By Alesha Capone
THE Sunshine Residents and Ratepayers Association has declared its intention to distribute how-to-vote cards during the upcoming state election.
Sunshine is located in the Footscray electorate and nominations for this year’s Victorian State election will open on 3 November.
SunRAA president Darlene Reilly said she thought it was a first for a resident’s association to launch how-to-vote cards, to try to make the safe Labor seat of Footscray a marginal one.
“Basically I think even though we are a non-political group, what we’ve learnt is politics is responsible for the situation Sunshine is in,” Ms Reilly said.
“Our members have assessed the situation and feel Sunshine has suffered, because it is under a safe state Labor seat, and marginal seats get more infrastructure and money.”
“It’s no secret residents here feel neglected and many feel nothing is being done to address the social and health issues of the area.”
Ms Reilly said SunRAA would contact all the potential candidates and ask them to supply their policy ideas and views on the Sunshine area.
She said the group’s members plan to assess the responses and give every candidate a chance to “win our votes and our recommendation”.
“We have 120-odd people who are members in Sunshine and we’ve been going for a long time, and we want to put both major parties on notice that they need to pay attention to Sunshine,” she said.
She said SunRAA had never told people how to vote before, but was planning to hand out how-to-vote cards on polling day, do letter box-drops and communicate with members after nominations closed.
The State Government did not respond to Star’s queries.
