Conversations with Ross

Long standing Cairns community Identity Ross Parisi has joined the blog world. No doubt his site will become a source of political agitation.

Richie Bates for the seat of Cairns

Local Queensland Council of Unions Secretary Richie Bates announced his intention to stand for preselection as Labor Candidate for the seat of Cairns today.

Having run for council with Mr Bates on the Cairns 1st ticket in 2008, I for one am thrilled, in fact should he gain selection I may just need to move into his electorate just to vote for him!

When running for council I got to witness first hand how hard Richie worked and his commitment to meeting and representing the views of the people in his division was inspiring. What I like about Richie is there is no guess work, you know where you stand, and this is a man who's word is everything. Imagine a pollie who stands by what he says, I know of two or three currently in council, but I'm struggling for more than that.

Mr Bates supports the retention of public-owned assets, something close to my own heart. "Lucrative assets like QR National which underpin Queensland's economy well into the future should be retained"

"We are already seeing the first signs of QR National getting rid of jobs and damaging rural and regional communities," he said.

"We should learn from this lesson that we can't risk vital public services by handing them over to commercial interests who do act in the public interest."

"Privatisations of public assets are supposed to pass the public interest test. QR National has failed and I will support the Labor Government in any effort to regain control over QR National and to ensure we don't make the same mistakes in the future.

"My hope is to bring Labor principles back to the table in any major decision-making in government"

Mr Bates said the Premier Anna Bligh had shown strong and inspirational leadership during the recent natural disasters and "I would enjoy the opportunity to be part of her team that can provide strong principled government to Queensland".

Richie Bates is actively involved in community sport and has been a staunch advocate to improve sporting facilities in FNQ.

Fantastic Friday Headlines

Today wasnt the best day for pollies in the print media, but it sure was nice to see some thought invoking front pages today:

The Gold Coast Bulletin had this brilliant front page -

Not to be out done, the courier mail had this offering:

I wonder how Desely feels about being thrown out with the garbage?

FREE Green Waste pick ups

Cairns Regional Council Crews will start collecting green waste from Wednesday 9th February.

Collection will start from the following suburbs;

Central - Bayview Hights, Woree, Earlville.
North - Redlynch, Redlynch Valley, Smithfield, Kewarra Beach, Holloways Beach & Machans Beach.
South - Forest Gardens & Edmonton
Far North - Port Douglas, Mossman, Newell Beach.

Council stresses the pick up is for green waste only and general rubbish will not be collected.

Esplanade Surge after Yasi

3/2/11 approx 9am (photo by M.Durkan)

The calm before the Yasi

I think this will become one of the stand out photos of Yasi, taken by the amazing Steffen Binke

Holy Yasi!!!

She's on her way, and like every girl seems to be changing her mind on where shes actually going every other minute. For an up to date information on what’s going on follow @cycloneupdate on Twitter, where local I.T. guru Carl Butcher of Carloscomputers and his fellow storm watchers are running live commentary from their make shift command centre at Freshwater.