In extreme climates such as Greater Lithgow the impact is sometimes even more of a shove into struggle street.

But instead of a lot of hot air (that could perhaps be harnessed) the pollies have the ability to cut electricity and gas bills by 10 per cent with the stroke of a pen.

When Peter Dutton was seeking the keys to the Lodge he had one thing going for him.

He promised that as (and when) Prime Minister he would remove the GST from energy bills.

It would be a hefty saving but it wasn’t the first time relief had been promised this way and withered on the harsh political vine.

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Labor’s Kim Beazley made a similar promise some years ago but when shoved out of the race by Kevin Rudd, Rudd was having none of it and said as much when questioned by the Mercury on the campaign trail in Lithgow.

There’s votes to be won here Australia wide so who’s next to step up with an offer we can’t refuse?

SUNDAY’S centenary Armistice Day was truly a bookmark in the long history of man’s inhumanity to man. One hundred years after the senseless carnage of the ‘war to end all wars’ nothing has changed; only the names and places are different in a war weary world and we’re more efficient at killing each other.

Nothing summed up the madness of the so called Great War than a journalist reviewing a new WWI documentary who wrote (‘They were) .. men who came to understand that a journey through the Great War could only end in one of two ways; a death sentence for those who fell, and a life sentence for those who did not’. Sunday’s speech writers could not have put it any better.

THE latest Shame File nomination for an urban eyesore comes from concerned residents of Laurence Street. The old Olympic takeaway and mixed business was probably Lithgow’s last corner shop and succumbed to the uneven battle with big corporations years ago after successive owners tried their best. Now this forlorn old shop is a decidedly tatty target for vandals and possibly even thieves with windows and doors smashed, the interior a gutted shell littered with debris, and tiles stripped from the outside. It surely fits the criteria required by Council to take urgent and overdue action.

THERE is no one who has put more time and effort into investigating and recording Lithgow district’s convict era history than Ollie Leckbrandt. Ollie has an international reputation for the depth of his work and for four books largely dealing with the stockades and the human tolls that went with them.

His regular columns in the Lithgow Mercury attracted a keen readership as evidenced by our feedback. Now he’s released a new study, this time largely consisting of letters and anecdotes relating to his research. It’s worth a read for anyone interested the little known sides of our history and is available in limited numbers from the Lithgow Visitors Centre.