The Voice of Cowper

in the house of representatives

Our reps in government should: inform us about what decisions are being made in parliament provide us with an opportunity to offer our opinion on how they should act on our behalf.

Local government does roads and rubbish. State does schools and hospitals and makes war on councils Fed does money and defence. It makes war on the other levels.

The way all these functions are directed is through acts of parliament. The acts come into being through the bills that are developed and agreed on by government. At every level there are “issues”. They haven’t changed in 200 years We have had 46 general elections since 1901 There is much that is not adequate about the way our society is functioning. V4C is engaging in a process to find out if there is sufficient ammunition in the electorate to warrant a fight against the intransigence of the incumbent representative. Is there a platform for an independent candidate? Environment and integrity nearly worked last time but I feel that to rehash that isn’t enough to engage the voters. "Housing" has been mentioned as a possible “issue". A good exemplar: between past government mistakes and media conflagration we have arrived at "crisis”. Last year the government passed a bill aimed at addressing this crisis. Our rep in parliament asked his party leader how to vote. He didn’t ask us. His vote was a NO to the “help to buy” bill which was subsequently passed Perhaps the people of Cowper would have urged him to vote YES. He didn’t consult. He didn’t represent. He only represented the party to which he belongs. That party has fewer than 1000 members in Cowper. There are 100,000 voters in Cowper. It's interesting to peruse his voting record Anyway, my point is that the issues are not the issue! The process hasn’t worked! The tools to effect representation are available. The 50 billion dollar NBN and the commercial network operators have provided us with everything we need to construct a conduit between each voter and parliament. Those tools are what our candidate can use to bring about democratic reform in our electorate.

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