Climate of elitism among candidates

IF A nanny cares for your children, a maid cleans your clothes, a chauffeur drives your car, or a cleaner fixes the house, you are better off than most. Tick all, and congratulations, you have a brilliant resume representing Climate 200.

Harbourside heirs and heiresses will never know what it is to choose between the $8/500g mince and a $1.75 can of lentils because of budget instead of any moral ideal.

Wealthy circles become smaller, as more of those around them become staff. Time for coffee to talk politics is easier to find when others are doing the housework.

With skyrocketing power prices from the closure of coal-fired power stations, people who could not change a tyre are apparently changing the climate.

I would never expect Wentworth’s so-called independent Teal candidate Allegra Spender, who went to a $34,000-a-year private girls school and then Cambridge, to understand. Nor would I expect that of Warringah’s Olympic skier Zali Steggall, who grew up in the French Alps.

The galling thing is that apart from the beautiful luck of the life that fell in their lap, they believe they have the right to purchase politics as well.

But from North Sydney’s independent Kylea Tink, originally from Coonabarabran, I expect more. Ms Tink backed a road-user tax “charging on the odometer” in a Sky candidates forum on Thursday, claiming the biggest death rate was due to vehicle emissions compared to “only 1200 of road accidents”.

Please, Kylea, go home to Parkes, to your old neighbouring town of Baradine where the “daycare” is a neighbour’s place and the people with the oldest, most fuel-inefficient cars, most likely to break down, live the furthest from town in the cheapest houses.

Tell Baradine, with a median household income of $771 a week, that they need to buy an electric car, and that they will have to pay a road-user tax “on the odometer”.

You patronise them by saying rural and regional communities “are incredibly resilient” like a person thrown out of a boat by necessity is a good swimmer or drowns.

At the Baradine shop yesterday, the shearer paid $3.95 for two litres of milk and $3.95 for a no-name basic loaf of white bread. In North Sydney, the bread equivalent was $1.70 at Woolworths, while the same 2L milk was $2.60.

People in Baradine are paying Harris Farm prices for home brand.

Surely Ms Tink, a publicly educated rural high school student, knows deep down how a policy like that would be taken at home.

A policy that works for the inner-city rich with light rail on their doorstep leaves us in the dust. Regionalisation Minister Bridget McKenzie tried explaining this at the National Press Club this week and perhaps proving her point; all questions from the media focused on climate change in Canberra instead of the bush.

Charging by the odometer, kids won’t go to school, doctors’ appointments will be put off, conditions allowed to worsen, and the poor become impoverished.

We can see the 100 per cent increase in wholesale power prices now, directly attributable to the closure of coal-fired power stations and the jagged road to renewables. Wasn’t all power going to become cheaper?

Shortly after a joint press conference with two Climate 200 candidates, Ms Tink denied being supported by Simon Holmes a Court, even though his website