Keith Duncan, Pimlico.
I’ll bet that when the Barnaby Joyce fiasco finally fizzled out, National Party supporters breathed a sigh of relief and assumed they would again ‘move forward’; well after they elected their new leader, an apparently reformed homophobe, they’re more likely to be moving sideways.
Mr Michael McCormack’s previous forays into ‘community attitudes’ when writing for the Wagga Wagga newspaper regarding the AIDS epidemic, contending that gays were solely responsible for causing it, does leave his objectivity in serious question.
It could well be the that the Nationals, by electing another arch conservative with extremist views as leader, are in for more of the same; opinion polls continually show that the vast majority of intelligent people have moved on from the out-dated homophobic views of the past, but the extreme right still stubbornly refuse to accept that the world is changing.
At the last Federal election, the National Party received 4.6 per cent of the national vote, the Queenslamd LNP 8.5 per cent and the Liberal Party 28.7 per cent, even with a combined vote of 13.1 per cent the Nats and the LNP do seem overrepresented with 16 lower house seats when the Greens got 10 per cent and hold one seat and One Nation got eight per cent and holds no seats.
This voting anomaly could explain why the extreme right ratbags seem to wield so much influence, and have over the years been so successful in preventing affirmative action on marriage equality, the Republic and the most important issue facing the whole world behind nuclear war – anthropogenic climate change.
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. 
