Griffith Business Chamber has partnered up with us to hold a candidates’ forum at Southside Leagues Club from 6pm.

There’s been so much go on with the race for Farrer in the past week, it will be great to hear everyone put forward their final pitch before we go to the polls on Saturday. It will also help to hear from the people we can actually vote for instead of the leaders who have decided to make this election a combination of daytime soap-opera and a race to the bottom.

Like many Australians I’m not buying Bill Shorten’s ‘Mediscare’ campaign, but at the same time I’m having trouble with Malcolm Turnbull’s repetition of the old “Liberals are better for the economy” routine. In fact, if you remove the mining boom, the Howard years weren’t the gold standard of economic responsibility everyone seems to believe they were.

One of the crises facing us as a nation is our inability to escape the election-cycle nature of modern politics. I haven’t heard a strong, 10-year plan from any party yet and I’m hoping someone can provide one on Thursday night.

MEANWHILE, British voters have won their game of chicken with the world and in one day they seem to have managed something madmen, nuclear weapons and worldwide financial collapse couldn’t: the fall of Europe. 

For hundreds of years there had been fighting in Europe but for a brief few decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall there had been peace on the continent. Sure, it wasn’t always easy, but the Germans and the French were getting on well and that was a pretty big deal.

With the help of social media and an almost-willing dumbing-down of the voting public, far-right-wing activists have sabotaged that peace by telling people to be afraid of other people. This time it was ‘immigrants’ that the far-right used to make people afraid and as a result Scotland might break the union, Ireland stands a real shot at becoming whole and France might start interrogating brits on their was in from Dover.

To put it in perspective: Britain is closer to France than we are to Leeton, but they want to remain separate. 

Time to visit while it’s still there, I think.

-STEPHEN MUDD