Rodney Stevens

The Greens candidate for Page in the upcoming federal election, Dr Luke Robinson is encouraging constituents to vote for change to ensure the best practice in politics is conducted across Australia.

The Emergency Physician at Lismore Base Hospital, who studied at the University of Melbourne and has worked in the Northern Territory and Alice Springs said if the people want a change of government, they must vote for it.

“If doctors like me practiced medicine the way many politicians do politics, we’d be struck off for malpractice, for pedaling disinformation, or for just for sheer incompetence,” he said.

“In health care we have regulatory bodies watching us, but for politicians – well, ultimately it is you, the voters.”

In his job, where people’s lives are on the line daily, Dr Luke said honesty and evidence are key.

“My job requires expertise and nuance to get things right,” he said.

“It requires an acknowledgment of complexity and individual variation.

“It requires respect for other colleagues’ expert opinions, for the evidence.

“It requires honesty, a commitment to tell the truth with compassion.”

Dr Robinson said some politicians use a tactic of stirring up fear and outrage in the community to get traction on issues.

“A topical case of political malpractice can be seen in the hard line taken by some politicians stirring up fear and outrage on youth crime,” he said.

“I understand the safety concerns for communities, but overall youth crime is down.

“However, these lazy politicians grossly overstate the extent of the problem, misdiagnose the causes, then proffer simplistic but harsh and costly remedies that only make the problem worse.

“As lawyer and Greens NSW MLC Sue Higginson says, “It costs $985,500 per year to lock up a young person – imagine the healing and real support we could provide vulnerable young people and their families with that much money…sending young people to prison does not work to prevent and stop crime, it just teaches young people how to be better criminals.”

Dr Robinson likened the attitude of some politicians to a doctor telling patient it’s OK to keep on smoking and eating poorly because we can always do a major heart operation on them some time.

“On energy policy, we still have some quacks prescribing the same outdated diet (fossil fuels), despite decades of research showing it’s slowly killing the patient,” he said.

“Then offering another dangerous and even more expensive dish (nuclear) that will be served up too late in any case.

“All while the cheapest, immediately available and safest food (renewables) sits waiting on the shelf.

“Then there are those who say we can just engineer rather than behave our way out of climate-change turbocharged disasters like floods or fire.”

Price-gouging, not increased demand, is driving inflation, Dr Luke said.

“Giving the Reserve Bank of Australia this one tool to fight inflation is like a doctor only using one medicine to treat every patient with a fever – never mind the underlying cause,” he said.

“Recent inflation has largely been due to supply constraints and opportunistic corporate price-gouging, not excess demand.

“Interest rate rises do nothing to address the former and specifically hurt mortgage holders already struggling with cost-of-living pressures, who are not responsible for the problem.”

To combat the current issues in Australia, Dr Robinson said a nuanced ‘treatment plan’ that targets the causes would include providing cheap and reliable renewable energy, produced here in Australia and not sensitive to price shocks from overseas wars or oil cartels, the government providing universal public services like health care and education funded by a progressive tax system which works out to be far cheaper and more equitable, engage in lang-term public planning and provision to prevent and address workplace shortages, legislating against unlimited rent increases and increasing the supply of public housing, and legislating against corporate price-gouging.

For more information on Dr Robinson’s campaign visit his Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/DrLukeForPage or website https://greens.org.au/nsw/person/dr-luke-robinson