This is a paid promotion by Luke Robinson
Dr Luke Robinson, Greens candidate for Page
If doctors like me practised medicine the way many politicians do politics, we’d be struck off for malpractice, for peddling disinformation, or for just for sheer incompetence.
In health care we have regulatory bodies watching us, but for politicians? Well, ultimately it is you, the voters.
If you want change, you have to vote for it.
My job requires expertise and nuance to get things right. 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.
Not necessarily what patients want to hear, but what they need to hear, to accurately understand their situations and the options open to them.
A topical case of political malpractice can be seen in the way some local politicians have been stirring up fear and outrage on youth crime.
I understand the safety concerns for communities, with some localised and well publicised spikes in particular offence categories, 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.”
On energy policy, we still have some quacks prescribing the same out-dated diet (fossil fuels), despite decades of research showing it’s slowly killing the patient.
Then offering another dangerous and even more expensive dish (nuclear) that will be served up too late in any case. All while the cheapest, plentiful, 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.
It’s like a doctor who tells a patient it’s OK to keep on smoking and eating poorly because we can always do a major heart operation on them some time.
If you want a sensible, nuanced approach to politics, if you want change, you have to vote for it.
This is what I and other Greens candidates including Eddie Lloyd, our local number two on the NSW Greens senate ticket, offer when you vote in the upcoming federal election.
Dr Luke Robinson, Greens candidate for Page
To find out more about me or support my campaign, go to Facebook or this website.
To find out more about our policies, go here.
Authorised by A. Croft for The Greens NSW. 19/1 Hordern Place, Camperdown NSW 2050