Jason Miles – Candidate For Nanango

July 23, 2024

Meet Jason Miles – who describes himself as “a Christian Conservative” – who will be taking on local MP Deb Frecklington at the Queensland State election in October.

Jason stood unsuccessfully for the Senate at the last Federal election, representing Rod Culleton’s “Great Australian Party”, but is no longer a member of this group.

This time, he will be running as an Independent.

“I am running as an Independent because I am sick and tired of seeing Australia and the State going backwards – we have the most debt that we’ve ever had in our nation, State and Federal,” he said.

Jason has spent most of working life in Victoria, but does claim some strong South Burnett connections.

These days he lives in South Nanango and his late mother and step-father formerly owned the Cosy Dell Café in Wondai.

He lived in Wondai for a few years in the 1980s, and as a teenager played cricket with the local team.

In 2020, Jason started to become interested in what was happening in global affairs.

The pandemic “perked his interest” in how the Federal and State governments operated.

“I wanted to know what was going on with my country,” he said.

“I wanted to know why politicians made the decisions they made.”

He admitted that until this point he had been apathetic about politics but suddenly became interested, like a lot of other people.

However some people, he says, “went extreme” at this time.

“There are people in this perceived ‘freedom movement’, for me, that are extreme and I do not go near them,” he said.

“So what I wanted to do was balance all this out, to say what is real and what’s not real.

“And the only way I am even going to do that is if I do my own research and validate it through independent sources … I don’t always get it right, I must say, but 99 per cent of the time I do.”

Jason said he was initially happy with the government locking down for two weeks to “flatten the curve” but he believes the response went off track later in 2020 because the pandemic “was not as bad as first anticipated”.

“What they should have done was pivot and protect the vulnerable … we did not need to lock down healthy human beings,” Jason said.

He said healthy people “were not impacted by and large” and he knows people “who died from the COVID vaccine” but vaccination should be a personal choice.

However, Jason emphasised that despite his interest in global affairs, he was running on eight local issues in his Nanango campaign.

1.  Pausing Renewables

“The people I have spoken with … do not want renewables in the region,” he said. “I support what the South Burnett Council has said.”

“Let’s pause renewables until we get a solid baseload to replace it. Is it coal? Is it nuclear? I don’t know.

“The people will decide what they want.

“I would say 90 per cent of the people I have spoken to, say we should have (nuclear).”

2. Fixing the roads – eg. widening Kingaroy-Barkers Creek Road

3. Getting doctors to the region – by incentives

4. Fixing the water – eg. Nanango town water

5. Homelessness – getting people off the streets into temporary accommodation, including tiny houses, containers or “pods” on big blocks

6. Crime – hire more police, prosecute DV offenders immediately, provide counselling for victims

7. Keeping cash alive

8. Funding the tick line

And how to pay for this? He believes governments should trim waste and perhaps “stop funding the Ukraine war” or “giving $100 million to the World Health Organisation” and start putting Australians first.