Dear Editor,

Your front page July article about the TPP is spot on.  It explains in simple terms what this awful swindle is about, even though you have to admit that, like the rest of us, you cannot give the detail as it is secret.  This is hardly surprising.   This government does not want us to know anything.  In our name and at our expense concentration camps are being run to deter asylum seekers, but we are not allowed to know what happens in them.  Boats are turned back and aggravate the Indonesians and others, but we are not to know, and our navy trespasses into foreign sovereign waters in pursuit of this ghastly policy.

Now we are likely to get 15% GST on everything including food and children’s clothes so that taxes on the rich can be kept low (assuming, that is, that their accountants have failed to save them paying any tax at all).   Meanwhile ordinary employees on PAYG have the taxes taken straight out of their salary and wages so that Bronwyn Bishop can take helicopter rides and go to Europe at their expense to try to get a new job.  This is known laughingly as the fair go.

No-one in their right mind with a conscience should ever vote for the coalition.  If the TPP does indeed threaten workers’ rights then at least Labor and the Greens are likely to veto it.  For Abbott the only people who count are the rich and the biggest of big companies.  A vote for him is a vote for the TPP.

Yours faithfully,

Terry Stanton.

Tinonee.