Can anyone reassure us? Is there in fact any Australian Labor Party presence in Toowoomba? Can anyone name all those shown above. You should get three of them but I bet the Hon Lindy Nelson-Carr MP for Mundingburra, Minister for Communities, Disability Services, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships, Multicultural Affairs, Seniors and Youth, is new to you.
Sure, Queensland’s Attorney General Kerry Shine is the Member of State Parliament for Toowoomba North. Solicitor Chris Meibusch was the ALP’s candidate at last year’s Federal election. But who actually speaks for Labor here?
Is there in fact an active ALP branch? What does it ever do? Why are not its meetings publicised? Who is its secretary and spokesman? What is muzzling ALP opinion? Is it apathy, sloth, or ignorance?
Here we have Kevin Rudd’s Government under sustained attack … like, Rudd is overseas too much (ignoring the fact that he is presently in New York at the fulcrum of the global financial debacle) …. like, Fuel Watch and Grocery Watch are rubbish … like, proposed changes to the Medicare levy surcharge threshold promising tax savings for some hundreds of thousands of people now blocked in the Senate …. like, Alcopop drink taxation branded as a revenue raid … like, luxury car tax proposals attacked and delayed ..… like, Rudd and Swan are ridiculed as incompetent … like Rudd accused of being an inbred bureaucraft who doesn’t have the vision for Government …. and worst, that Rudd’s Government has no economic credentials and is leading us to ruin.
And Toowoomba offers not a single ALP identity to defend the party’s own Prime Mininster and Government - except me that is, and I’m independent and not a party member. And no one speaks up for Anna Bligh either, on the nose as her Government deserved presently to be.
No wonder the Opinion Polls show her administration is on the slide and unbelievably being overtaken by the Springborg team which so far has enunciated no policies at all? Springborg’s lot is advancing simply because Anna’s lot is on the nose.
On his occasional television appearance, Shine looks hangdog and worried.
And so he should be. Toowoomba is represented by two other Members of Parliament – Stuart Copeland whose electorate of Cunningham creeps into the southern sububs and Mike Horan whose electorate of Toowoomba South is its neighbour. Stuart, whose electorate has been declared redundant in the recent redistribution, is packing it in and won’t contest the next election even if a vacant electorate should come up. He’s a good man and a loss to politics.
But Kerry Shine doesn’t seem to get it – that as a highly prominent member of Anna Bligh’s Cabinet, and whether he likes it or not, he is in fact regarded as THE Member of Parliament for THIS City. So where are you, Kerry?
>>> Scroll down for “Anna’s losing touch with Toowoomba’s battlers”
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