 11am. All Australians, new and old, are warmly welcome to attend and join together to celebrate all that makes our community and our country, great. duced injury: seatbelts, blood alcohol limits for drivers and gun control. Mr Wilkie is also correct to deplore the decisions of politicians whose knowledge tells them the moral course but who fall in line when their leaders, generally cowed by industry lobbyists, dictate the opposite.