It’s not written in the Stars. It’s driven by the Numbers.

                              There was movement in Australia
                              for the word had passed around
                              that no pollie without regret would get away

Hello everyone…thank you all so much for supporting this petition.
 
It’s strange, but in the grand scheme of catastrophes happening world-wide at the moment, particularly as a result of the rapid heating of our planet, this issue of mass spraying can seem like a small drop in a large ocean, bordering on the insignificant.
 
However, we all recognise that its deep significance lies in the fact that the Victorian government is signalling to its citizens, and to the rest of the country, that whenever our warming world throws us another problem, whether expected or unexpected, it will always be met with an approach based on the lowest common denominator.
 
And it doesn’t get much lower than this ridiculous notion, whereby we unleash highly toxic chemicals onto our communities and environments, doing untold damage to local ecosystems, local produce, local flora, and all the creatures, both large and small, that inhabit our world.
 
I do agree that mosquitoes will most likely present problems as the climate warms. And we will certainly need to do something to make sure outbreaks of disease are kept in check.
 
But a creative government doesn’t go down the sad-sack path of diminishing returns, let alone the path of no return. Indeed, the real question to be answered is why the Andrews government wouldn’t be using this as an opportunity to create jobs? Both major parties bang on relentlessly about Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!...but too often when they are offered the chance to create those jobs AND win the community’s respect for doing so, they take the so-called easy option.
 
So I thought I’d take a look at some numbers that politicians and bureaucrats tend to dismiss when they allow their knee-jerk response to a perceived threat to completely cloud their thinking…starting with the vulnerable in our communities:
 
50% of the population have one chronic disease or more.
23% of the population have 2 or more chronic diseases.
33% of the population have a chronic respiratory condition.
33% of the population have arthritis and other musculoskeletal conditions.
20% of adults and 14% of children experience a mental illness in any given year.
3.5% of the population are suffering from trauma at any given moment.
 
15.7 % of the population is over 65 years of age, which means that for all of these people the immune system is weakened, and for many the immune system is highly compromised. Add in the fact that 80% of people over this age have one or more chronic conditions, and you have a group seriously at risk from mass spraying.
 
And what about the 300,000+ pregnant women and their babies born each year?
Or the 19% of the population who suffer from chemical sensitivities?
 
Taking these figures as a whole, you start to wonder what sort of government would even consider mass spraying when there are other far safer methods of culling mosquitoes. Aside from the increase in cancer and ghastly auto-immune conditions that communities will have to deal with long-term, there will be countless lives lived in daily misery due to the constant contact with these chemicals.
 
In some regions of Australia, council workers go around checking peoples’ homes and gardens to make sure mosquitoes are not able to breed. Surely freeing some people from Newstart Hell by providing them with employment would be far preferable to putting the already sick and vulnerable into deeper mental and physical torment by forcing their bodies to have to deal with the toxic overload these insecticides will certainly bring on.
 
Passing legislation requiring every homeowner to install a microbat box on their property would be another brilliant move. We aren’t allowed to live in a house that has no running water for health and hygiene reasons…why not make it the same for microbat boxes if we really need to keep mosquito numbers down? Two microbats living in a tree by your house will ensure that 2000 mosquitoes will disappear from your property every hour of every night. And this could easily be put into practice across rural Victoria and the leafier suburbs of Melbourne and other largish towns.
 
The government believes that the tourist dollar will dry up if regions of the state become known for disease. But what will really dry the tourist dollar up is if we start spraying our state systematically. What family would want to pay $3000+ per week for a home on Victoria’s coastline in January or at Easter when they could have a brilliant chemical-free holiday for the same price or less somewhere overseas? Or in the magnificent Kimberly ranges? Or sunny northern NSW?
 
Who would consider going to a BnB for a fabulously relaxing weekend in one of the many splendid regions of Victoria knowing that the place they have booked might have been sprayed the day before they arrived?
 
Most councils, when it comes to mosquitoes, operate under environmentally sustainable mosquito management plans. If this legislation passes without any form of community consultation inserted into the new regulations, the Victorian Government will have the right to override councils when it comes to the spraying of our homes and communities.
 
This is a madness that must be stopped.
 
And so I am asking all of you who signed this petition to do two things…
 
1. Spread the petition as far and wide as you can via email and social media. Please get as many people as possible involved in this campaign, and ask them to do likewise. If we allow our government to get its way on this issue now, in thirty years time it could well wind up being the only response we have investigated to combat the increase of mosquito-driven disease due to a warming planet. One can see whole rural towns being sprayed to make sure diseases and viruses, particularly mosquito-borne ones, do not reach the major cities.
 
Indeed, wasn't that one of the ideas behind the spraying of 25 square kilometres of the Mornington Peninsula !
 
2. The second thing we all need to do is get submissions in before the end of the month. This is where OUR numbers can really bring about change. Especially if we rope our friends and relatives into doing likewise. And for those of you who shudder at the thought of writing a submission, you’re not alone…but a submission doesn’t have to be long and complex, full of references…it can be a handful of well-written lines explaining how spraying will affect you or your family or your community…something short and to the point.

Submissions can be made by clicking on Link 1 in my original petition, scrolling down to the 'Formal submission' heading, clicking on the category 'Arbovirus control', and uploading your document using the File upload.
 
Thank you all once again, and you shall hear from me sometime soon no doubt…