Perks and Rorts
AN ANONYMOUS MP said that the new crop of perceived travel rorts was undermining the confidence in MPs.
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Don't worry mate, that evaporated ages ago.
Peter Taylor, Midway Point.
GRAVY TRAIN
NICK Xenophon's colourful description of current penalties applied when MPs misuse entitlements - 'like being hit with a wet piece of lettuce' - only strengthens community expectations that the long-promised 'root and branch' review of such entitlements is long, long overdue.
After Bronwyn Bishop and 'choppergate', then PM Tony Abbott was quick to promise a wholesale review of entitlements, while rejecting Senator Xenophon's call for an independent body to set, monitor, review and punish transgressions of MPs entitlements, nothing has happened.
Senator Xenophon also quotes the function of just such a body in the UK Parliament, so claims that it would be unworkable are nothing more than protecting the gravy train - by both Liberal and Labor MPs.
Regardless of whether Sussan Ley is or is not guilty of misusing travel entitlements under parliamentary rules, by community standards she should be sacked, now.
And her demise should serve as a trigger for meaningful debate about far better management of entitlements, and penalties far beyond that piece of wet lettuce.
Bruce Lindsay, Scottsdale.
Climate change
WONDER how Jack Sonneman and M. Chugg would feel about climate change if they lived on the Solomon Islands.
A University of Queensland study shows that that five islands present in the Solomons in 1947 had disappeared by 2014.
Another six islands had shrunk and on one of them 11 houses have been washed into the sea since 2011.
Climate change is clearly complex.
Denial on the other hand is simply a matter of finding some convenient statistics.
It is clear that some climate sceptics won't accept human influenced climate change until they literally get their feet wet.