Lying political scum

I received an interesting letterbox drop this morning from an organisation calling themselves doublecrossed.com.au.  Their gripe is that the state Labor party is proposing a skyrail project for several of the metropolitan train lines, as opposed to doing underground level rail crossing removals.

There was a bunch of twaddle and scaremongering on it about the purported disadvantages of the project, so I initially set down to send them a few conversational points to display that they are, in fact, dead wrong.

Some of their scaremongering:

Elevated lines are noisier.
Er, no, they are not.  Train lines are noisy, period.  Something to do with putting a few thousand tons of steel across steel lines at 100km/h, yeah?  Physics much?  That's not going to go away no matter what you do, and elevating the lines will result in the noise being radiated upwards, where it will dissipate far more quickly and with less disruption than it does at ground level.

It will "divide communities".
Sorry, what planet are you from?  What do you think the rail line, right of way for it, and fences to keep dumbarses off the lines do now?  Elevating the lines will actually remove those issue for the most.

It will create dumping grounds for rubbish.
Have you had a look at rail lines, car parks, shopping centres and road verges at all?  Rubbish dumping happens because of restrictive, expensive and idiotic council rubbish policies.  It's not created by the availability of a place for it to happen, there are plenty of such places already which is why it happens now.

Undesireables will hang out underneath the lines.
Have you had a look at the quality of individual that hangs out at train stations now?  I fail to see how adding 15 feet of vertical clearance is going to alter that one way or the other.

What elevated lines will achieve is to create a heap of additional parking space, which is the single most sorely needed factor in Melbourne's suburban train system now.  At most stations you can't get a park after 7am, which is hopeless.  At some stations like Oakleigh it's more like 6:30am.

Decreased property prices.
How?  The noise from the adjacent line will be less, not more, the eyesore of the generally unmaintained right of way will be gone, and there are no downsides.  In other words, that's a boogeyman word that the published hopes will scare people without needing to produce any actual proof.


So I set out to explain this to the publisher of this bollocks, but being a geek I decide to see who the registrant of the domain is.

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools#whois|type=domain&&value=doublecrossed.com.au

Domain Name: doublecrossed.com.au
Last Modified: 04-Mar-2016 04:18:45 UTC
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Registrar Name: GoDaddy.com, LLC
Registrant: THE LIBERAL PARTY OF AUSTRALIA VICTORIAN DIVISION
Registrant ID: ABN 70723275853
Eligibility Type: Other
Registrant Contact ID: CR194171579
Registrant Contact Name: Simon Terpstra

Um, dafuq?  Liberal party?

Who is this Simon dude?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonterpstra

Simon Terpstra
Senior Digital Strategist at Liberal Victoria
Melbourne, AustraliaPolitical Organization


Gee, let's look at the website.  Here's the footer:

Authorised by S.Frost. 104 Exhibition Street, Melbourne VIC 3000
(03) 9654 2255 | vic.liberal.org.au | libs@vic.liberal.org.au


So, in reality, this is an attempt by a political party to bash their opposition based on a thinly veiled attempt at masquerading as a public action campaign.

Unfortunately, it means I didn't bother to write them an e-mail, because there's no point.  I think I'll go and troll the idiot that runs the Moorabbin Airport Resident's Association instead, which is something I do occasionally for fun.   It's always fun poking holes in the arguments of people that buy houses next to airports and then complain about the noise.