WOLUMLA resident Frank Farrell may be left with no option but to contact the Fair Work Ombudsman after working for the No Land Tax (NLT) party at this year’s recent state election.
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Mr Farrell has managed, after repeated phone calls, to contact party leader Peter Jones recently, and was told to fill out an application online and a cheque would be forwarded in the mail.
However, that has yet to arrive.
Mr Farrell, along with around 3000 other people around NSW, were employed by the NLT on election day in late March, to hand out “how to vote” cards with the promise of payment of $300 for their time and effort.
On the day Mr Farrell and many others donned the party’s T-shirt and handed out party material, at a cost of around a million dollars to the party, of which not a cent has been seen yet by Mr Farrell after being promised payment by Mr Jones.
“How can they get away with something like this?” Mr Farrell said.
“It’s the fact he was so silent, you don’t know where you stand.”
Mr Farrell said Mr Jones had told him he was having trouble with his emails and that the cheque would be in the mail over a week ago.
“I’m allowing him every possible consideration, but with any of this stuff there should be safeguards,” Mr Farrell said.
The party created controversy in the region before this year’s election when Bega candidate Clyde Robert Archard was nowhere to be found, and was not known to Mr Jones or any other NLT contact.
Fairfax reported in late April that party treasurer Patrick Di Cosmo had resigned and that former party members had claimed that president James Ruben was pushed out of the top position on the party ticket in the middle of the campaign by Mr Jones.
This news comes after previous president and founder Jeff Madden was forced out in February, with Fairfax reporting that both Mr Madden and Mr Ruben had refused to donate tens of thousands of dollars that Mr Jones was to use to fund the $300,000 election campaign for the party he had taken over.
"Jeff [Madden] feels that I robbed him of the top spot on the ticket, but his supporters, the old members since day one, the Balmain mafia, didn't support him," Mr Jones told Fairfax.
Left in the middle of the party chaos are people like Mr Farrell, who initially thought he was responding to an advertisement for work with the NSW Electoral Commission, not the minor party he had not heard of before.
“I left a curt message on his answering machine,” he said.
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