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The less Turnbull talks, the better he sounds
Volume 32 #47
May 2, 2018
Dear resident This may not be applicable to you now, but given the massive increase in real estate value and developer interest in this region, here’s some helpful info to consider should you be facing a large-scale inappropriate development application (DA) in your neighbourhood. It could be a proposal that massively increases the density of dwellings on your street, or could be a proposal that aims to attract visitors to an event site. A DA lodged that is valued at over $20m will be decided by the Joint Regional Planning Panel, but mostly Council are the determining authority. Council’s only obligation is to advise immediate neighbours of any DA submission, and advertise it with a few lines in a newspaper. Currently, The Byron News (Murdoch’s NewsCorp) carries Council notices for DAs. If those immediately affected neighbours are absent or aren’t bothered, the DA proposal moves quickly. Two weeks’ public notice is the standard timeframe, unless you make an extension request in writing to staff. Four weeks in total appears standard to write your submission, and when you consider that the developer has paid experts who have prepared theirs over months in secret, it does appear unfair and inequitable. Everyone in the surrounding area needs to be letterbox dropped with the DA info and signatures and contacts collated. Call a meeting, draft and share submissions, ask who knows a town planner and associated experts such as engineers. Lobby councillors. Lodging large, inappropriate DAs with Council also does not adequately meet community expectations, especially for the notso-computer savvy elderly. These DAs are often unnecessarily long, and as a PDF, some are unsearchable. It’s not uncommon to be faced with a bundled file size so large it is almost impossible to download from the internet. Additionally DA applicants are able to add further reports and information after the public submission process, but that is often as a response to issues raised in submissions or by councillors at the Planning Review Committee. That committee is another check and balance in this process before the crucial councillor vote. Those unfamiliar with reports such as geotechnical, statements of environmental effects, civil engineering and ecology reports, erosion and sediment control plans and stormwater management plans will feel overwhelmed. That’s why finding help immediately is so important. This all appears unfair to non-planning expert residents and it is – NSW planning laws largely favour development at all cost, because growth is the main metric applied to measure wealth creation. Generally from a developer’s point of view, the only framework they apply is what Council will seriously consider. But that doesn’t stop them from lobbing a proposal that appears way overscale and out of character with the surrounding area. There is no requirement to engage with residents prior. The ‘shock and awe’ approach is intended to grab as much as possible, but the strategy is to then reduce the DA’s size to what will still make a profitable project. Residents opposing unwanted development can argue the need for neighbourhood character considerations under section 79c of the NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979. Council’s Local Environment Plan (LEP), Development Control Plans (DCPs) and settlement, residential, rural and heritage strategies all outline how communities want their neighbourhoods to be. And these ‘instruments’ all count if it lands in court. Surprisingly, a judge can favour residents if a council did not provide a clear intent/strategy for the area. Presently, Council is still preparing a residential strategy and are awaiting state approval for their revised rural strategy. For more info visit www.byron.nsw.gov.au. As Tex Perkins crooned, ‘Better get a lawyer, son.’ You could add a town planner and an engineer and a hydrologist… Hans Lovejoy, editor
The Byron Shire Echo
C
orrelation is not causation. The scientific method instructs us that events that may often occur simultaneously or in close succession are not necessarily connected, let alone actually resulting in one another. So it is probably no more than coincidence that Newspoll usually seems to improve for the government when parliament is not sitting, and to get better still when Malcolm Turnbull is out of the country. After all, we are constantly assured that our current prime minister is the last, best hope for the coalition, so it would seem logical to display him as frequently as possible in the most media-friendly circumstances, and nothing attracts the commentariat like question time in the House of Representatives. And yet a disillusioned and dysfunctional backbench is increasingly coming to the conclusion that Turnbull is in fact part of the problem; that the voters have simply stopped listening to him. They fear that the punters feel positive relief when their leader shuts up, when the confected outrage, the bullshit and bluster, the schoolboy taunts about Bill Shorten cease for a couple of weeks while they take stock. And when they do, the news is not too horrible: wages are still down in the cesspool, but there are signs that things might finally improve, and that no thanks to the politicians, the increase in commodity profits and hence company taxes means that there will be tax relief for some real people as opposed to the corporate geniuses who are bringing us the Royal Commission. Thus, Scott Morrison can make a virtue out of his latest backflip, and claim that the universal Medicare levy rise to pay for the NDIS is really not needed after all and can instead be tossed into the basket of goodies
he is preparing for the budget. In some ways this looks more like desperation than serious policy; the Medicare levy needs to be raised as a more or less politically painless measure, not just to secure the NDIS but to help fund the ballooning cost of our health system overall. Of course, nominating a tax rise for a designated purpose is always a con; all tax goes into consolidated revenue for Morrison and his apparatchiks to dole out wherever and whenever they feel inclined. However that has not stopped Morrison, Turnbull and many of their lesser acolytes saying that the new tax was absolutely necessary to save the
In some ways this looks more like desperation than serious policy by Mungo MacCallum NDIS from the penury from which Julia Gillard’s government had consigned it and that Shorten was leaving the blind, the crippled, the halt and the lame to die in misery if he did not endorse it. We now know that this was not true, that the funding was always a matter of priorities, and given that the levy had no hope of passing the senate in its original form, it was sensible politics to dump it. There are enough distractions already, as the daily horror stories from the Royal Commission continue to unfold, and will likely do so right up to the election. And on this front Turnbull is doing the best he can, but frankly it isn’t all that much. His fallback position seems to be that he initially resisted the inquiry because he wanted to put other reforms in place first; thus the forgettable tweaking of ASIC, APRA, and the lectures
Nicholas Shand 1948–1996 Founding Editor
‘The job of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ – Finley Peter Dunne 1867–1936 © 2018 Echo Publications Pty Ltd – ABN 86 004 000 239 Mullumbimby: Village Way, Stuart St. Ph 02 6684 1777 Fax 02 6684 1719 Printer: Fairfax Media Brisbane Reg. by Aust. Post Pub. No. NBF9237
10 May 2, 2018 The Byron Shire Echo
Turnbull has at last admitted that delaying it, mainly because it was the idea of the Greens, then adopted by Labor, was a mistake, but it seems that he is still unsure what to do next. For starters, who is to pay and for what? It is now being argued by the remaining supporters of the wayward banks that inflicting drastic penalties on them would be a form of overkill: either they would simply pass on the costs to their hapless customers or they would have to reduce their dividends to their innocent shareholders. But hang on, are the shareholders really so innocent? Presumably they knew the banks were bastards – everyone else did – when they invested their hard-earned savings. But they hoped for rewards, and for a long time they got them. But now, as it has emerged that the banks were involved in fraud, theft, perjury and heaven knows what
other shenanigans, it appears that at least some of those welcome dividends were the proceeds of crime – the shareholders were the receivers of stolen goods. No-one is seriously suggesting that shareholders should give them back, but perhaps they could be persuaded to accept a small haircut in the immediate aftermath. Similarly, the apologists want to separate the Commission from Morrison’s cherished corporate tax cuts: we should not, they tell us sternly, think of imposing some kind of morality tax. Well, actually almost all our laws are based on morality – or at least we thought they were; their aim is to protect the public from harm in various forms. That is why we put ordinary criminals (but seldom corporate ones) in jail. So the withdrawal of a huge tax bonanza could be seen as a hefty fine for misconduct, which seems entirely legitimate. And this dilemma will remain the heart of the budget: can Turnbull afford to give the impression that he is rewarding the banks? Next week’s budget will tell the story – and also the next Newspoll. And the debate that follows will show us whether the glimmers of hope that appeared while Turnbull was overseas will translate into a genuine recovery. And if the past is any guide, the mob will not be impressed if Turnbull reverts to form and uses parliament as a platform for his Kill Bill strategy. If he does, and the following Newspolls mark him down, then the backbenchers may decide that he is unable to change by himself, so perhaps they will reluctantly have to act in sheer self-preservation. Correlation is not causation, but there are definitely times when absence makes the heart grow fonder. And, it can appear, make Newspoll kinder.
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to the banking executives, all proving in the end to have been completely ineffectual. But the point is that if Turnbull was determined to push ahead with them, there was nothing to stop him from starting up the Royal Commission at the same time. Only last week Morrison introduced serious legislation while the Commission was sitting: there was no suggestion that he should have to wait until it produced its findings. And during the previous Royal Commission into the unions, the government was celebrating the new laws it was introducing with no restraint at all.
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