Environment to sway election

Politics is a numbers game, pure and simple, for the inhabitants of Spring Street. Many old people needing reassurances about hospital care. Not so many requiring reassurance about the state of the environment.

So, grow the hospital sector, plunder the environment.

Few will argue about the need for quality health care. But I suspect Spring Street has got it wrong about how many of us care about the environment.

Two hundred, mainly Corinella and district people, turned out for the candidates meeting on the future of the Westernport woodlands, which you reported on so well in last week’s edition.

But I suspect a far greater number will have noted the abject failure of the Member for Bass, Jordan Crugnale, to offer any reassurance on the future of the woodlands, our last remaining strip of coastal forest, last refuge of many threatened and endangered species.

While Dan Andrews and his city-centric crew think they can continue to destroy this woodland for sand to make Melbourne taller, faster and ever spreading, the rural rebellion grows apace.

It isn’t as though there isn’t plenty of sand as close to Melbourne, and even with vastly improved transport options. 

Over Trafalgar way only paddocks sit atop enough sand, of all the types needed for hundreds of years of Melbourne’s growth. And rail and high-speed highways a stone’s throw away.

But Andrews and his mob listen only to the sand miners, caring not a jot for the forest they are destroying, too lazy to make an inconvenient decision to move operations over the hills and disappoint their mining mates.

So let us see what this election brings. Governments sleep walking to disaster is such a common theme.

Noel Maud, Inverloch