Dear Dick Adams,
What a totally misleading and outrageously disingenuous cover photo you have distributed in Lyons attached to postal voting information for voters in your electorate.
To claim that you are “working for our community” in the areas of “water security – climate change – fairness at work – secure retirement” belies the gross failures of your representation of the people of your electorate in the Tamar Valley during the last three years.
You pose with a child in a farmer’s field, affecting an image of familial concern, but you have been totally silent about the threats to children and their children of likely pollutants from a pulp mill in the Tamar Valley. You have ignored all independent medical advice, from numerous professionals with no vested interest, including the AMA and individual medical practitioners across a range of expertise, about the likely risks to children posed by a pulp mill in a valley renowned for its atmospheric inversion problems.
You also portray yourself as a defender of “water security”, a truly cynical position given that you have shown absolutely no concern or interest in the fact that Gunns will use 26 gigalitres of water annually (and perhaps much more), year after year for decades, a quantity of water almost equivalent to all other annual uses of water in northern Tasmania, both domestic and industrial.
Then you have the effrontery to profess an interest in “climate change”. What a complete absurdity, for you have vigorously and actively supported the most unsustainable and most destructive forest-clearing practices that can be employed, third-world logging practices that wreck everything where they occur, including the future viability of water catchments for generations, undermining the very basis of any “water security” for the community that you say you believe in.
As if that is not enough, you project an empathy with family farming, while on your watch in Lyons farms are increasingly being overrun by MIS plantations, undermining local communities, destroying some of the most productive and important agricultural land in Australia, perhaps irreparably, and placing unrelenting pressure on owner-operated farms of all types and diversity.
Your cynicism then extends to “fairness at work”, for you have failed utterly to stand up for the interests of workers in the fishing industry in northern Tasmania, or for the workers in the diverse range of agri-businesses and tourism in the Tamar Valley.
The message you try to convey of interest in water security, climate change, fairness at work and secure retirement, is a total misrepresentation of the reality of your practice as the federal member for Lyons.
It is simply reprehensible that you seek to convey an image that is clean, green, healthy and sustainable. You have made no attempt to work for any of these things for the people of Lyons. As for those people in Lyons who live in the Tamar Valley, you have ignored their legitimate interests, their welfare and their livelihoods, both now and into the future, in entirety.
Yours sincerely,
Tamar Valley resident and Lyons voter
