Calls grow to fix housing

By Sonia Isaacs

A SERIES of grassroots petitions have gained thousands of signatures including more than 5000 to state parliament urging laws that allow the use of tiny homes, buses and caravans as permanent residences to help stem the growing housing crisis. The petitions come in the wake of the Sunshine Coast Housing and Homelessness Action Plan 2023, which was endorsed at Council’s Ordinary meeting on July 27, in front of a packed gallery of concerned community groups. Full story p4-5

WEDNESDAY, 12

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MITCH GAYNOR mitch@gcnews.com.au

JENNIFER KENT jennifer@gcnews.com.au

SONIA ISAACS sonia@gcnews.com.au

KIRRA LIVINGSTONE kirra@gcnews.com.au www.gcnews.com.au

TINA GRIEVE tina@gcnews.com.au

LEWIS KWARCIANYI lewis@gcnews.com.au

SHARON KING & KATIE BUCKLEY design@gcnews.com.au accounts@gcnews.com.au

YOU have to love it when a plan comes together as beautifully as Celebrate Glasshouse Country’s long lunch on the weekend. Perfect weather, food, setting, hosts and importantly a genuine celebration of all the great agri-innovation going on in the hinterland.

The lunch, as part of The Curated Plate, used produce from a bunch of local producers and in the expert hands of chef Dan Penfold created a top shelf experience for attendees.

The aim of the irrepressible Martin Duncan - aka Sunshine Coast Foodie - is to create a regular farm trail experience to better promote the 400+ producers in the region, and if the weekend’s lunch is an entree to this, then bring on

Check out the pics on p15 as well as our regular Meet the Producer series, which this week features Katrina Atkinson and

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Daniel Tibbett from Mountaintop Mushrooms (p14).

One small drawback of the lunch was the decay of mobile access soon after everyone - about 120 people - had congregated together.

Attempts to pay for drinks on the caterer’s mobile payment systems proved frustratingly futile at times, especially when everyone was gathered in the same spot.

Of course if we’d just listened to Telstra’s key ‘upgrade’ outage takeaway message - ‘you can’t just rely on us’ - then we could have all carted in temporary mobile towers, connected to Starlink, dusted off the credit card imprinters and put a bank safe in the boot.

The upgrades were supposedly to improve capacity.

That’s why businesses suffered for weeks during outages in May and June.

Maybe ‘capacity’ only extends to

Glasshouse Country & Maleny News @gcmnews

119 people in one place at a time. Or maybe we were in one of those blackspot areas that apparently don’t exist in Glasshouse Country.

And just maybe, Telstra misspoke.

Instead of ‘you can’t just rely on us’ they might have meant ‘you just can’t rely on us’.

Either way, just minutes from Beerwah and so close to the coast, it’s a sad state of affairs.

I also need to draw a line in the sand under my last editorial that saw me fumbling a pretty straight forward question to a 10-year-old about the role of gynaecologists.

I couldn’t help but ask later in the week if the answer had been acceptable.

It wasn’t, but that’s okay because ... “we looked it up”. Cringing I asked what they’d found. “Nothing. But we saw the word ‘vagina’.” Case closed.