Rally 21 November 2010

On a sunny Sunday morning 150 dedicated and passionate people attended our Community Rally. Thank you to all those who were able to attend.

Special thanks to -

• our Mayor Jack Wegman and councillors - Brad Miles, Coral Ross, Phillip Healey and Nick Tragas who attended, for their ongoing support & for working most of the morning as MC's or cooking sausages, etc
• representives from all the political parties for our area, particularly Rob Clarke MP and Andrew McIntosh MP for their ongoing support and encouragement
• the amazing Deb Ganderton from our council and her team
• Eileen, Ken, Sean, Barbara, Lorri and their families from Balwyn North who assisted with delivering brochures
• Chanmali Tregambe from CPR who was the main organiser of the event
• Councillors Phillip Healey and Coral Ross for their BBQ skills
• Maria of Kawarren Street for cutting all those onions
• (edit by BNFNG: ...and some photographs from the event can be seen on our website )
• (edit by BNFNG: ...and a short video presentation of the event can be found here )

We will not stop until we get noise protection for our community - no matter how long it takes!
But at least our voice is being heard:

• We had a "mention" in The Age last Sunday (edit by BNFNG: click here for the article from The Age on Monday 22/11/10 - see the last three paragraphs...)
• Mary H had 5 minutes on MTR radio on Monday morning speaking with Steve Price regarding how the noise affects our community, issue with trucks particularly at night & air brakes and re allocation of funds - we hope that Steve will question Tim Pallas when he speaks with him this week, particularly regarding the allocation of funding for noise barriers which seems to be directed only to labor electorates.
• We expect some coverage in next week's Progress Leader.

I will attach some of the notes from my address at the rally in the next few days. (edit by BNFNG: click here for the transcript of Mary's speech )

Interesting information on the Eastlink/Connecteast website - 13,000 noise wall panels were erected along Eastlink. How frustrating it is for us - we can't even get 1!!!

Watch this space for our next steps...