City Backs Terminal - NOT

In "City Backs Terminal, doubts Casino..." our friends at the GCB provide their latest confabulation of statistics and claim (yet again) that over 2/3 of Gold Coasters want a ship terminal.

Ooops - poor Bully fails Maths 1-01 again. And badly.

But it seems Mayor Tate shares the GCB's mathematically-challenged interpretation. He says he is "... pleased with the huge level of support..." and thinks he now has a "mandate" to build a ship terminal. So, is that the mandate from winning 37% of primary votes when all other mayoral candidates opposed to the terminal accrued 73% ... or a mandate arising from the GCB "Ultimate" survey?

If the former, the figures seem to speak for themselves. Err no mandate there Mr Tate. And if the latter, well, the fact is, that nothing was too "ultimate" about the whole exercise. Only 1800 people responded - which must surely reflect something as to the GCB's circulation(?) given there are 536,480 people in this city. That's 0.3% response rate, using a calculator.

Oops kinda embarrassing for GCB, we would have thought.

But no, our intrepid local rag persists in trumpeting its triumph, whether we want it or not. And now they claim that "...two out of three Gold Coasters believe that a cruise ship terminal would deliver the biggest boost for the city's lagging tourism industry." But as anyone can see, the question is not do you want a ship terminal nor was the answer targeted, rather it offered a relative range of things which might boost the tourism industry - and that was it. So it was self-limiting question, with a self-limited survey sample, which in terms of the city's real population, seems statistically insignificant to us. The words statistical bias spring to mind. And the interpretation is blatantly wrong.

SOSA can only sigh (well, yawn actually) and say that over 30,000 Gold Coasters signed a petition to say we do NOT want a ship terminal on The Spit. Versus the GCB's 1200.

So if it comes to mandates, and surveys and statistics... we win. And we did. And we will again... with your support.

SOSA asks its supporters to help us out right now given looming battles ahead - pls join up, pls join our subscriber list, pls "like" our page at www.faceboook.com/SaveOurSpit and pls encourage everyone you know who opposes the ship terminal to take a stand now. Before the GC Waterways Authority is bullied into something which irreparably damages the Broadwater and before Mayor Tate gets his paws on The Spit.