Viesha Lewand
Independent

Summary

Policies & Commentary

Viesha is the owner of Hepburn Springs Naturals, a mineral water selling company based in the namesake town, and also a Justice of the Peace. Her primary campaign centre appears to be the Facebook group linked above, and most of her other socials have at most two or three entries. So it’s the Facebook group I’ll be relying on primarily here, since it has the most actual content. Even then, it’s mostly just links to news stories, presented without any contextualising comments by Viesha to let us know what she thinks of them.

Viesha several times mentions that she is an experienced candidate, but there’s so little information about her to be found that I cannot verify this claim. But even taking it at face value: candidate for what, exactly? Eagle-eyed reader Greg points out that Ms Lewand ran in the 2007 Senate election, as the number two candidate for the Conservatives for Climate and Environment. Sadly, 2007 predates when Cate started her original blog, so I cannot link to a review of that party. For the 2010 election, the party was renamed the Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy Australia but was deregistered prior to the election due to not having enough members. Their old website is on the Wayback Machine, but it’s unclear if Viesha was still a member at that time.

Fortunately, she has provided a statement (well, a bullet-pointed list) entitled “What I Stand For” which gives some clue as to her policy positions. What follows is that statement reproduced in full, with my commentary added to each bullet point.

• Strong Morals and honesty throughout society which should be reflected in our Government. Managerial level government employees should be audited regularly to ensure this standard.

  I mean, this sounds reasonable enough, but aside from honesty, what morals exactly are we talking about here?

• WE CANNOT SURVIVE WITHOUT FRESH FOOD !! Our government must give every consideration and assistance to our farmers. They work long hours on the land to feed us!

  Further to above I will encourage Australians to establish an Investment Fund to help ORGANIC farming. Shares should only be sold to Australian Citizens.

  Again, reasonable enough, and certainly our Farmers have been largely abandoned by the National Party and need more than what they’re getting. The emphasis on organic farming is, based on the general nature of Viesha’s content, likely a dog whistle for Non-GMO food.

• As a mother and grandmother – I want a good future for my descendants ….. and this encompasses Clean Air, Housing for Australians before others, Fair Pay, Help for Small businesses financially and professionally.

  These are all solid enough and worthy policies (although the ‘before others’ part also feels kinda dog-whistly in an anti-refugee way), and the phrasing suggests that Viesha has other policy ideas allied to this grouping, whatever those might be. Hoping to see some expansion here.

• A strong honest Government which will protect Australians from the overreach of large Corporations. Australians should be in total control, not Corporations owned by other countries. We need a strong army of government workers who will act professionally for the Australian Taxpayers who pay them!

  Implicitly, this reads as support for a strong ICAC with powers over the public service, something I am very much in favour of. And it is definitely a rejection of the Liberal Party’s “slash public service numbers” policy.

• If China and India are opening new coal mines for electricity at the same time as we are closing ours…. there is a big problem here as these countries are buying our coal and gas very cheaply.

  I’m not sure what point is being made here – but surely if we are closing our coal mines, no one will be buying our coal anyway?

• Our Government is urging us to buy Solar batteries BUT we learned that lithium batteries can be detonated from afar (Lebanon). Has this been investigated to the max to ensure our safety?

  After checking some news stories (this is a reasonable representative sample), it appears that no one’s quite sure how the pagers in question were detonated, but it appears that there was sabotage, and that something else placed in the pagers exploded, causing the batteries to explode in a chain reaction, rather than the batteries themselves being the problem.

• Why are Australians and other countries being constantly sprayed by Chemtrails?

  The chemtrail conspiracy theory has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked, and if your alarm bells weren’t already ringing before this, they should be now.

• Australia is known for its many bushfires but we still need to depend on volunteers. This should not be accepted. An audit of govt spending is warranted for EMERGENCY SERVICES.

  I agree that there’s a problem here, I just don’t see how auditing spending is the solution. Surely recruitment should be the focus if staffing levels are too low?

• Australia needs a bank owned 100% by us without outside interference. This means that experienced Government employees must manage and operate them. Only Australian citizens should be allowed to buy shares in them.

  I can only assume that this means either starting a new version of how the Commonwealth Bank used to be, or reverting the existing version to its earlier state. It’s not a terrible idea, but I’m not sure why a government-operated bank would be listed on the stock market.

• We need to keep full ownership of Australia Post so that we don’t depend on large Corporations to handle Australian goods.

  Australia Post has been corporatised (for several decades now, in fact), but not privatised, and it is the stated policy of the current (ALP) government to keep it that way, and the Liberal Party has no current policies to privatise it either. Still, it’s a decent enough principle to stand on, if not one that’s likely to come up very often.

And there we leave it, for the time being, with Viesha’s promise of “More to come”
(I will checking back on her page and updating here as necessary.)