I THINK it was in May when a woman rang the Mercury office and said she was from the Liberal Party.
She explained that the Liberal Party was on a membership recruiting drive in the Central Wheatbelt and she was organising a meeting in Merredin and hoping to sign up 10 new members.
She asked if I was interested in attending and whether I might consider joining the party.
I told her I would be happy to attend a meeting but, as editor of the local newspaper, I was not prepared to join any political party.
I told her I believed it was my duty to the newspaper to remain as politically independent as possible and to refrain from political party affiliations.
I never heard any more about the membership drive or the meeting but, given the Tier 3 grain lines closure, its impact here in the Nationals' heartland, and the government's reluctance so far to step in and reopen the lines, I suspect that any new local support the Liberal Party membership drive may have unearthed is now being dashed.
The Tier 3 closure is an even bigger problem for the Nationals.
It's predominantly their members who have been hit, who are now faced with a degree of uncertainty over how and at what cost they will get their grain to port in future - and with world grain prices on the slide after reports of a bumper Russian harvest.
I'm not aware of any Nationals MPs breaking coalition ranks and joining the farmers in calling for the government to step in and reopen the lines.
It was a Liberal/Nationals coalition government that implemented the 49-year lease deal of the state's southern freight rail network which farmers see as being at the core of lines closure, it was a Liberal/Nationals coalition government which allowed some Tier 3 lines to close last year and it is a Liberal/Nationals coalition government that stood by while the rest of the Tier 3 lines closed on Monday.
It's one thing to be talking about line closures but still with the possibility, no matter how slim, that it won't happen.
Now that it has actually happened, the anger and disappointment in the government is spreading across the grain paddocks rapidly, and it will continue to grow every time a local road near a grain bin is closed temporarily for repairs or every time a farmer has to drive an extra 10 kilometres to get grain from farm gate to accumulation centre because the people, 250 kilometres away in Perth, who decided which roads are to be used as grain roads had no local knowledge.
CBH has told growers it does not plan to close any bins, but realistically, what is the long-term future for smaller bins serviced by gravel roads, like Korbelka and Koonadgin, when access cannot be guaranteed?
Conservative wisdom is that governments should make unpopular decisions early in their term of office because there is a chance that voters will have forgotten or come to accept the changes by the time the next election rolls around.
The problem for the state government is that farmers are going to be reminded every harvest.
