Independence Day!
Image: Independent Elizabeth Farrelly running for NSW upper house. Photo: CityHub.
Opinion by PETER HEHIR
I’m a huge fan of Elizabeth Farrelly. I have been for years.
When RAW (Rozelle Against WestConnex) was raising the $10,000 to fund the publication of Bottleneck!, RAW’s 20 page newspaper that was distributed throughout the Inner West in late 2017, it was essential that we give some space over to Elizabeth.
Her column in the Sydney Morning Herald was the only reason that many of us bought the paper.
We were never, ever disappointed with her wit, intelligence and incisive commentary on the truly absurd goings on that passed for politics at the state and national level.
She was for me the good Wizard of Oz. Perceptive, far sighted and forward thinking, she said what none of the NSW pollies could or would say; except for Jenny and Jamie.
And she was the only journalist that I’m aware of who had the vision to see the looming monster, and the hell that it would create in the approaches to the Anzac Bridge from the west.
But it was blatantly obvious to anyone with half a brain that it not only wasn’t a solution; it was a bloody great big problem.
The toll nightmare for the people from the west predicted by the SMH’s visionary and the early opponents; such as No WestConnex Public Transport and RAW, has come to pass.
But the really big killer, the harvesting of vehicle exhausts from all parts of Sydney and releasing tonnes of this toxic mass at White Bay via the three fuglies, is yet to descend upon us.
The Reaper patiently awaits.
The ‘Tweedles’ are equally guilty.
Berejiklian squealed like a stuck pig when the ALP proposed the unfiltered Lane Cove Tunnel, yet in 2008 in a speech in the NSW Parliament extolling the virtues of WestConnex, she had conveniently forgotten her earlier concern for the poor little kiddies who would die as a result of exposure to the carcinogens.
A direct result of the unfiltered stacks.
The Libs and the ALP kept pedalling the lie that all the nasty stuff would just rise up and dissipate harmlessly into the stratosphere; or was it the ionosphere…
Images on the internet of the fire in Melbourne’s Burnley road tunnel showing smoke billowing down from the stack were conveniently forgotten.
The mouthpiece for the RMS kept telling us we had nothing to worry about. Perhaps he wasn’t familiar with temperature inversions and how the meeting of warm and cold air formed a cap, the mixing level, beneath which everything that was emitted spread out horizontally.
Perhaps he hadn’t seen the images or studied meteorology, hence he saw no problem in his ignorance of this phenomena.
It took RAW a year to raise the $10,000 with one and two dollar donations from thousands of concerned residents, to produce 60,000 copies of Bottleneck!; and three of Elizabeth’s articles appeared on a page given over just to her.
