Category: News

Anne Reid of the Secular Party is an accountant who works in the Griffith suburb of West End and lives in nearby Yeronga. She was the Secular Party candidate in Griffith in 2013, polling 0.51 per cent of the vote.

She told No Fibs that her engagement with the people of Griffith “is at the grassroots level through social media, community groups and with those I meet working in West End”.

“Griffith,” she said, “has a diverse population with many different concerns. Jobs and job security are certainly on the agenda, as is climate change. However, the cause of most consternation is the rise and rise of religious influence under the current government, particularly as it plays out in education and equal rights issues.”

She said the most important issues to her personally is equity.

“Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that everyone is going to be better off from every decision that government makes when it comes to the allocation of resources, however it does mean that everyone should get a fair go.

“It really concerns me that religious interference is undermining both our education and legal systems,” Ms Reid said. “The most far reaching inequity our society has seen in recent times is the demise of our once great free, compulsory and secular public education system as it has increasingly had to compete with religious and independent schools for funding. This has now manifest itself in poor literacy and numeracy rates and slipping rankings compared with other OECD countries. Ultimately it affects us all as more people don’t have the skills to access the workforce and participate effectively in it.”

Ms Reid said she joined the Secular Party in 2012, “in despair at the state of politics in Australia. It seemed to me,” she said, “that this was the only political party that was developing polices in the long term public interest, instead of for short term political gain”.

“The Secular Party’s polices are based on the ideals of a true liberal secular democracy that recognises the virtues of meaningful work in a market-based economy on the one hand, and the notion of individual freedom (including both freedom of and freedom from religion) and the protection of human rights on the other. It is this balance that our current governments seem incapable of negotiating.”

Ms Reid said she thinks the Secular Party will increase its vote in this by-election, “because we are raising important issues that both the major parties avoid.”

The Secular Party has a website, and Ms Reid has a Facebook site but does not tweet.

– See more at: http://nofibs.com.au/2014/01/28/candidates-fronting-griffithelects-meets-two-familiar-faces/#sthash.EpVgNp4h.dpuf

Inevitably in a two-party system, the media focus will be on the ALP and LNP candidates, and to a lesser extent The Greens. This is a pity, because voters can miss some very interesting issues that are often only prompted by the minor parties.

Of the nine ‘other’ candidates, just two will be familiar from 2013: Geoff Ebbs (The Greens) and Anne Reid (the Secular Party).

It is hard to know exactly where to position The Greens. It is certainly not a minor party, with nine senators (including Larissa Waters from Queensland) and one member of the House of Representatives, but in Griffith the interest in The Greens seems to focus on the distribution of preferences as much as on its policies.

Geoff Ebbs was The Greens’ candidate for Griffith in the September 2013 election, polling 10.18 per cent of the primary vote. He is a former editor of IT publications with Australian Consolidated Press, author, blogger, and community radio presenter. He is currently a partner in the local Westender (which occasionally republishes No Fibs stories about the Griffith electorate), and lives in West End.

After a bit of a false start for this by-election, when Andrew Bartlett was initially preselected and later withdrew, Ebbs was finally endorsed by his party in December. This appeared to put the campaign onto the back foot and it will be interesting to see if The Greens are able to regain some of the ground it lost in 2013.

Of the mood in Griffith, Ebbs said voters are “angry at the loss of an egalitarian Australia and the creation of a two-speed economy in which they are the losers. They are scared that the old parties are not dealing with the major economic challenges posed by climate change, energy shortages and over-use of the world’s finite resources.”

The issue at the heart of Mr Ebbs’ concerns, and the one which motivated his entry into politics, is climate change.

“I have been writing and lobbying for change in energy policy to address climate change for over a decade”, he said.

Mr Ebbs said The Greens worked with scientists and economists to develop policies to deal with difficult challenges. “Other parties have ignored these issues and called us extremist and alarmist for making serious plans for the future. Despite this we have stuck to our long term plans and gradually the media has come to acknowledge that our solutions are not only practical and realistic, but necessary.”

Like Labor, The Greens have been campaigning strongly on Medicare and Geoff Ebbs was quoted recently on ABC television as saying that a co-payment for bulk billed GP visits “would be a disaster for the less affluent members of society.”

The Greens preferences are highly sought after by other parties. A number of commentators attributed Kevin Rudd’s win in 2013 to Greens’ preferences, however, as I was reminded recently, preferences belong to the voters, not to the parties.

This time around, The Greens announced preferences for five ‘progressive’ micro parties or independents before Labor. It will be interesting to see whether its supporters will follow suit, but you would expect a fair degree of independent thinking from Greens voters.

While Labor may be attempting to distance itself from The Greens in other parts of Australia, most notably in Tasmania, this is not the case in Griffith and Labor has listed The Greens at number two on its how-to-vote card.

Greens leader Senator Christine Milne will be adding her support to Mr Ebbs in the last week of the campaign.

Mr Ebbs has a Facebook site and website and tweets occasionally using the handle @Geoff4Griffith

– See more at: http://nofibs.com.au/2014/01/28/candidates-fronting-griffithelects-meets-two-familiar-faces/#sthash.EpVgNp4h.dpuf

Queensland Health has issued an alert about yet another measles case yesterday in Brisbane.

In West End on 22 and 23 January an adult male visited numerous stores on Boundary St, including a barber shop.

In the morning of 24 January he visited Coles Supermarket. Then the Stradbroke Barge at 5 pm.

Metro South Health (MSH) public health physician Dr Brad McCall said, “all Brisbane residents needed to be alert for symptoms, particularly those who may have come into contact with the first most recent patient on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th January, or with the other patient on the flight or at the IGA in Carina on Tuesday 21 January.”

For more information regarding the measles alert see: http://www.health.qld.gov.au/news/stories/140128-measles.asp

The community forum held at Jagera Hall on Tuesday to discuss the Queensland Government’s war on civil liberties generated passionate debate around the value of protest marches as a form of engendering change.

Organised by the Cloudland Collective, the intent of the evening was to bring the experience of three activists from the seventies to bear on the discussion about how best to respond to the Newman Government’s ongoing attack on civil liberties and the Abbot Government’s emulation of the slash and burn approach to everything that smells faintly progressive, humanist or libertarian.

Sam Watson, Jim Beatson and Jenny Harvey were all University of Queensland students and activists at the height of the Joh Bjelke Petersen years and engaged in a variety of protests and other actions.

Sam Watson remains deeply involved in Socialist politics and activism. Jim Beatson has built on his long experience at 4ZZZ FM moving to Northern NSW and being actively involved in The Greens mayor of Byron Shire Council. Jenny Harvey continues to advocate for public education and regional affairs from her position as a regional school teacher and union rep.

Inflaming passions

It was Jim Beatson who raised passions on the evening with his observation that “if you think you are going to change the world by marching and shouting you are deluded.”

His contention is that actions designed to co-op and derail the media are more important than actions which the media cn portray as the radical looney fringe.

“If you provide the news with its fodder that those opposing the government are outsiders and fringe dwellers, you are helping the government do its job,” he said.

Many members of the audience were shocked into making comments from the floor during his speech and denouncing him during the forty minute question and answer session.

“You are using me as a straw man for the more fundamental argument about how we build a progressive movement for change that isolates and identifies the government’s radical agenda,” Bestson said.

A common thread

While the lines were starkly drawn in this forum, Westender has come across very similar discussion at a number of fora.

Advocates for high profile speakers, targetted social media campaigns and media friendly actions against the VLAD laws, offshore processing of refugees and sacrificing public assets to coal companies have expressed frustration at a number of organising committees that the emphasis is so firmly on the protest march that there is little room to discuss anything else.

The facilitator at one committee meeting actually said without any sense of irony, “These ideas are all well and good and I support them, but we have a rally to organise for three week’s time and we still have a large number of decisions to make.”

Looking forward

Given that the context of the Cloudland meeting at Jaegera is the forthcoming G20 summit, and the mounting calls for a major March in March against the Abbot Government it becomes critical that this debate is resolved and soon.

Rather than attempting to discuss the value, or the appropriate context of protest as a form of raising awareness, it seems more fruitful to develop new mechanisms for shifting the mainstream.

As an activist attempting to engage with mainstream politics to drive change and as the publisher of Westender trying to create a mainstream publication advocating for a compassionate and holistic leadership it seems critical to me that we build alternatives. Rather than protesting against the counter-reformation governments we have elected, who are clearly ruling as the vassals of corporate feudalism, it is critical that we build and sell an alternative.

This year, some of us need to suit up in black and occupy the police, but even larger numbers need to hold an alternative G20 to outline a more sensible future than the extractive, oppressive and dominant paradigm that sacrifices the 99% to satisfy the one percent. That is certainly where we will direct the resources of this publication.

Disclaimer: Geoff Ebbs is the publisher of Westender and candidate for The Greens in the Griffith by-election.

Australian Government Office of the Australian Information Commissioner announced today, aptly on Data Privacy Day, that Australians will have their right to privacy strengthened on 12 March 2014.

Australian Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim says in a press release the new privacy laws will strengthen peoples’ privacy rights in areas such as direct marketing, the disclosure of personal information overseas and requesting access to and correction of personal information held by an organisation.

“Being up front with customers and having good privacy practices in place makes good business sense.”

“Everyone should take an active interest in protecting their privacy and read an organisation’s privacy policy to decide whether they want to do business with that organisation.”

For more information on privacy law reform see: http://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/privacy-act/privacy-law-reform

Having a Prime Minister as the sitting member drew significant attention to Griffith during the 2013 federal election, but there is a sense that this time around the eyes of the nation will be on Griffith with renewed interest, many seeing this by-election as the first test for Tony Abbott’s government.

On one side of the ring we have LNP candidate Dr Glasson, who is well liked in the electorate, and his personal appeal may be his greatest asset. He projected as much himself, when he was reported in the Fairfax press as saying that: “If we try to sell it (the election) on a political basis, or a leadership basis, we won’t get up.”

As the son of William (Bill) Glasson, Queensland Minister for Lands and Forestry and Police under Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Dr Glasson has an LNP legacy. “You may say politics is in my blood” he told Carindale Connect in March 2013.

Since the 2013 election Dr Glasson has been touted in the media as something of a giant slayer, having made significant inroads into the ALP’s primary vote in Griffith by gaining 42.2 per cent to Kevin Rudd’s 40.36 per cent.

In his campaign material, Dr Glasson lists his priorities as:

–  Improving frontline health services and delivering on our commitment to establish Hummingbird House, a children’s respite and hospice facility at Kangaroo Point;

–  Creating more local jobs by reducing taxes and regulations on small business and increasing their ability to compete – which will be helped by the Government’s new competition review;

–  Reducing the cost of living by scrapping the Carbon Tax – making households $550 a year better off; and,

– A stronger, safer community through more CCTVs, and support for sporting and community groups.

While he may have wanted to ‘keep it local’ and focus the campaign around Kevin Rudd’s resignation, the Abbott government’s shaky start has largely enabled Labor and the Greens to set the agenda.

There has been particular focus in the past few weeks on school funding, Medicare, and action on climate change. Whether he had planned to or not, these are the issues to which Dr Glasson is now having to respond.

Much is made in Dr Glasson’s campaign material of his credentials as a local doctor and a past president of the AMA. It says of him that: “Bill’s character is reflected in his belief that all Australians should be able to access quality health care, regardless of their circumstances or where they live. As president of the Australian Medical Association he fought hard for that outcome working with governments of all persuasions.”

However, after going public with qualified support for a proposed new Medicare fee for bulk billed patients, these credentials have been under attack and a ‘Save Our Medicare’ campaign has sprung up in Griffith and found resonance nationally.

It is hard to know whether the Medicare fee issue has gained any traction beyond the Labor and Green’s party faithful. While the government has not categorically ruled it out, the Acting Health Minister Kevin Andrews has made it clear that a new Medicare fee is not current Government policy, and Glasson says Labor is just ‘scaremongering’.

Locals I have spoken with appear to be somewhat underwhelmed by the issue, some saying they already pay a gap fee anyway, and others that $6 doesn’t seem like much to ask. Nevertheless, Labor and the Greens continue to pursue the issue with vigour.

– See more at: http://nofibs.com.au/2014/01/25/griffith-grudge-match-glassons-gladiators-vs-butlers-battlers-griffithelects-reports/#sthash.cMNbqhmg.dpuf