Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Yorkeys Knob Residents Association, muzzle freedom of speech.

I approached the Yorkeys Knob Residents Association, to put a short note in their next newsletter that I’m blogging, they refused. Their reason, I quote: Upon reading the blog, we discovered that it contained items of a political nature. Unquote.

Well, well, well, they are in effect suppressing freedom of speech. No wonder, it is alleged that they are the sub branch of the Barron River ALP branch. It may be of interest that the humorous political item “How to get rid of Anna Bligh” they didn’t like, was sent to me by a life member of the ALP who could see the funny side of this. Needless to say this motley crew of Labor supporters are devoid of a sense of humor.

I cannot see that mentioning my blog once in their newsletter (And I was prepared to make a donation) would politically compromise their rag. Nobody would know what is in it until they open it and - if the reader doesn’t like what is in my blog he/she simply deletes it and never opens it again.

This is like advertising for shops, you don’t know about everything they sell, until you go there – and if you don’t like what you see you don’t go there again, the same would be the case with my blog.

And, talking about politics, Wettenhall and Turnour constantly feature in this rag. – Non political? You would have to be kidding. Of course, Wettenhall is printing this rag for his sub branch.

And while I’m at it let me tell you this. I used to be a member of this association. Then they wanted to produce a newsletter and were having a competition for a name of this newsletter, Lesley Clark, the former member for Barron River, donated a bottle of Champagne for the winner of the name competition.

I was the winner with: “Yorkeys Knob News” second place getter was “Yorkeys Knob Matters.” So after the meeting the executive in their wisdom decided to make the second place getter the winner, and that person was most likely a member of the ALP. I didn’t very much care of what they did, but how they did it. Courtesy would have demanded that they would have at least consulted me about this, but they didn’t. But, I was told that I can still keep the bottle of Champagne. I walked out of that meeting without the bottle – and that ended my membership with this association.

My publishing criterion in my blog is: It must be interesting, educational, informative and humorous and political opinions can be expressed.

My thought for today:
Speak well of your enemies. After all, you made them.


Werner Schmidlin

2 comments:

Fair Go said...

Could it be that the Yorkeys Knob Residents Association is the first line of defense in the federal Government's plan to filter the internet?

Anonymous said...

Good point, Fair Go, very possible. Whether that is the case or not, the YK newsletter is usually half-full of brimming announcements from Steve Wettenoballs & Jim 'The Invisible Man' Turnour, informing us that Anna's going to spend 15.6 million on this, Rudd is spending 30.5 on that, & there's very little mention of local issues - they are just PR exercises from these local pollies.

I don't always agree with Werner's views, but this is a democracy, so it's good to air different opinions.

It's a shame the YK newsletter people could not have just put a link to Werner's blog, as a matter of interest, a bit of good goss from the local community, Werner having been a long-time resident and all.

I wish him good luck with his blog.