Today on ABC radio, I heard Fiona Sewell interviewing a public transport advocate who was bemoaning the congestion that occurs on our roads, and I don’t disagree with his sentiments. He was particularly focused on the cities southern access and the seriously under-utilised rail corridor that follows the highway most of the way into town. His suggestion was that instead of spending money on the improving the road, the money should instead be allocated to the railway so that it can be duplicated and used as a suburban commuter service. Now this I have problems with.
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Current Member for Barron River Steve Wettenhall
What’s going on here then? I was wandering through the election section of the cairns post website today, and I noticed that Steve Wettenhall has had a facelift – perhaps? Sure enough, looking at the page on candidate profiles for Barron River, one could be forgiven for thinking that the LNP candidate is in fact the current sitting member!
In all the candidate profiles except Barron River and Hinchinbrook, the photos of the candidates appear in the same order as the text summaries. And in most cases, the text has the current sitting member as the first entry. Only in the Barron River profile do we see that the LNP candidate has their photo promoted to the top slot – the only area profile to have this “mistake” happen…
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On Thursday, March 12 the Cairns Post ran a story titled titled “Showdown on high-rises”
Tom Chamberlain seems to be doing a better job as the new council reporter than his predecessor Roger Dickson who trivialised almost everything. Yes it was the usual sensational headline: “High Rise Show Down,” but the content of the article at least gave a hint of both sides of the discussion.
What the article didn’t make clear was that Mayor Val Schier was not supporting 8-storey buildings. I understand she was saying that Cr Margaret Cochrane was pushing things in trying to force through a motion without giving councillors any notice. Wisely, they decided that they should actually have a workshop on the matter and really talk about where people coming to Cairns are going to live. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Let’s hope the Post will accurately report on their deliberations.
I received an interesting email today:
Dear Bert,
I love commenting on the Cairns Post web site and post quite often under a number of names. The moderators are quite slack to the point of approving comments that are blatant spam. Yesterday I put a comment in on the story “Schier turns weather expert”. Phil of Mt Sheridan (he’s a bit nutty I think) had gone off about how it was Val’s fault that Cairns flooded recently:
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The Cairns Post breaks another major story
I never miss a Weekend edition of the Cairns Post. There’s always plenty of “interesting stories” in between the real estate ads and bikini girls. Yesterday though, there was a surprise waiting for me in the pages of the Weekend Post – two blokes had been caught by the police riding around Freshwater naked and I knew one of them! So, I gave “Matthew Kean Fenn” a call and he agreed to this exclusive interview for Not The Cairns Post
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