RAIN FALLS!

                                                    LETTER TO THE EDITORS

Dated April 14, 2016

Mr. Bob Cronin
Editor-in-Chief
West Australian Newspapers Limited
CC
Mr. Brett McCarthy
Editor
The West Australian Newspaper

Gentlemen,

Your Ref: - The West Australian Newspapers coverage of Rural, Regional and Remote  
                    WA’s economic, political and social affairs.

Congratulations Bob on your ‘Walkley Award’ for services to Australian journalism. It is well deserved.

Also congratulations Brett on your longevity as Editor of The West Australian. You have only three years to go to catch up to Paul Murray, the longest serving editor in Australian newspaper history.

Paul Keating once called The West Australian Newspaper ‘The Worst Australian’ and a former Editor, Paul Armstrong, called it an ‘international newspaper’. Both were wrong.

Keating was politically motivated and Armstrong was waxing lyrical over a state newspaper, without overseas bureaux, with its national news coverage gathered from John Fairfax newspapers and its international news from the usual sources such as AAP, AP and Reuters, not its own staff.

International newspapers are those that are published internationally with its content sourced by their own editorial staff, and are archived in prominent libraries and universities as being an accurate record of the particular psyche of their country of origin. Conversely, easily accessible, printed version copies of The West Australian are difficult to obtain in any other Australian state, let alone overseas.

Brett, on your appointment as Editor in 2009, West Australian Newspapers Limited’s, Chief Executive, Chris Wharton, said of you that ‘under his leadership, The West Australian will be tapped into the West Australian community and will reflect the aspirations of the people of this great state’.

Maybe Mr. Wharton should have added ‘all’ between ‘of’ and ‘the’ as a fair portion of your readership, among the 551,000 living in Rural, Regional and Remote, WA, do not feel that your newspaper gives coverage to- or in any way adequately reflects, their aspirations.

It could be said that your country coverage reflects Dorothea Mackellar’s, ‘My Country’ covering ‘droughts and flooding rains, and fire and famine’, other disasters and mining booms, but with very little to do with any important, broad-spectrum needs, wants, ambitions and aspirations.

Rural, Regional and Remote West Australians often suffer from 70 per cent less required healthcare services, pay up to 50 per cent more for fuel and domestic gas and are forced to pay similar council rates to those living in the metropolitan area, despite domestic properties having less than half the Gross Rental Value. This is fact not fiction!

Brett, you would be aware that the newspaper you used to edit, Perth’s The Sunday Times
has launched a campaign titled ‘Fair go for WA’s Regions’. It is based on The Australian Bureau of Statistics data that confirms the inequitable gulf between the quality of life enjoyed by Perth residents compared to most of the rest of the state.

Also, unfortunately, the sustainability of life, suggesting there is a much shortened life expectancy through disease, suicides and the carnage on rural roads.

Brett, it is probably time The West Australian Newspaper realized that without the massive
economic input by Rural, Regional and Remote, WA, into the states’ treasury and economy,
you and your staff would not be there or it would be just a ‘parish-pump’ publication.

Given this, it is about time The West Australian gave half-a-million citizens, living outside the metropolitan area a ‘Fairer Go!’. ‘Fair Go’ may infer that you are plagiarizing The Sunday Times.

A ‘Fairer go for Everyone’ or a ‘State of the State’ campaign could answer the questions that we, as a state, not just Perth, have every right to have answered.

In depth investigations such as:-

WHAT PRICE ROYALTIES FOR REGIONS?
Has $5.6 billion really been squandered?

NATIONAL’S CARD GAME!
Brendon Grylls’ Country Age Pension Fuel Card could now be costing $28 million a year. Is it used for fuel or beer?

NOT SO WATERWISE!
The Minister for Water is accused of allowing blue asbestos to be buried near a water catchment area, on pristine farmland in the Avon Valley. One concerned mother has emailed the 145 Shire Councillors, from Mundaring to Kalgoorlie, warning of the potential danger to their drinking water supply.

WA’S WATER HAZARD!
Will the state be dry by 2025? Why? And what can be done!         

GOING, GOING, GONE!
Regional state schools are being shut, so now which rural towns will not survive? and why?

COUNTRY CURRICULUM VITAL
The Minister for Education claims that regional students in 2016 are significantly better off than their predecessors. The West Australian has gone back 50-years and obtained the 1966 syllabus for Northam Senior High School and its 2016 version.
This Minister has always had something to answer for. It is alleged that he was a very average Liberal Party official who was originally elected through forgery and branch-stacking and one of his favourite electioneers was a convicted felon, Katrina Nicole Watts, who has served two jail terms for stealing as a servant.

PERTH’S PROFIT AND LOSS
Is Perth really $7 billion in the red each year and ruining our state’s economy? What does it contribute to export earnings, or is it just our anchor in the Indian Ocean?

THE NATIONAL’S GONE ROGUE
Once the country party, what does it stand for now?

Brett, you above most others would be aware of the declining significance, relevance and influence of The West Australian. Less than 10 per cent of the states’ population would purchase a copy on a daily basis.

Yet it still has time to make a significant contribution to the welfare of everyone in WA.

I leave this in your capable hands.

Yours sincerely

David Taylor
Manager
West Australian Newspapers Syndication Department
1990-2001.

*****

(Now that it hardly ever rains, does the Minister for Water have any idea as to why, and have any realistic solutions to possible future serious water shortages? And does she really feel she will get re-elected?)

Amid the washing dangling from apartment balconies, hundreds of bizarre, garish blue leaches cling precariously to vertical walls. These are large plastic water tanks to capture the rain that rarely falls.

The nearby dark green walls of the rainforest jungle are speckled with the rusty brown leaves of vines dying because there has been no rain for months.This is Kota Kinabalu, the Capital City of Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia. It is a tropical paradise with an annual rainfall of 2800 millimetres, until now.

Some towns, close to the capital, have had dry taps since before February 8, 2016, the Chinese New Year of the (extremely thirsty) Monkey. The Tawau River has shrunk to the size of a drain.

Sabah’s State Disaster Relief Committee is on high alert with barges and water tankers being deployed to small villages that have run out of water.

There are rumours of children and the elderly falling ill on Palau Banggi Island because of lack of a water supply. The typical political response is that ‘no one has died from drought in the island’s 30-year history’.  This is not the answer to the question.

In the luxury hotels of Kota Kinabalu, tourists are politely requested to try and conserve the city’s precious water supply, while the rest of the population suffer from having their water supply cut-off regularly.

Some of the public amenities used by tourists at world-renowned wildlife parks have not been flushed for days, possibly weeks. Mixed with the high temperatures and humidity, the stench, and potential health risk, is almost beyond comprehension.
(In addition, Palau Islands, a Pacific island paradise, has just two weeks of drinking water left and schools are shut, half the time, because they do not have enough water for their students. The Marshal Islands and the Federation of Micronesia have also issued similar water supply states of emergency.)

The distance between Perth and Kota Kinabalu is only 1,000 kilometres more than between Perth and Sydney, its rainfall is four times greater, with its metropolitan population being just 500,000. (Yet it, and others, drastic water supply problems could soon be mirrored in Western Australia.)

Now for our capital city, Perth, in the State of Western Australia, Australia, and a future water resource prognosis for a much larger population in a rainfall region lucky to receive an average of 700 millimetres per annum.

Perth’s Bureau of Meteorology has such difficulty in predicting rain, it now informs us as a percentage calculation. (Today there will be a possible 20 percent chance of rain and the possibility of a storm.) 

Regularly, neither of these fading phenomena occurs, particularly rainfall.

Yet our Minister for Water, Mia Davies, has done nothing to prevent the                  possible environmental and economic rape of York through refusing to protect a precious groundwater collection area from metropolitan detritus.

This, at a time, when even the rainfall bibliography of Noah’s Ark may not measure up to the volume of rain required to refill our dams.

SITA’s huge underground toxic waste dump, complete with blue asbestos residue, buried on valuable farmland, close to a water catchment area and near an historic, clear-water well, is still proceeding. (Even though it is Ms. Davies job to totally protect our state’s precious water resources)

If that is not bad enough, the area is subject to strong, seasonal winds and Temperature Inversion that can both spread, and trap, escaped toxic fumes. It is also within Australia’s most volatile earthquake zone and can only be accessed by one of WA’s most deadly rural roads.

You could not pick a worse-case-scenario other than making it a Nuclear Test Site. (It can only be hoped that the waste is relocated to the site at North Bannister.) 

If not, as Minister, Ms Davies could excise the site and say no! She could approach the new Minister for Agriculture, Dean Nalder, and ask him to excise the site in the public interest as part of an invaluable farmland precinct and approach the Minister for the Environment, Albert Jacob, to overturn the SAT decision for environmental reasons (and ask him, as part of the powerful Liberal Christian Lobby, to pray for rain, in tongues, at the same time.)

(Regarding SAT, there is not a group of public interest decision makers more emotionally inept than a bunch of lawyers, out of a courtroom, out of their community interest recognition cognitive depth and not accountable for their decisions.)

Ms. Davies could also approach the Minister for Planning, John Day, asking him to intervene. 

This Minister, has already stated that he considers the Great Southern Highway to be unsuitable for continuous heavy transport traffic and that this could stultify the future development of WA’s oldest inland town, York.

If you asked Mr. Day, off the record, how a National Party Minister, elected to represent rural interests, could allow the potential destruction of a historic town of 3,000 people, he should say it is beyond anyone’s comprehension.

Will the Minister for Water and the Member for Central Wheatbelt do any of these things, now mentioned, that she should do? No she will not, because she considers it is not in her own best political/personal interest- currently.

So Ms. Davies should be given the constant reminder that, at this point in time, she and her parliamentary partners have little chance of winning the next election.

SITA’s waste dump may well be the biggest political blunder in her ministerial career that may end on Saturday March 11, 2017 and make her future as the Member for Central Wheatbelt uncomfortable. This is if she manages to cling to her seat.

(If SITA is funding the Coalition, then the Nationals are accepting blood money.) 

So what does Ms. Davies intend to do to alleviate the effects of a drought that could last long after the punishing dry weather conditions of El Nino, spreading across South East Asia and Australia, subsides?

What does the Bureau of Meteorology weather modelling show for the foreseeable future, other than the rapid drifting of South-West regional rainfall patterns, south, over the Southern Ocean?

Her Waterwise Campaign is not working, so what innovative contingency plans does, Ms. Davies, have in the likely event that the annual rainfall over the South West Division of Western Australia continues to rapidly decline to the point where that it can no longer meet population demand?

 It is not tomorrow’s problem, it is today’s and it is hers!

Pumping our finite aquifer resources into extinction is not an option.

So what does the Minister envisage as the alternative? 

Does it include the development of improved technology to facilitate the capture of potable rainwater, as it falls, where it falls?

It is called ‘surface run-off harvesting’. On a large scale it involves percolator tanks, on a smaller scale it involves recharging pits, wells and shafts to increase
groundwater retention. 
Of course there is also individual roof capture into rainwater tanks which is the method used in Kota Kinabalu.

It certainly does not include the option of pumping water from the Ord River, as there is no money for such a project, with the WA economy in freefall. (A new desalination plant would also be out of the question while there is still the new Burswood Sporting Complex to pay for.)

And, probably, not surface run-off harvesting as this involves the expenditure of financial resources the state should have, but does not.

One solution could be that all new housing developments constructed within WA must have measures in place for grey-water retention and surface run-off harvesting.
  
But for now it is back to the drawing board, with the current initiative being the Waterwise Campaign to shower in your pants, and reduce the amount of time reticulated sprinkler systems are used. And, of course, the possible increase of the cost of household water consumption, again, as a usage-restraint measure.

Does Ms. Davies have answers to any of the questions regarding her plans for the future to alleviate the state’s dwindling water supply? Most fear she does not and will not in the future!

She may also have another political crisis on her mind to keep it occupied until the next election.

The major platform for the National Party’s re-election is now falling apart at the seams, along with its credibility as being the party that protects the rights of country people.

In the past week there have been explosive, underlying allegations of commercial ineptitude, international political/economic ignorance and deliberate pork-barrelling causing massive wastage in the National Party’s use of Royalties for Regions funding, particularly in the Pilbara.
All National Party Ministers will now be focussing on public damage control, 
including Ms. Davies.

Her cohort, Brendon Grylls, stands accused of wasting part of nearly $2.4 billion in mostly failing or financially unsustainable housing and social infrastructure projects in the Pilbara and the Kimberley. 

It is a substantial part of in excess ( of the now known) $5.6 billion spent as Royalties for Regions funding since 2008, throughout most of the state, which has shown little to no quantifiable, positive financial socio-economic return to West Australians, especially those in the regions. (This $5.6 billion is the cost of just a few edifice built in Perth, the new sports stadium, the Fiona Stanley Hospital, the Perth Children’s Hospital and Elizabeth Quay.)

Mr. Grylls based his infrastructural, financial support rationale on a continuously booming mining industry developed on an exorbitantly inflated iron ore price and unparalleled demand, and a rapidly expanding, yet potentially transient, local population sourced from major mining companies. (An extremely risky mindset.)

None of these companies, including such luminaries as BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, were in the least bit interested in assisting Grylls to build and support permanent communities in the region as the FIFO system was far less costly to them. (You do not have to be a Rhode Scholar to understand why.)

Even small local manufacturers involved in the use of steel products were aware of the potential for a collapse in pricing and demand, as China began to stockpile iron ore and steel nearly three years ago. (It was not a particularly big secret, and a substantial rumour that Mr. Grylls should have been well aware of.)

Grylls could be accused of putting West Australian shirts, on a one-trick-pony


Some businesses were more than happy to assist a totally out-of-control, Mr. Grylls’, in his irrational, self-interest support for local, expensive, housing developments in his electorate, by honouring the adage ‘let’s make hay while the sun shines’ at the taxpayer’s expense.

As early as June, 2015, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that the population of the Pilbara had declined by 0.7 percent and any need for luxury apartments, and extravagant, unused amenities, was declining.

Now you can understand why the Premier, Colin Barnett, was not enamoured with the suggestion of the imminent return of Mr. Grylls to the front bench. (He would far rather see Grylls disappear into the Federal political landscape where he can be of less damage to WA’s bank balance.) 

It is also more than likely, with the use of hindsight, Premier Barnett would be more than happy to take up the suggestion of the Liberal member for Peel, Murray Cowper, and strip the Minister for Regional Development, Terry Redman, of this portfolio, as he is equally to blame.

The even more damning revelation, as far as the Nationals’ are concerned, is that irrefutable statistical data shows all the expenditure on Royalties for Regions projects has made not one iota of difference to the overall quality of life experienced by people living in most of rural regional and remote, WA.

This has come in the form of a dramatic expose in the Perth Sunday Times called ‘Fair Go for WA’s Regions’. 

Emails to, and meetings with, senior reporters from this newspaper, involving the discussion of some generic social, political and economic problems faced by rural communities, such as York, has appeared to finally bear fruit.

If it has involved the input of a reporter, Peter Law, and an Editor, Martin Saxon, then these two investigative journalists should be highly commended


The Oscar winning film ‘Spotlight’ focusses on the terrible damage done to hundreds, indeed thousands of Catholic parishioners over decades, by the priesthood.

The report ‘Fair Go for WA’s Regions’ focusses on the damage done to the vast majority of WA’s, 551,000, rural regional and remote citizens through the lack of quality education facilities, health care, psychiatric care, roads and employment opportunities, over the decades, when compared to Perth.

On April 30, 2009, the then Minister for Regional Development, Brendon Grylls launched his Country Age Pension Fuel Card.

As Grylls was also the Member for Central Wheatbelt, one of the major factors in its release was that it would assist in allowing eligible retirees on fixed incomes to access the additional 70 percent of required health care not available in his electorate. This included resources such as chemotherapy, kidney dialysis and psychiatric treatment (with its attendant suicide prevention) available in the metropolitan area.

It had to be provided state-wide to an estimated 30,000 eligible recipients that had increased to 45,000 by 2015. If everyone has used their card to the maximum amount, a staggering sum of at least $140 million has been spent, when averaged out over the past 7 years.

Although the fuel card- cum- taxi voucher could be considered to be a necessary public service for the disadvantaged, it was originally mooted because areas such as the Central Wheatbelt have poor primary and secondary health care facilities and virtually no public transport. (This remains exactly the same, today!)

Now it is alleged that the Country Age Pension Fuel Card is the centre of a black-market scam. The recipients use it to sell their $500 fuel allocation to others for cash.

Since 2008, a combination of Brendon Grylls and Mia Davies, have spent some portion of the entire Wheatbelts’ Royalties for Regions’ average annual funding of $65.8 million in the Central Wheatbelt Electorate. (This is around $709 per person.)

The quantifiable value of this to the Central Wheatbelt communities with regard to any form of better services, or increased employment opportunities is highly debatable as this region has lost 0.5 percent of its population over recent years. 

The Minister for Education, Peter Collier, has had the audacity to claim recently that ‘students in 2016, who live in the regions, are significantly better off than their predecessors’. 

This comes from a man who many of his colleagues believe lied and cheated to get elected. 

In the past Mr. Collier has been accused of forging signatures and using people’s names without their consent as a means of political branch stacking in his favour. (Those who assisted Mr. Collier in his electioneering campaign, and were praised by him for doing so, are the convicted thief Katrina Nicole Watts and Michael Watts.)  

A senior power broker in the Liberal Party, Noel Chrichton-Browne once said of Collier ‘he is a very ordinary party official that was barely able to answer a question at his pre-selection’. So you can take anything, close to being lucid, that the Hon. Peter Collier has to say with a grain of salt.

If Collier cared to check, those allegedly poorly educated predecessors, such as those at Northam Senior High School, studied French, German, math, the sciences and humanities to University entrance level. (Only then he can pull his foot out of his mouth.) 

In the past six months Mia Davies has managed to supply the Central Wheatbelt with new Waterwise showerheads, a skate park, have its swimming pools cleaned, have some local water supply upgrades and hire a new club Development Officer for Northam at a probable cost of $354.50 per head of population, based on averages.

This is while her constituents die nearly a decade earlier than in Perth, suffer from treatable cancers and type 2 diabetic obesity, are constantly killed and maimed on third-world quality roads, commit suicide through drug abuse and depression, receive a second rate education, cannot find employment and pay twice as much for petrol, diesel, auto-gas and a domestic gas supply as their city cousins.

Congratulations Ms. Davies, this is a formidable Curriculum- Vitae of over three years of your constituent support that you can present, with pride, to the Central Wheatbelt voters at the next election, just 11 months away.

However you are not on your own, the rest of your Nationals team have a lot to answer for including exactly what improvements have been made to the quality of life of the average rural, regional and remote West Australian through the expenditure of $5.6 billion over the past eight years.

The answer is ‘sweet bugger-all’! (other than the interesting herd of plastic cows at Cowaramup.)

David Taylor.

(A Waterwise Footnote: Recently Colin Barnett blamed dirty WA kids for closing the Elizabeth Quay waterpark. On Sentosa Island, Singapore, thousands of children use its waterpark each weekend. They are Malay, Tamil, Indian Chinese, Korean, European, Australian and American. They run through the water fountains in bathers and street clothes in searing heat and soaring humidity.

Do they contaminate the water? no they do not. Nice one Colin!)