Missing Gary Tweddle Book Part 9 – DEDICATION

May 3, 2025

We dedicate this book to all visitors to the Blue Mountains. May they enjoy their trip here, be careful and stay safe.

We also dedicate this book to those lost and missing in the Blue Mountains.

This book is particularly dedicated to the 200-odd unsung rescue service paid workers of the NSW Government (Police Rescue, Police Officers, Air Ambulance crews, NSW Ambulance paramedics, Fire and Rescue NSW, The Triple Zero (000) Service).

It is also dedicated to the 800-odd unsung and unpaid supportive volunteers of the NSW State Emergency Service, the NSW SES Bush Search and Rescue (BSAR), the Rural Fire Service, and local individual and club hikers, abseilers and rockclimbers who gave up their time and took personal risks to contribute to the extensive search effort to find Gary Tweddle in freezing conditions at the time.

As an aside, it is this author’s personal view that all involved in such search and rescue (S&R) efforts that are organised by government (state and/or national) should be fully paid, commensurate with their assigned role and S&R seniority by the respective government responsible. Merely supplying kit, meals and transport doesn’t cut it. Volunteerism is a governmental abuse of good Samaritans and community charity. It is unfair to expect community volunteers to witness deceased persons whilst effectively doing the task of professionally trained and supported paramedics.

This author served four years in the Army’s School Cadet Corps unpaid, and a further ten years in Surf Life Saving Australia (Victoria and NSW) unpaid. No more volunteering for this little black duck.

Governments with their political pet projects every year indulge and waste copious millions and billions of taxpayers wealth that should be going back into the communities they represent. Consider recent examples of politically-motivated financial abuse:

NSW Premier Berejiklian 2019–20 emergency funding cost $4.1 billion to respond to COVID-19, because of the abject failures of national quarantine
Berejiklian’s Sydney Light Rail system cost over $3 billion
PM Albo’s Voice Referendum to divide Australians cost $450 million
NSW Western Sydney Airport to cost $11 billion
Victoria’s Andrews Government wasted $1 billion not to build Melbourne’s East West tunnel
The total cost of the Australian Government’s submarine program is estimated to cost $368 billion

Governments can easily afford to pay volunteers what they deserve, a casual ‘reserve’ equivalent to the paid professionals. The systemic problem is the perverted value system of politicians when in power.

In 2011, our sister website, The Habitat Advocate, compiled a research article advocating such a reform: