Sunday, February 22, 2009

Action Angela

It is now five weeks since I wrote to our local MP, Angela D'Amore about graffiti around Drummoyne Public School, and I have not heard anything in reply.

In that time, the school has been cleaned up - but only because my compadre wrote to the Director-General of the Department of Education and took the matter up with him.

Members of Parliament are provided with staff, an office and a postal allowance so that they can communicate with the electorate and respond to concerns that are raised via correspondence. In this case, I'm not sure how the staff and postal allowance are being used, but it doesn't seem to be applied very often to responding to residents.

Over the last 9 months, I've written well over two dozen letters to a variety of departments, councils, councillers and MPs (state and federal); and the only one that has not responded is Angela D'Amore. Her office may have struck the same problem that they did last time I wrote - they replied to the wrong address because they didn't bother paying attention to the return address that I provided with my letter.

The generally accepted rule with correspondence from MPs is that if it is going to take more than a week to pen a response, an acknowledgement letter is sent out straight away. If a response has still not been written several weeks later, then a follow up letter is sent stating that a response is still being worked on, and will be forthcoming in due course. That ensures that you aren't left in the dark, wondering if you letter ever made it through.

So far though, I've recieved nothing. No acknowledgement letter and no response. Maybe I've made it onto some sort of Tripodi black list?

No comments: