Dear Alex and Phil,

I understand why you did not show up to talk about public transport today. Being professional politicians, I appreciate that you are very busy men. Buses running late, not connecting or not showing up are going to cost you precious time out of your day. Time is money.

Although the morning 20A turned up on time, my evening bus was 14 minutes late (or 16 minutes early, depending how you look at it). I understand that, as busy men, an extra quarter of an hour at home with your family is important in the evening.

Being men of means, you probably also have a fairly good comfort zone in terms of rising petrol costs. The rising cost of fuel would be a small price to pay for the convenience of getting to work on time and getting home at a reliable hour.

On the eve of my bus ivitation to other Gaven candidates, I recieved this reply from Alex Douglas:

Dear Glen
Thanks for the invitation. Buses are a crucial key to our transport infrastructure. At short notice I can't manage the time.

Many thanks
Alex Douglas

So, Alex, what do you propose to do about fixing public transport, or has that escaped your attention?

I haven't got a reply from Phil Gray yet. I expect that means he'll turn up tomorrow morning.

I will let you know.

Hello Alex and Phil,

One of the long term weaknesses in infrastructure in South East Queensland is the ability to efficiently move the workforce to where it needs to be. This is a serious threat to the long term economic viability of many Gaven communities.

The reliance on single passenger private vehicles will have an increasingly negative impact on economic growth in the region.

Fortunately, the Greens have many good ideas in this regard. I therefore invite you to catch a bus with me. Please join me on the 20A on Wednesday 6 September at 6:03 am outside Boonaroo shops on Neilsens Road. Please note that the bus can leave up to five minutes early and/or five minutes late.

I try to do the right thing. Use public transport. Leave the car at home. But why don't buses always show up? I normally try and get to the train station by walking or jogging. But a few of weeks ago I injured my foot and have been a regular bus user ever since. In the last three weeks there have been three occasions when the scheduled bus has not shown up.

The Beattie government wants us to use more public transport because our region is struggling under the weight of poorly planned development. I invite my fellow Gaven candidates, Alex Douglas and Phil Gray, to hop on the 20A with me one day so we can discuss what needs to be done to fix public transport on the Coast.

Has anyone else had this problem? If so, let me know which bus, when and where (or if you have any other P.T. war stories) and I will take the information to Translink.

The CEO of Insurance Australia Group, Australia's largest personal lines insurer, Michael Hawker sees the possibility of significant damage from a storm surge on the Gold Coast.

IAG have spent considerable effort in studying the effects of climate change since 1999 when a massive hail storm hit Sydney and cost the company (then NRMA) millions of dollars in claims. So they know what they are talking about.

The REIQ also thinks it is a good idea to start planning for the worse.

By VOTING GREEN you can DOUBLE your VOTE. If you VOTE 1 for the GREENS and then VOTE 2 for the party of your choice, your VOTE still gets counted for your party but the GREENS get a bigger VOTE and that tells the main party’s that you care about GREEN issues.

Just because we have recommended that you preference LABOR doesn’t mean your VOTE automatically goes to LABOR if you VOTE GREEN. Your VOTE will go to whoever you put second. We suggest LABOR based on their environmental record, but if you really want to VOTE 1 GREEN and 2 COALITION you can and your vote will still get counted as a COALITION vote when preferences are distributed.

See how it works:

Good luck to all candidates tomorrow. Lets hope the rain clears up by then.

The pace of the campaign is certainly picking up, along with the rhetoric. I have now been labelled as “slippery” and “extremist” by the Brisbane Nationals who are speaking to their rural constituencies. Unfortunately, this is not helping poor Alex Douglas who is desperately trying to keep his message relevant to urban voters in Gaven.

We fronted the Nerang Community Association in a "Meet the Candidates" evening which I found immensely satisfying. The highlights for me were talking about preserving the Spit and Broadwater from shipping developments (I actually get quite emotional about this) and also talking about Nerang forest. If you look at my earlier posts that show the physical significance of Nerang forest, you can see why it is such an important asset to preserve.

I left work in a hurry today and left my prepared speech there. So I had to scribble a couple of notes on a post-it note on the train home. It worked out for the best in the end because I just had to speak from the heart.

I know that there are some differences of opinion on our preferences decision, but I can honestly say that there was and still is a lot of suspicion of Labor among Gold Coast Greens. We will definitely be very robust in our approach to deciding preferences at the upcoming state election. But for Gaven, we were given no choice when the alternative was the National Party.

If the coalition parties are serious about getting our preferences then they have to comprehensively overhaul their environmental and social policies. A good environmental or social policy is naturally conservative – cautious in approach to change and encompassing the time-honoured concept on noblese oblige.

I have just been reading through the DNRMW’s Vegetation Management website. I have found some interesting facts about land clearing in the Coomera River catchment. I couldn’t find anything about Nerang River catchment. If you have any information let me know.

Between 1988 and 2003, 3.9 thousand hectares of trees have been cleared. Worryingly, about half of the 3.9 thousand (1.9 thousand) hectares have been cleared since 2000. Just over a quarter of a thousand hectares were cleared in the 2000-2001 financial year. More than a thousand hectares of trees were cleared in the 2002-2003 year. This is a 400% increase in the rate of clearing in two years. If clearing in Gaven continues to increase at this rate there will not be a tree left standing within ten years.

I hasten to add that I doubt this will happen, but we need to get recreational and National Park land locked away now before it is too late and we find ourselves living in a concrete jungle.

I would like to know how many thousands of hectares are currently protected under the SEQ Plan as green space and how many thousands are still under threat. While the vegetation legislation (that the National Party wants to repeal) will protect trees on freehold land, this can be overridden by approved development applications under the Integrated Planning Act. We must get the government to strengthen tree protection in development approvals. Forward thinking developers should be OK with this, as the trees in this area helps makes this such a wonderful place to live.

Sorry for the short post in my blog today, but the phone has been ringing off the hook! This is my reply to the National Party comments today.

1. The Nationals have said that they will establish port authority on the along our pristine coast somewhere (probably in the Broadwater). My question to the National Party is: if you are not going to build a shipping port at the Spit, then come clean (no pun intended) and tell us exactly where you are going to build it.

2. For heaven's sake, can we PLEASE concentrate on issues actually within Gaven. We have lots of land that can be rehabilitated and made available for recreation and wildlife. My question to the National Party is: do you have any ideas about developing public space WITHIN GAVEN?

3. I say again, our final decision on preferences will be announced when WE are ready. We won't be bullied by anyone into announcing them sooner.

Some Gaven voters should be receiving our campaign material in their letterboxes over the next couple of days. I would like to expand on some of the ideas that we touch on in the pamphlet. Many issues are necessarily complicated, but we are forced to reduce our messages to short, punchy platitudes in this age of three second TV grabs.

Hopefully, I will be able to expand on some of those ideas here.

When we say “more buses and bus routes”, we are actually talking about more flexible public transport. Rather than developing more fixed routes it would be a better idea to have smaller buses where the route is determined by who gets in. Imagine getting into a small bus at the train station that will drop you close to your front door. You know that if there is no bus at the station, that there will be one only five or ten minutes away. I would like to see bus companies given more freedom to respond to community transport needs, with funding paid on a per trip basis, rather than a per seat basis. Here is some work being done by the CSIRO. I will post more on this in coming days.