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North Coast news daily:
Positives for a weak PM after WA defeat
Volume 31 #40
March 15, 2017
North Coast Holiday Farce Haven’t we been here before? Last Thursday’s ‘information session’ by managers and CEO of NSW Coast Holiday Parks Trust (NSWCHPT) at the Ocean Shores Country Club appeared to achieve very little. While there is therapeutic value in publicly expressing dismay, anger and abhorrence at plans to expand and develop three caravan parks in the small town of Brunswick Heads, resolution to this issue clearly needs political intervention. The crowd of around 140 were told this was a pre-exhibition process and there is still ample time to have more input and adjust the plans during public exhibition. This means the public are being tortured over an extended period with ‘community consultation.’ It’s actually a really clever political tool because you could never argue that there hasn’t been enough engagement. It gives the illusion that the boxes have been ticked and that everyone has had a fair go. This all costs money and obviously it keeps bureaucrats busy and employed. Hooray. Is there an adult in charge, ie an elected MP within government with some gravitas? They could step in and just tell the Trust their plans do not align with the community’s wishes. They could say something like, ‘Sorry, these plans are garbage and it’s wasted everyone’s time and money for far too long. NSWCHPT have failed to negotiate in good faith and have not been good neighbours to the people of Brunswick Heads.’ ‘And now, as an MP with gravitas, I will direct the Crown Lands department to hand back management to Byron Shire Council for the benefit of the ratepayers who live with high visitor numbers.’ Elected MPs within government who have gravitas are in short supply everywhere and bureaucrats seem to be in charge. This is dangerous for society and is not ‘democracy’. The planning department announce big developments, not the minister. The adoption of the plan of management for these three parks was quietly published on the NSW Crown Lands website in 2014. There was no minister in sight. The community of Bruns have made it abundantly clear over many years that they are aghast at the prospect of high-density development within the parks, along with other outstanding issues such as boundary encroachment. The town’s Simple Pleasures ethos has nothing to do with these plans, no matter what NSWCHPT CEO Steve Edmonds says. The question becomes – who will wear out first? Will the community finally be ground down (and eventually lose interest) by ambitious bureaucrats or will the community be unrelenting in its quest to preserve their small town from blatant greed and over-development? Wearing out your opponent through ‘sustained engagement’ has a certain Art of War feel to it. So kudos to residents for being able to sit through more than two hours of tedious talk of legislation and policy which guides the governance (and mismanagement) of NSW holiday parks. They held their ground and were across everything. CEO Steve Edmonds told the crowd his plans will eventually go before NSW minister for lands and forestry Paul Toole (Nationals) to be determined (approved most likely). The best course of action for residents unhappy with this is to strategically bombard Mr Toole’s office and let him know the entire process is a waste of time, has no community support and that the government MP responsible should return the parks to Council. That way, profits from high visitor use can go back into fixing potholes from high visitor impacts. Paul Toole’s address is 52 Martin Place Sydney NSW 2000 and his phone number is (02) 8574 7000. Another government MP with presumably the power to do something is locally based MLC Ben Franklin (Nationals). His address is the same as Mr Toole’s and his Sydney office number is (02) 9230 3793. Hans Lovejoy, editor
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alcolm Turnbull has always been a glasshalf-full kind of guy, so he probably woke up on Sunday morning thinking that the result in Western Australia was not all bad. True, the longest-serving and most reliable of the conservative dominoes has fallen – not merely fallen, but plummeted almost to the bottom of the abyss. But no-one could say that it was all his fault. His rare and desultory visits to the west may not have helped. Yet they hardly mattered against the parlous state of the local economy – which the incoming Labor premier, Mark McGowan, will now have to deal with – and more importantly the massive ‘it’s time’ factor. It was obvious that Colin Barnett and his Liberal government were well and truly past their use-by date, a view confirmed by Barnett’s major election promise: if re-elected, he would not serve his full term. Understandably, the electorate thought it might as well cut to the chase and dispatch him on the spot. But the good news is that although the Libs were clobbered beyond the worst fears of even the most zealous pessimists, One Nation also copped a hiding, largely as a result of the Faustian bargain on preferences struck between Barnett and Pauline Hanson and her sinister adviser, James Ashby. Hanson explained that her supporters were just too ignorant to understand the system, and immediately demanded that the goalposts should be moved to make it simpler for them. But there was no excuse for Barnett: his desperate deal to secure a few extra seats spectacularly backfired, driving his own moderate waverers away in masses. The strategy turned out to be not only morally indefensible but electorally disastrous.
Which is why Turnbull will be relieved: it must be clear to even the thickest right-wingers in the party room (and they are pretty darn thick) that playing footsie with One Nation is not really a good idea. Turnbull has to face the reality that a handful of dysfunctional nutters in a dysfunctional senate will have to be accommodated from time to time, but that does not mean a formal alliance. He can, with good conscience and admirable pragmatism, now demand that Pauline Hanson’s party should be put last on the Liberal Party ticket. Life will be much harder for the Nationals, in the regions
It must be clear to even the thickest rightwingers in the party room (and they are pretty darn thick) that playing footsie with One Nation is not really a good idea.
by Mungo MacCallum where One Nation can still be an existential threat; Barnaby Joyce will have to decide whether to follow the example of his predecessors and fight, or else drift further towards the extreme fringes of Hansonism. Queensland will be a tougher test than Western Australia and will presumably set the scene for the next federal election. But at least it has been shown that the bubble can be pricked; that appeasement and surrender do not work. And perhaps last weekend will inspire Turnbull with newfound courage to take on another of the right’s follies: the battle over section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act. But he will have to confront the Murdoch press, which will need another level of courage altogether. For months – years, decades it might seem – The Australian has been bleating over 18c, an endless tirade by its elite com-
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Established 1986 General Manager Simon Haslam Editor Hans Lovejoy Photographer Jeff Dawson Advertising Manager Angela Cornell Production Manager Ziggi Browning
HONOURING THE ANNIVERSARY OF DAVID BOWIE'S PASSING Nicholas Shand 1948–1996 Founding Editor
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10 March 15, 2017 The Byron Shire Echo
The zealots of The Australian fell on this idea with shrill cries of delight: this would unite the factions in the coalition party rooms, secure free speech, wedge the Labor Party and no doubt regain the Ashes and establish world peace. But within 24 hours they were backing away, and inside a week the whole wizard wheeze was history. The factions were not united, the argument about free speech went on unabated, Labor ignored the report and Australia lost the second test in India. The problem was, of course, that Fierravanti-Wells’s proposition was never going to be taken seriously. The giveaway was her example – the man on the Bondi tram. The last tram clattered its way to Bondi in 1960, some 57 years ago. It was another world. These were the days of White Australia – European immigrants, dagoes and wops,
were generally accepted, but Asians (wogs and slopes) were still seen as aliens and of course Aboriginal Australians (coons and boongs) were virtually ignored – it would be seven years before they were included in the national census. Multiculturalism was not even a word. Racial vilification was commonplace. But since then, we have matured. Minority voices are heard, and sometimes loudly, and they do not take kindly to the casual bigotry the attorney-general, George Brandis, once asserted as a national right. And this is where the man on the Bondi tram is out of his time and place, and why even the ideal of the reasonable man is not easily defined. Assume an entirely hypothetical case in which an Aboriginal footballer is abused by a fan as ‘an ape.’ A white, middleclass observer might well insist – entirely reasonably in his view – that it was the footballer’s fault – he was carrying on like a mug lair and had it coming. But an equally reasonable opinion could be argued that the man was simply celebrating his culture and that the offence and insult were both intended and racially based. Deadlock: lawyer’s picnic, endless disputation, nothing resolved. Unsurprisingly The Australian has now reverted to its default position: smash 18c, smash the RDA, smash the Human Rights Commission, and most particularly smash Gillian Trigg. And what’s more the paper is doing so for the best of all possible motives, as a lasting memorial to its late cartoonist Bill Leak. Unfortunately it would also be seen as a monument to Pauline Hanson, who espouses much the same views. But Malcolm Turnbull, it is to be hoped, has finally been freed of them. The weekend has not been entirely wasted.
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The Byron Shire Echo
mentators to persuade the reluctant masses that it actually matters. And last week the national daily finally went over the edge – from being merely obsessive, the paper became frankly hysterical, even deranged. Its latest crazy crusade apparently sprang from the limited imagination of Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Malcolm Turnbull’s undistinguished minister for international development and the Pacific. She produced a thought bubble suggesting that the whole debate could be solved if the act were subjected to a ‘reasonable person’ test – insult and offence would be decided by ‘the man on the Bondi tram.’
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