THE TWEED Volume 2 #48 Thursday, August 12, 2010 Advertising and news enquiries: Phone: (02) 6672 2280 editor@tweedecho.com.au adcopy@tweedecho.com.au www.tweedecho.com.au
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LOCAL & INDEPENDENT
Candidate claims ‘identity theft’ Luis Feliu
Making each stitch count
Barbara Waters with one of the colourful knitted blankets made for the needy. Photo Jeff ‘Purler’ Dawson
roots charities and aid organisations on the ground. These include the Addis Ababa FisKate McIntosh tula Hospital in Ethiopia. The centre provides treatment for women sufferFor Murwillumbah’s Barbara Waters, ing debilitating childbirth injuries and each knitted square and stitch that was the subject of an award-winning goes into her colourful handmade documentary featured on the ABC’s blankets is like a labour of love. Four Corners program. Barbara is a long-time member of the Australia-wide network known Wrap with Love as Wrap with Love, who provide blanWrap with Love has had a presence kets to those in need. on the Tweed for about 13 years and Volunteers are asked to knit squares provided 130 blankets to the needy in which are then put together to form the past three years alone. colourful woollen blankets that are Knitting has always been a condistributed worldwide. stant in Barbara’s life. The 74-yearLast year the non-profit organisa- old grandmother of six said she first tion, which was first established in began knitting when she was five 1992, provided about 37,000 blankets years old, helping family members in countries as diverse as Kazakhstan, knit socks and other items as part of Mongolia, East Timor and Papua war-time efforts. New Guinea. She became involved in the organBlankets are distributed by grass- isation some 10 years ago and is now
area coordinator, helping organise meetings and hand stitching individual squares together. It can take up to six hours to stitch one individual blanket, but Barbara says the experience is far from a chore. ‘The nice thing about it is you can sit there watching TV and it doesn’t feel like work at all, but it’s actually giving with unconditional love. You don’t know where it [the blanket] is going or who it’s going to. No one will ever thank you for it,’ she said. ‘It’s just one of the most rewarding and heart warming things.’ Knitters meet at Mountain View Retirement Village in Murwillumbah on the first and third Tuesday of each month from 1.30pm to 4.30pm. For more information about Wrap with Love in the Murwillumbah area call Barbara on 02 6672 1660, or for Tweed Coast, call Judi Williams on 02 6674 2968.
A Tweed-based independent candidate for the seat of Richmond in the upcoming election has accused the Liberal Party of ‘identity theft’ after she ‘googled’ her own name on the internet only to find she had been redirected to the Liberals’ website. Hastings Point resident Julie Boyd says that many non-Liberal candidates who google their own name will find themselves directed to the Liberal website while a name search for some Labor candidates redirected the searcher to a website for ‘Labor failures’. The first link that appears on the Google search page for ‘Julie Boyd Richmond’ belongs to the Liberal Party with the words ‘sponsored link’ beside it. Ms Boyd said it ‘looks like any nonLiberal candidate who googles their own name will find themselves directed to the Liberal website’. ‘As none of these candidates are in any way associated with the Liberal Party, this is a gross misrepresentation of each individual,’ she told The Echo. ‘I work extremely hard to be accepted as a truly independent candidate, and this reflects on my reputation as well as the reputation of every other person affected by this appalling behaviour.’ ‘This is effectively identity theft. All those affected, including myself, are asking people not to click on any ‘sponsored links’ with the name of any candidate.’ Ms Boyd said the google-searchredirection scam seems to target marginal seats around the country and that apparently 90 per cent of independent and small party candidates were affected.
A spokesman for the Australian Electoral Commision (AEC) said it had limited powers under the Commonwealth Electoral Act to deal with electoral advertising on the internet. ‘Those powers do not enable the AEC to regulate the content of electoral advertising or where it appears on the Internet. The AEC is also unable to regulate what advertising is placed on Google and where it is located with respect to electoral advertising,’ the spokesman told The Echo. A Liberal Party spokesperson said that sponsored links were part of the party’s paid advertising strategy. The spokesperson said it was quite clear that the sponsored links were simply advertising. However, at the time of going to press, the Liberal Party appears to have pulled the Google ads after threats they breached electoral laws and could lead to a challenge of results in marginal seats. Richmond independent candidate Stephen Hegedus, a lawyer from Byron Bay, who was also affected by the ads, told the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday he would consider mounting a challenge of election results in the Court of Disputed Returns. ‘In this seat if there was a result where the Liberal Party candidate was returned by a very narrow margin then I think it would be worth a challenge on public interest grounds purely for the sake of raising accountability issues in relation to electoral advertising,’ Mr Hegedus told the SMH. Electoral law expert Graeme Orr, based at the University of Queensland, told the SMH the ads could lead to a legal challenge as it could confuse voters about party affiliations and the identities of candidates.
ABN 82 087 650 682
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