Re your article in Echonetdaily April 22 headed ‘Railway bridges about to be demolished’.
Quote: ‘Greens MP Mehreen Faruqi has written to NSW transport minister Gladys Berejiklian this week querying the government’s plans for the Casino to Murwillumbah railway line’ unquote.
Nice try Mehreen, but let’s have a bit of reality about the C-M rail line and politics in general. It matters not which political party governs, they will do as they are told by the most powerful lobbyists. Lobbying is a multi-billion dollar industry. Lobbyists have the power to break any politician or political party that does not ‘come up with the goods’.
Here’s a federal register of lobbyists and their clients: http://lobbyists.pmc.gov.au/
NSW government register http://www.dpc.nsw.gov.au/
(On the NSW register of lobbyists, their clients are conveniently not listed).
And here is an expose of how lobbyists work: http://meanjin.com.au/
Road transport companies don’t like competition from railways and neither do road construction companies. Oil companies prefer to not have fuel-efficient trains operating (buses use more fuel), and developers go into fits of euphoria at the thought of the NSW government selling off the C-M rail corridor.
If you think letters, protests, demonstrations etc, will do any good to get our C-M rail line ever up and running again, then all I can say is: dream on.
Only two political parties have vowed to ban lobbyists if they ever gained any power to do so, the One Nation Party (politically assassinated by the media) and Clive Palmer’s PUP Party. Clive is the lobbyists’ ‘work in progress’; being portrayed in the media as a bumbling buffoon in order to manufacture public consent to have him ousted.
Peggy Balfour, Mullumbimby
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
