GET WITH THE PROGRAM
Retired now we flexed our Opal Card with a trip to Sydney. What a great experience travelling along the coast. Returning home how disgusted I was both my wife and I were forced to stand all the way back to Oak Flats.
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I feel for the workers forced to use this service. Overcrowding only adds to workers stress. Time the Government got with the program and put more carriages on this link. We don’t want more cars on the roads, do we?
Peter Tornaros, Oak Flats
WHO SUPPORTS PENSIONERS?
This is the 29th year of the pensioner council rates discount. In 1989 the then NSW Government gave pensioners a $250 annual discount on their local Council rates. This was a welcomed amount then.
Twenty nine years later this amount has not changed. Yet every thing to do with living expenses has. Sometime, some year, someone may listen from the NSW Parliament and do something about it.
People threaten to strike for higher wages. The NSW Government and unions fall over themselves to solve the problem because the voting public will be disrupted. However, pensioners can not strike.
I point out that Wollongong City Council has the ability to increase that rate, but won’t. They just give you different options to pay. Still it's a farce. Wollongong Council says it's a NSW Government issue. The NSW Government says it's a council issue. So it keeps buck passing to each other.
So what do I think it should be? The discount should be doubled to $500 and indexed each year going up with the CPI. Simple. In 1990 when I moved locally, my rates were $1100 and for that I got a garbage service once a week.
My Wollongong rates are now over $2000 a year even with the pensioner discount rate. With that I still only get a garbage service once week. No councillor or government MP will take up the baton for the pensioner. Though I have recently spoken to Labor canddiate Maryanne Stuart who will try to follow this through for me. The elected member Lee Evans has made no attempt to do anything except to say it’s back to the council.
But this is just not for me, but for all pensioners who are trying to live in their own home while still trying to pay it off, if they can. As I said pensioners can not strike, so who speaks for them to correct this great injustice in the 21st century?
Alan Bond, Stanwell Tops
STOPPING THE BOATS
In reply to the letter by John Pronk ‘Something More Positive?” (Illawarra Mercury, May 14, 2018), please do not misrepresent the facts Mr Pronk just because you cannot handle the success of the Liberals to stop the boats.
It may be boring to Mr Pronk, but the Rudd-Gillard Labor Government (2007-2013) opened Australia to the asylum seeker trade, where we saw some 1200 people (men.women and children) drown at sea. A number of people suspected that a good portion of the asylum seekers were not refugees fleeing persecution, but could have been economic refugees.
This makes sense given the fees people smugglers demand for their illegal activities. However as usual the left champion the cause of asylum seekers while ignoring the genuine refugees sitting in camps and treated so unjustly. Yet, former Premier of NSW and Federal Senator Bob Carr confirmed (in November, 2013) after Labor left office that most asylum seekers were economic refugees.
On the issue of white Africans coming to Australia to seek refuge, what is wrong with that? Or is Mr Pronk like most of the left an apologist for white "racial" persecution which includes the murder of women and children? I support Mr D.J. Preece in continuing to write his letters and express his point of view, as we're supposed to be allowed too in this democracy of ours.
Adrian Devlin, Fairy Meadow