Albany's Race for a New MP

 Peter Watson MLA is stepping down at the next election in March 2021. It's going to be a stange contest with several people well credentialed with Community Involvement. The probable 3 front runners are Delma Baesjou (Nationals), Scott Leary (Liberals) and Rebecca Stephens (Labor). 

Scott Leary's chances are said to be improved by the rise of Zak Kirkup as party leader but whilst that's possible Liza Harvey was a good leader & in any case, she's staying on and is backing Zak Kirkup by all accounts. Both Liza & Zak visited Albany as Party Leaders. Scott has had a long history of community involvement in business & sport as well as the local TAFE,

Delma Baesjou is in a similar spot but her party's leader Mia Davies had visited Albany more times in the last 18 months than both Liberal & Labor leaders combined so they are serious on elevating Albany. Their party's State Conference in Oct 2020 was in Albany & add onto that Delma was the successful candidate in a political first for WA "Community Pre-Selection" so Delma really is a political candidate put forward by the community & voted in by the community...not a Perth based pre-selection committee and she's had a long linkage with local community groups, developers and community groups.

Rebecca Stephens also has a good history with local community groups and has run a local small business as well as sitting councillor on the City of Albany. She's going to have trouble building upon Peter Watson's legacy because for the last 4 years he's been Speaker of the Hourse so he hasn't built much at all. As Speaker he cannot have any part of cabinet decisions, has no part in Government business, cannot represent & speak up for Albany on the floor of the Parliament so Rebecca is starting off on a blank slate just like the other candidates.

She also has a few other barriers that only a well funded campaign can over come. In an ABC Radio interview she was asked about Deregulated Trading Hours and she said "No comment" which was a most curious reply. When further pushed she explained she would have to see what the electorate felt about it. Now this is curious because as a City Councillor she voted against it. Either she knows what the community wants or she doesn't or she voted without knowing what Albany wants or doesn't.
It's actually what is best for Albany regardless of what some do or don't want.

There's also some other differences that only an expensive campaign with lots of visits from the Premier can over come.

If Rebecca wins you can guarantee the Labor Party will celebrate her as the first woman to represent Albany in Parliament. It's odd because WA Labor has a stance, according to Simone McGurk MLA the Labor Minister for Women's Interests that a woman is someone who is a woman or lives as a woman. In other words anyone of any gender. Unless they can check to confirm all previous men lived & identified as men not women they have a funny claim to make. If you're a woman, your "interests" involve allowing anyone to be a woman. Ironically by elevating women's interests as they do, they're de-womaning the gender completely.

Rebecca has several other obstacles. She cannot cross the floor and vote on a matter in the best interests of the Albany community. If she does, she will be expelled fromt he party. This isn't such a problem for the Nationals & Liberal Candidates. Nationals MPs have put their electorate first & crossed the floor and indeed the Nationals have an ex-Liberal MP & an ex-Labor MP in their parliamentary ranks, but very renouned for putting their electorate first and they can cross the floor now.

Rebecca on that front is required to be a Labor representative in the electorate, not an electorate representative in her party, the government or the floor of the house. Its very unfair and will restrict Rebecca from the best results Albany needs to move forward.

Then there's yet another problem that only an expensive campaign can gloss over or distract from, Labor's close affinity with the Chinese Government & the prerential treatment for WA billionaires when it came to COVID quarantining. In amongst this, Labor has not been very regional friendly. 

Labor's plan to abolish the School of the Air without any stakeholder consultation, indeed even their own far north MPs only learned about it via the press. Labor's plan to shut Moora Residential College because it wasn't worth the money & under used (?)...federal money was sourced and it's been kept open, renovated and now fully booked.

There was also the additional problem that in their first budget Mark McGowan's Labor Party pent more money in 2 years on Rockingham Basketball than 2 years of drug rehab in Albany. You won't remember Peter Watson raising this in Parliament or crossing the floor over it. He represents Labor in Albany so golden silence.

Labor also said they would not bring in a Gold Tax, soon as they were elected Mark McGowan went back on his pre election committment & tried to introduce one...TWICE. Rebecca will need to rely on an expensive campaign & the old "that was before my time and I'm not familiar with Kalgoorlie". Well she'll have to vote on many things outside Albany & had that passed, Kalgoorlie would ahve gone into a serious economic slump and the entire drilling & exploration sector would have closed.

Royalties for Regions...many hundreds of projects, some were duds but now, its been skinned & gutted and used to pay for normal items within general expenditure and basically cost shifted a billion dollars a year from the regions to Perth. 
2.6 million square kilometres outside the Perth/Mandurah/Metro Area & R4R was to ensure a small portion of royalties was quarantined into the regions. The programme is effectively dead and you probably shouldn't be surprised.

As people starte getting the picture, expect the Labor money poured into the Albany Campaign to increase greatly as rural people including those like us in a rural city have been short changed badly.

Would you vote for a Democratic Communist Party?

Would you vote for a Democratic Fascist Party?

Would you vote for a Democratic Dictatorship Party?

Would you vote for a Democratic Khmer Rouge Party?

Assuming you would answer no to all 4 questions, ask yourself why on earth would you vote for a Democratic Socialist Party? That is what Labor is, the ALP Constitution says so in black & white.

So my expectation for the State Election 2021 in the seat of Albany...expect a massive campaign from Labor, a very costly one the other parties can't match to try & white wash over the facts you'll get & the poor results we've had. Expect the Premier & ministers to jump on the Lear Jet WA used to hire but then bought and head to Albany. They've had plenty of campaign flights Perth to Albany to Denmark (or Manjimup) then back to Perth. Whirlwind face dropping.

Drugs, hard damaging drugs...possible approach?

 Background, I'm no expert on drugs or addiction but there is a general push for drugs to no longer be seen as a criminal matter but as a health matter. That sets up 2 sides, the yes, the no but there's also another.

Both.

There's some pushes to decriminalise illicit drugs and drop it all fairly & squarely within the health realm which I'd politely say isn't coping with it now.

I knew a couple with kids and small business, successful small business. They smoked a bit of dope and when that happened I would go home, it increased and we drifted apart. What I didn't know was they were also beginning to use Methamphetamine, in fact it turns out they were high functioning addicts for a number of years before finally the unavoidable decline began. The decline was horrible to say the least. The husband was attacked and went to hospital several times. It ended up with a lost business, they lost their house and all assets, a divorce followed, then came prostitution, violence against police and medical staff, theft from family & strangers. It's ruined their lives, their parents lives, their children's lives. It is an utter shameful mess and I can only say I'm glad I wasn't close by to watch it because I would've been lost as to what to do to help.

In the end one of them is on the road to recovery health wise after a jail stint but there is no way to repair the damage that's been done.

Now if its solely a health matter, I need to see how that looks on paper because at the time when an intervention by medical professionals might, stress might have helped I for one thought they were just smoking dope & had no idea they were on hard drugs.

Crime, it isn't a sole answer either but somehow we have a problem because if we as a society were able to cut supply tomorrow, then drugs would be in short supply and addicts would jump over to another type of drug to fill the gap & the demand for the missing drug rises, there's more importation/production incentive.

I think there is no one answer, I think society needs a dozen keys to this puzzle. One of them might be doubling the penalties with each repeat offence. Get a 50% reduction in sentence for helping to prosecute & convict the next person up the line BUT the person convicted must go into a rehabilitation programme, regular drug testing and be found clean at the end of it. to get their reduction.

There has to be a serious penalty joined with a serious incentive to get clean and point the finger at the next person up the line. Can't have just a harsher penalty, there has to be a genuine incentive offer with set treatment.

Hopefully the random drug testing that happens ocaasionally with RBT becomes common place, test for one, test for the other.  
No, its probably correct that penalties will not solve the problem. we see that in Asian countries that have the death penalty for drug offences and the Phillipines where it's alleged drug dealers and addicts have been gunned down as well clamped down harshly by authorities. Drugs remain no matter what becuase I think the addictive nature of humans is never going away and the lure of big money still draws people in despite the incredibly high risk and brutal penalty.

But I think taking people out of the game by penalties & rehab on a larger scale is one of the keys to the puzzle not in eliminating drugs but at least reducing the number of addicts.

I don't know if there's the political will and the other trouble is the meth epidemic is only starting to become readily apparent to those outside the realm of these drugs. When it gets to this point, we've lost a big chunk of a generation and we need to move very rapidly & decisively to curb the damage for younger ones still not thinking of dabbling.

I think the entertainment industry has a big hand to play in demonising drugs but empathising with addicts. The Hollywood effect of glorifying drugs or mocking the dangers started before Cheech & Chong.

And yes, I don't think a shaded tent prison in the desert is such a bad idea either

The Left & the Right of the Political Spectrum

 For years we've heard of the Left vs the Right on the political Spectrum and even the Left, Centre and Right within each Party. The latest term to front up is "Sensible Centre" or "Centrist" which everyone seemed to claim for a while but it lost steam in Australia. Well it seemed to when the Independent MPs prior to the last Federal election claimed to be Centrists, Dr Phelps et al & running for election Zali Steggals. They weren't any compromise between Left & Right, they weren't any middle ground. They were trying to create a unique marketing brand whilst remaining leftists. It largely flopped.

The sort of traditional view of the political spectrum is somewhere like the following linear idea.

That's kinda roughly the current view of what the traditional political spectrum is. The Conservatives on the right of whatever the real dead centre is, the Progressives (or in America the Liberals) to the left. That may not be very accurate, but among many people thats the current view of what the traditional spectrum is.
Between Conservative & Hard Right there's Alt Right and other groups or ideologies with gradually changes towards the Hard Right. Between Progressives and the Hard Left will be gradual increases in ideology like the Antifa etc until you get Communism.

Its not the only view and some of the other views might be contentious to some, but they do have support and some supporting history on their side. Then there's this...

Now how on earth would this even be an idea that people might even consider being accurate. One reaction is you cannot lump Fascism/Nazis in with Marxist Ideologies like Communism, Socialism. They're thought to be polar opposities, one extreme right, one extreme left. They were enemies during the war & share no common traits.

Well ok, thing is that's the argument, except they do share a lot in common. Communism/Socialism has a Father in Karl Marx. Fascism has a Father in the Italian Philospher Giovanni Gentile who was a close ally of Mussonlini. Here's the thing, do your research on Gentile and his work and it soon becomes apparent he started out a strident Socialist then created Fascism which is an offshoot of Socialism because Gentile himself said Fascism is the ultimate form of Socialism. Both took away individual rights, individual ownership of the means of production, both vested decisions on how the individual lived into the State. Both had the State as the supreme goal, aim and governor but Socialism is based on getting rid of class, fascism is too that but more Nationalistic and expansionist. Both required full totalitarian regimes who were ruthless and prone to killing anyone who stood in their way. 

Hitler and the Nazis regime can never be trivialised nor over looked in their rank brutality that made them rightly considered by any religious or non religious worldview judgement as being totally evil.
Well, Stalin's Communist/Socialist regime actually shared many traits with the Nazis and over time they killed or rather ruthlessly murdered more innocent people. No Communism/Socialism isn't worse, they're both supremely evil by any measure. Nazism was lost & destroyed as a regime at the end of World War 2 and the Russian regime continued on. They were competing with one another and both wanted to crush and take over the other. (Before marching onto Capitlist countries and conquering them)

But don't forget the West opposed Socialism/Communism/Fascism during the War & after. With Nazism gone, we had the Cold War. The West versus "the East" and had the Nazis defeated Stalin, the East would have been Germany and every country it conquered or annexed.

Pick a conservative country during the War...or before or after. It would have fought both totalitarian regimes, it would not have set up gulags or concertration camps in the West.

Now somewhere on that second line graph is the Alt-Right. Now considering the Right is over there on the right, the Alt Right must be to the left of the Conservatives. Why? Because they're not of the right. They are "Alternative right". They're considered far right, but they're regarded as White Supremist Nationalists. They often tend as a group to relate to Nazis & be anti Communists. They're quite correct in being an alternative to the right. They are often over there by the Fascists & Nazis. They are not conservatives. Most religious conservatives consider all people are God's children, racism is wrong. Alt Right is not conservative at all. It like all other hard right are not conservatives and share more in common with the Hard Left.
Even Antifa, Anti Facist are not of the right, their followers are generally of one of the Marxist stripes. Oddly though they are very communist like, some are very racist and prone to violence to get their way like fascists and many communists.

This is probably why we see some sets of Antifa clashing with some sets of Alt-Right...meanwhile Conservatives are not a fan or connected to either & oppose both Antifa & Alt-Right. Both Antifa & Alt-Right oppose the West, capitalism, individual rights & want the State to rule the people, not serve them. Every that is the very opposite of Conservatism.
This is why it sure looks not to be simple linear spectrum, Conservatives & wise Progressives are not really of the left or the right. That linear distinction only applies to seperate those that support authoratarian rule & equal division of assets, money & the State owning the means of production & distributing wealth evenly amongst all.

Yes its very uncomfortable for some who wish to demonise conservatives by creating the illusion that Fascism and Nazism is of the right, but they're not. They're of the right compared only to Communists & Socialists. The Communists are of the left, but only to the left of Nazis & Fascism. For Nazis the clue is in the name "National Socialist" and they were brutal totalistarian regimes...that is not from the conservatives any more than Communism is.
If its in favour of authoratarian rule, loss of individual rights, control of all manner of lifes aspects its the Left/Right alright...but not of & opposed by conservatism & real progressivism.

Now progressives...they're looking to change things for the better, Conservatives looking to conserve things for the better. Having them both in a society is not only admirable, its desireable as long as they don't go to far into removing individual rights, over taxing, over legislating the people and not changing from the goevrnment serving the people to pushing the people to serve the government. Real progressives won't support authoratarian rule, loss of individual rights, private property rights, individuals freedom of speech, worship etc.

Yes, I think the second representation of the political spectrum is more correct than the first.
But the first one whilst being intellectually corrupt, morally bankrupt & unsupported by actual history...yes it will live on. Usually by those that will try to not mention progressives but need to condemn conservatives to help falsely bolster any level of Marxist or Fascist validation.
Desperates being desperate.