While the NDIS has bipartisan support and was great news for local people with disabilities and their families, I am concerned the roll-out will miss some people who are in most need. The former Liberal-Nationals government signed up to the NDIS and committed to a roll-out where all those on waiting lists, regardless of where they lived, received the benefits first.

It’s very disappointing that Labor has chosen not to follow the program we proposed.

Under the Andrews Labor government’s roll-out, some people who are already receiving disability services will be transitioned while those on waiting lists in the western region will continue to wait.

Rolling out the NDIS to those on the state-wide waiting list first is the fairest approach.

This is what we, The Nationals, committed to do and it’s what carer groups wanted.

EMMA KEALY

Member for Lowan

EVERYONE seems to be mad about climate change.

Governments at every level declare their carbon emission targets as though, like King Canute, they are going to hold back the tide of global warming.

Temperatures have been rising constantly but in stops and starts since 1650, the nadir of the Little Ice Age, yet climatology focuses on the period from 1975 to the present.

Prior to 1975, science was focused on a coming ice age where food production would be impossible by 1990.

It was not difficult in the period leading up to 1975 to find quotations from scientific papers reporting on scientific experimentation that purported to prove the above.

Where are the papers that report on scientific experiments that prove the involvement of carbon dioxide in climate change?

It seems to me that the world has been the victim of the lie ‘that repeated often enough becomes the truth’. 

So David Brennan and his friends at the Wimmera Catchment Management Authority (Mail-Times, October 5) have prepared a carbon ready plan without evidence for the basis of their preparations. ‘Scientists agree’ is not proof. 

A more logical explanation for rising temperatures, if indeed the overall global average is rising, is the humungous amount of combustion we use in our motor vehicles 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

A large unmeasured amount of the heat so produced ends up in the atmosphere through the radiators and exhausts.

I say unmeasured because it seems nobody is interested in such a project, or if they have done so they are more interested in concealing the result.

RON FISCHER

Horsham

WIMMERA Uniting Care in conjunction with Mental Health Week is holding a mental health forum to help break down some of the myths and barriers around mental health.

Join us for a free event to hear from and engage with professional guest panellists as they share information and encourage community discussion around mental health.

The forum will be held on Wednesday, October 7 at the Wesley Performing Arts Centre in Horsham from 7pm to 8.30pm.

Guest panellists include Larelle Kuczer (youth engagement officer, Headspace), Dr Yvonne Cymbalist (General Practitioner), Leigh Cooksley (Wimmera Uniting Care), Acting Inspector Brendan Broadbent (Victoria Police), Wendy Barton (social worker and counsellor), Mick Fryar, (clinical manager for adult – Ballarat Youth Mental Health Services) and Carol Henwood (Grampians Community Health).

LEIGH COOKSLEY

Wimmera Uniting Care