A PUBLIC DEBATE
In 1992 when the Port Macquarie hospital was privatised by the Greiner Liberal Government, the hospital employees belonged to the State Government superannuation fund (SASS).
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Under the SASS act legislation schedule 5, when employees are privatised they are automatically kicked out of the government SASS fund with many of them losing tens of thousands of dollars in retirement benefits.
Owing to Port Macquarie being a marginal electorate and in order to deflect community anger, the then Liberal state government enacted special legislation to exempt schedule 5 and allow existing employees to remain in the government fund.
The legislation was specific to existing Port Macquarie hospital employees.
About the same time, the state government owned and operated Port Kembla Coal Terminal was privatised.
Being in a safe Labor electorate there was no special legislation for the several hundred coal terminal employees and they were dumped from the SASS fund. Some employees are calculated to have lost over $100,000 in superannuation benefits.
Those employees are today living with the consequences of a significantly reduced superannuation pot in retirement owing to the ruthless actions of the Greiner government in 1992.
It would appear that the current employees of the Shellharbour hospital are about to suffer the same fate as those 1992 coal terminal employees, should the hospital privatisation proceed.
Mick Atkin, Shellharbour
GETTING FACTS STRAIGHT
In response to the letter by Doug Steley ("Fears of mythical invasion”, Illawarra Mercury, September 19, 2016), I remind Mr Steley that Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts are entitled to their view and have more guts than most politicians because they will not bounce to political correctness on the issues of Muslim immigration and climate change.
In his second paragraph Doug Steley claims "Pacific Islanders would be coming to Australia to escape the effects of climate change”.
But Professor Paul Kench, an Auckland University coastal geomorphologist along with colleagues in Australia and Fuji has now studied more than 600 coral reef islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
His findings show 40 per cent have grown in size.
Another 40 per cent have stayed stable. Only 20 per cent have shrunk. When are these climate change scaremongers going to get their facts straight
Adrian Devlin, Fairy Meadow
NOT A SURPRISE
It is not surprising to know that half of the Australia would like to ban Muslim migration.
We live in a world today that is very much influenced by media coverage. We base our opinions on what we are shown.
The media is constantly putting Islām down, and instead of showing the good things of this faith, the media only shows the bad: the terror, the horror.
This is what makes their headlines, and stories.
It is unfortunate that radical Muslims and terrorists get more coverage in the media than those hundreds of millions of Muslim men and women who serve humanity as doctors, scientists, charity workers, social workers, human right activists or lawyers.
Images, texts, headlines and news can just as easily present a false notion as they can present facts. There are so many things that people do not know about, and so many negative and incorrect assumptions are made about Muslims.
It is our job to clear up the misconceptions and false accusations against Islām. I urge Muslims to get out of their comfort zone and demystify our peaceful religion and beliefs.
Usman Mahmood, South Bowenfels
