Day 36, 4 March
NOTHING HAPPENING? MAKE IT UP
As eager voters made their way to the opening day of pre-polling in Noosa Heads and Cooroy, equally eager candidates, their supporters and other influencers filled the path from parking to voting with corflutes and persuasive conversation.
Of the influencers, the most visible and vocal appeared to be lobby group the Noosa Boating Fishing Alliance. While NBFA itself has no candidate in either race, it does have the only non-candidate how-to-vote card, which backs former Noosa River Stakeholder Committee member Nick Hluszko for mayor and has Cr Amelia Lorentson, who spoke so eloquently to the NBFA-packed public gallery in council late last year in favour of postponing consideration of the Noosa River Management Plan, as No 1 on the councillor ticket. Candidate Hluszko, in his hand-out, advocates partnering with the State on a river strategy and calls the Conservation Park proposal “total overkill”, while in hers Cr Lorentson seems to have moved on to solving traffic congestion through electric school buses. But while the NBFA’s carefully worded how-to-vote card emphasises “community needs and services’ for hinterland, river and coast, its alleged message outside the booths is that the river.
There is a school of thought that a vote for sitting male councillors will deliever a band on powered craft. Deputy Mayor Frank Wilkie confirmed this on his campaign social media and in a full page ad in Noosa Today last week: “Claims that Noosa Council wants to lock up the river and ban motorised boating and fishing are absolutely false.”
Day 38, 6 March
… OR DIG IT UP
A year is a long time in politics, let alone a decade. But in a quiet week for real news on the campaign trail, the usual suspects on social media dug even deeper into the time tunnel to re-present an opinion piece from the Courier-Mail of 2013, hoping to fool a new generation of residents and voters into thinking it was today’s news.
The article claimed that a “Sunshine Coast green group [was] running [a] private business in Noosa National Park, and not paying a cent in rent”. The “green group” was of course Noosa Parks Association, which has championed environmental initiatives in the shire for more than 60 years, whose sales of books and tee shirts at the park information centre run by its volunteers enabled it to contribute one-third (with Noosa Council and State government) of the $3.6 million state forestry buyback for national parks in 2022, thus completing Noosa’s “ring of green”.
When Rod Ritchie, convenor of the Residents For Noosa Facebook page, pointed out that this was old news, river person and frequent social media poster Trevor Clarey responded: “Well Rod, it may be old news to you, but to our Noosa it’s New News. How sad is it that our local media hide this stuff from its [sic] community. I’m really surprised mayoral candidates Morral [sic], Nick Hluszko [and] Ingrid Jackson aren’t all over this.”
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Day 41, 9 March
AND SPEAKING OF…
Full disclosure, that is, it’s time to disclose that this concludes Campaign Diary’s six week rumble through the jungle of local politics. It’s been fun, but all good things must pass. While it wasn’t an issue this time around, we leave you with Smart Voting’s take on a future nuclear Noosa!
