Your Say: Craig Kelly and his loony ideas must go the way of the dinosaurs

In the latest edition of Your Say, Crikey readers suggest rogue Liberal MP Craig Kelly needs some serious intervention.

On Craig Kelly:

David Ritchie writes: I live in the Indi electorate and we have been blessed to have fantastic independent members over the past three parliamentary terms in Cathy McGowan and now Helen Haines.

Indi was traditionally a National, then Liberal, seat but what we were served up by the Libs in Sophie Mirabella was a reactionary, conservative zealot and we patently didn’t like it.

From taking over the seat with a 65% primary vote, Mirabella did such a terrible job of representing farmers, small-business owners and middle-of-the-road voters that she suffered a humiliating defeat to McGowan. This was due to the wonderful grassroots support and consultation that McGowan pursued and enjoyed.

The voters of Hughes have a similar opportunity to vote in an independent. Let’s face it, Kelly has been saved at the last two preselections only by the intervention of the serving prime ministers (first Malcolm Turnbull and then Scott Morrison). Not even the local Liberal preselectors think he should represent them.

It’s past time that such climate change-denying, pro-coal, anti-vaxxer, conspiracy-obsessed dinosaurs were either deselected or voted out of office.

The best of luck to the We Are Hughes group. I hope it can learn from those in Warringah and Indi and succeed in getting rid of their irrelevant local member.

Jacinta Foale writes: I’m a school teacher. If a child in my class comes out with stuff that shows they haven’t been listening, if they are being so vocal that they are interrupting the learning capacity of other children, and if it looks like the behaviour is mostly about attention seeking, then a consultation process happens with other teachers, teacher aids, guidance officers, etc.

Craig Kelly needs similar serious intervention.

One would hope that the school, or in this case, the parliament, has a principal with the intelligence and courage to support the intervention.

Maria Kunda writes: For a short time (in perhaps December 2019 or January 2020) I made a point of responding to discussions on Craig Kelly’s Facebook site.

I was purposefully and relentlessly polite. My aim was not to be disrespectful — rather to provide argumentation and informative links to counter erroneous claims about climate change.

It was after only a very few of these comments that I was blocked from commenting on Kelly’s page. Not replied to. Blocked. It is a tightly administered page that brokers no counterpoints.

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