If you tell a lie often enough…

M Mizzi, Tabulam/Byron Bay

The spin and lies from the Liberal/Nationals-backed and -expanding noxious coal-seam gas industry continues. It seems chief polluter and spin master Peter Henderson is beginning to sound like Hitler’s propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, who once said ‘If you tell a lie often enough to enough people it becomes the truth’.

Henderson told ABC radio on November 9 he’s excited about being able to go ‘full throttle’ in his efforts to poison our water, contaminate our land and gas our kids’ future.

He’s shifted his preferences for selective language to exclude the word ‘mining’, preferring to use the word, ‘extraction’. He says, ‘CSG is not mining’. They ‘drill wells just like water’, an obvious lie. ‘There’s no evidence of contamination in Queensland’ and it’s a ‘safe and established industry’.

Mr Henderson should tell that to the Monk family of Tara, Qld, whose grandchildren suffer inexplicable nosebleeds, blackouts and other symptoms of gas toxicity every day! He should tell that to the people along the Condamine River watching gas bubbling to the surface into the atmosphere, which in a bushfire would ignite the region.

In fact Mr Henderson should simply come clean and tell the people of the northern rivers he plans to ruin their area by industrialising it with gas-fields and gas wells, pumping stations, and all the other paraphernalia that goes with his company’s greed-filled rush to extract locally un-needed gas to sell to China as soon as possible.

He should also tell the people of the region that he wants to ruin it even more by building a gas hub port at Ballina or Grafton and make the place look like something out of a Mad Max movie.

The people of the northern rivers should deliver a message to the facilitators of this noxious industry, like Don Page and Thomas George, by turfing them out of parliament as soon as possible. Now that would be a great advance for this region.