Bawley Point has a long and proud history of Santa runs and as always the response from most of the community is outstanding and it’s wonderful to see the children waiting patiently in the streets for Santa’s arrival and for his volunteer elves to hand out lollies to them all as they wave and cheer and take photos with the Santa and the fire truck.

Throughout the year, your volunteer members have protected the community of Bawley Point and supported other volunteer units from countless bushfires, assisted with motor vehicle accidents, carried out reduction burns, attended training sessions and organised numerous fundraising activities.

The Santa run is just another way that your local Bawley Point Rural Fire Brigade says thanks to the people of Bawley Point for their on-going support for another year.

Every year it seems the number of children and families in the streets get larger, meaning we have to cover more streets but that’s part of what makes our Christmas Day Santa run so special.

It is truly a terrific representation and example of what living in a great community is actually like!

Thank you Bawley Pointers for a very Merry Christmas and a great past year. We look forward to helping protect and serve you all, as best we can for 2019.

A civilisation may be judged on the extent to which it looks after its most vulnerable citizens. Properly considered and funded welfare initiatives are the hallmark of a just society. A policy that seeks to redistribute wealth by targeting retirees with self-managed super funds, however, is an ill-conceived and unjust funding arrangement. Sadly, this is the prospect being faced by self-funded retirees under Labor’s “fair go” election platform. 

In 2007, Labor took a platform of growth and opportunity to the election – a platform which promoted and incentivised investment and good old-fashioned hard work. It was a platform which subsequently enabled greater support of vulnerable sectors of our community. Notwithstanding the success of the equitable centrist approach adopted in 2007, Labor has bowed to its vocal and increasingly irrelevant Left faction by advancing a platform of inequality and redistribution. The Chardonnay Socialists of Labor’s inner-city Left, have rallied around a catch cry of “inequality”. This mantra has an unfortunately inequitable outcome for self-funded retirees in our Gilmore electorate in the form of Labor’s policy of eliminating cash refunds for excess franking credits, ie, the refund to shareholders of the tax already paid by companies on profits.

Gilmore has a not inconsiderable retiree population, many of which are self-funded – a status resulting from years of hard work and personal sacrifice. To arbitrarily penalise these people who have contributed to society all their working lives is immoral. Considering the extent to which our retirees have helped grow our economy and sustain our welfare system, such attack defies logic. Few of our retirees can be considered high-income earners with the majority living on a tight budget – a budget that relies to varying extents on the refund of franking credits.

I wouldn’t hold my breath that Labor’s endorsed candidate for the seat of Gilmore will advocate on behalf of our retirees. She has nailed her flag-of-convenience firmly to the mast of the foundering ship of the Socialist Left – she is beholden to the Left for her preselection and is expected to vote en masse with her latté-sipping political masters, oblivious to the realities of life outside the Sydney CBD or the Canberra bubble.