OPINION: Loft jailing just a deterrent

THE jailing of former Fraser Coast mayor Chris Loft has created some debate.

Chris Loft.

THE jailing of former Fraser Coast mayor Chris Loft has created some debate.

Mr Loft was last week sentenced to spend six months behind bars after a jury found him guilty of unlawfully attempting to procure his former campaign manager a job with the council.

There are suggestions that is somewhat harsh to jail a man of Mr Loft's age, 75, who they say was attempting to do the right thing by his community.

I disagree.

Regardless of his age and his intentions to improve the council and do the right thing by the people who elected him, Mr Loft broke the law.

The ends does not justify the means in this case.

Not only did Mr Loft break the law, but by doing so he also damaged the public's trust in elected officials and an elected body.

Criminal sentences must also act as a deterrent, and this is the kind of crime we need to ensure doesn't work its way into democratic government.

IT SEEMS terribly strange that people are castigated for linking bushfires and climate change when logic suggests it must be so.

For Australia, climate change means hotter temperatures and worsenining droughts.

If you accept this, then it it's hardly "despicable", as the rather angry Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack  says, to point out that a hotter and drier country is going to have worse bushfires.

If the opposite was true, that climate change would lead to a cooler and wetter Australia, critics would have a point.

If you don't believe climate science, that's your choice, but you can hardly blast people for pointing out the logical conclusion of what is widely accepted, including by most experts,  to be the truth.