By Jim O’Toole, Townsville Bureau
Local government elections, at grassroots level of the State often produce some ‘different’ candidates with novel campaigns and promises that cannot be met.
Cairns Regional Council at the upcoming council election on Saturday has attracted candidates from across the political spectrum espousing wacky policies that they can never deliver on.
Local Government councils lawfully, are in effect another State Government department. Local Government legislation gives almost all authority to the unelected CEO, leaving Mayors and councillors an expensive irrelevancy, because ultimate power lies with the government of the day.
Former Cairns police chief Paul Taylor has centered his mayoral campaign on the immense problem of runaway juvenile crime which is just what the long-suffering rate payers of Cairns want to hear because wall-to-wall state Labor politicians in Cairns have not been able to make one bit of difference to the burgeoning crime statistics over the past seven years, even if they wanted to.
Car stealing, break-ins and home invasions continue to plague Cairns and the Tablelands, a dire situation that former police officer Paul Taylor says he can fix.
Unfortunately candidates have not done any research as to why Labor won’t lift a finger to clean up juvenile crime where the main culprits are black youth.
United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous People and UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Labor is a signatory, prevents the ALP from enacting any policy that affects black entitlement to crime.
The Labor Party is obligated to the UN for all policy decisions and has been for decades which is why there are so many repeat juvenile offenders who keep stealing cars while on bail for previous offences.
Black and white kid criminals are not allowed to be locked up and nothing will convince a Labor politician otherwise.
Local businessman wants to poison ratepayers with industrial-waste fluoride
James Coll
Another local candidate vying for a councillor position wants to poison the community by adding fluoride to the water supply. This misguided, hopeful, local businessman James Coll has staked his whole campaign on an issue he can do absolutely nothing about even if he was elected.
Polling of ratepayers in Cairns over the years has rejected fluoridisation of drinking water and in 2013 the council voted to remove it saying it amounted to ‘involuntary medication’ of residents.
Candidate Coll leaves himself wide open and so would a council re-introducing a neurotoxin to potable water after a Brisbane Supreme Court decision last week found Covid vaccination mandates unlawful as these directions had limited the human rights of workers because they were required to undergo a medical procedure without full consent.
Adding industrial fluoride to drinking water is a medical procedure because dentists claim it prevents tooth decay. Many studies have found it does not prevent tooth decay.
Anti-fluoride activists across the state are now sharpening their pencils ready to swamp courts with well-documented evidence to have toxic fluoride removed from all drinking water.
Walls
Then there is another Mayoral candidate, Denis Walls, a known strident Green who wants to blanket Cairns with trees, just ready for a marauding cyclone to wreak major property damage.
Cairns residents had better beware, there are five other Greens candidates lurking in the shade of abundant city trees also waiting to invoke their woke policies if elected.
Former federal election Greens candidates Phillip Musumeci and Renee Lees are among a team of six that has entered the Cairns Regional Council election race.
The team, Community First, is led by Whitfield resident and former president of Cairns and Far North Environment Centre’s management committee, Denis Walls.
