Thanks also to Adam Holmes for his informative breakdown of the Whipstick Ward count-back process, published in the Bendigo Advertiser on Wednesday October 24 (It’s been a shock. New Bendigo councillor wants focus on industry).

Adam’s report clearly demonstrates the importance of voters’ second and subsequent preferences in ultimately electing councillors.

Prior to the 2016 City of Greater Bendigo council election,  a largely positive electoral reform meant that candidate how-to-vote cards were disallowed. This is a reform designed to discourage the dubious practice of candidates effectively harvesting voters’ preferences from “paper candidates”. Under our preferential voting system, preferences are always determined by the individual voter, with specific how-to-vote advice merely being a recommendation from any one candidate.

Mr Pethybridge’s eventual election to council via a redistribution of Julie Hoskin’s voters’ preferences makes sense in the context of their similar views.

Adam’s report, however, also refers to “Ms Goldsmith’s preferences”. The semantics here are important. In the absence of any formal advice to voters from myself as to how they may like to direct their vote, voters’ preferences are entirely their own, and not mine.

I urge voters to remember that, in Australia the preferential voting system is the foundation of our democratic process at all levels of government, and your preferences are always your own, and within your control. They are, therefore, always your preferences, not “Ms Goldsmith’s” or anyone else’s.

Your vote is powerful and important, all the way down to your last preference.

Read more: Whipstick ward councillor, Julie Hoskins, resigns

Imagine a child, not yet a teenager, whose despair is such that he no longer eats, speaks or leaves his bed. Without psychiatric intervention he will probably die.

This is the situation of many of the children in indefinite detention on Nauru. This is why doctors have described the situation as a medical emergency and almost 6,000 Australian doctors have written to the Prime Minister pleading for all children to be brought to Australia for assessment and treatment.

More and more Australians are seeing the shocking harm being done in our name, supposedly to protect our security. What have we become as a supposedly humane nation to allow this to continue? Please contact the Prime Minister and tell him this must not continue.

Read more: ‘We wouldn’t do it to our own children’: protest rally in Hargreaves Mall

The Labor government’s ducking and weaving –  not to answer legal/police question about this 'Red Shirts” saga  – is bordering on deception.

The saddest thing, however, about all this is that the government may be voted back in. Which says more about the apathy of the voting public than anything else.

Related: Rort scandal rattles ahead of Victoria election

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