A big thankyou to everyone who has signed, commented, shared and retweeted. The petition now has over 51,000 signatories and is growing.
The Prime Minister has said he will consider a Royal Commission, the Leader of the Opposition has said he is open to the idea, the Greens are calling for one and a number of volunteer fire fighting associations are as well. It seems quite possible that we will succeed. In fact it is inconceivable to me that an event this big can happen to the nation and there not be a Royal Commission.
However we can’t take anything for granted and we need to keep the pressure up by force of numbers until a Royal Commission is called.
It is vital then that you keep helping to spread the word. The team at change.org are getting right behind the petition and I had a good chat to one of their campaign directors yesterday about how to further our cause. Amongst other things they’ve provided us with the following short link for the petition
Change.org/BushfireRC
as well as this page
which allows you to easily share the petition on your social platforms.
I’ve started contacting media outlets now too, but have mainly been mainly pushing it on facebook and twitter to this point, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, with just a little bit of blow back on twitter (no, Royal Commissions aren’t run by the Royal Family, and neither are they run by the politicians.....which is kind of the point of them really!).
So my advice to you is if you do get any blow back just politely point out that we’re just calling for all possible issues to be examined and are not taking any slant on the issues one way or another – that’s for the experts in a Commission.
I just hope we have a Government courageous and honest enough to take the same stance, and until we do we’ll be doing our bit to keep the pressure on them, because the people and the wildlife of Australia deserve nothing less.