Bendigo Advertiser Letters to the Editor - Federal election 2019: Climate change, Section 44, bankruptcy, voting

Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) are sick of waiting for the Federal Government to take meaningful action on Climate Change, and have declared a climate emergency. For the sake of our childrens' health and the health of the planet man made green house emissions must be curbed. There is 'no time for games'. The next decade is critical to reduce emissions to prevent global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees centigrade. Numerous medical bodies throughout Australia and the world demand immediate and effective action on climate change. DEA are asking doctors and health care professionals to support action and to let Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten know of our concerns. To this end a stall will be held outside Bendigo Hospital entrance in Drought Street at lunchtime on Thursday 9th May so that concerned health care professionals can support the 'No Time for Games - protecting childrens' health in a changing climate' DEA campaign. Failure 'to take prompt, substantive action given our current knowledge would be an act of injustice to all children' (American Academy of Pediatrics).

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The Australian National University has developed a new tool 'Your Climate 2050', which shows, based on current trends, how the average daily maximum temperature(degrees celcius) will rise from the 1960 - 90 by 2050. It covers more than 4000 locations in Australia. Bendigo is set to warm 3C. Summer will be 4C hotter. There will be 85 days above 30C; the old average was 42 days. There will be 10 days above 40C; nine more than there used to be. What we used to experience as winter will no longer occur. The year will be dominated by extreme heat. There will be 27 per cent less rain. I'd say in the Federal Election, vote for the party most likely to slow global warming.

Richard Flannagan, the Australian Mann-Booker Prize winning novelist, told us in his closing address at the recent Doctors for the Environment Australia conference in Hobart that we have 11 1/2 years to take definitive action on climate change if we want to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade by the end of this century. If we don't take immediate action the World Bank says we will warm by a catastrophic four degrees by then. And Australia will be hotter than that. Who will be alive then? People born now will be 81 years old and will have lived through massive fires and floods, sea level rises, displacement of millions of climate change refugees, food shortages and mosquito-borne epidemics, to say the least. Their children will face the sort of global weather problems we have difficulty even imagining. We are the last generation capable of taking action to avoid this massive upheaval and health threat. It is encumbent upon all of us to jolt our politicians into the recognition that talk of tax breaks and saving utes is so minor as to be nonsensical. We heard the brave voices of our children recently in the school strike. Let us heed them, and make this the climate change election. Think carefully about your vote. For it is really our last chance.

The nomination of Julie Hosking is rightfully invalid as the Electoral Act specifically precludes undisclosed bankrupts from holding any office in any Parliament in Australia, be it federal, state or local government. And she should be well aware of that, just having been ousted from council as a result of bankruptcy. This provision has been in the electoral act since Federation and is there to protect the community from the possibility of the potential election of people who could be open to corruption due to their financial situation and see it as an avenue to redeem themselves through the use of public pffice to influence future decisions in return for financial gain. And that's how it should be.

As if we didn't know, but big Clive Palmer has told all of us that he allegedly doesn't give a stuff about anybody. Scott Morrison has endorsed that feeling loud and clear, that he doesn't give a stuff about ordinary working people either after slashing penalty rates, and now doing a dodgy preference deal with this man, who left the Australian taxpayer with a $70 million bill after closing his Townsville mine, and has allegedly spent $61 million dollars on his election campaign. Well if that's the case, why has the Australian taxpayer had to pay his workers when he claims he has $4 billion dollars, $500 million dollars of which is available at a minutes notice. So what are ordinary Australians left with? Maybe the majority of Australians will walk into the polling booth and emphatically tell these two individuals and their parties, that they don't give a stuff about them - either.

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