Spend time choosing before giving it away The Magpie Whisperer
From
the Editor Last weekend, the family and I travelled to see the Three Sisters. Olivia is learning about them in class and she informed us that she had never seen them. I think she has, but maybe she was too young to remember. So as we often do, we all piled into the car and headed up and over the Mountains to go and check it out. After a quick stroll through a market, and then some lunch, we headed down to Echo Point, expecting to park and take a stroll to view the famous landmark. Now admittedly, it was a stunning winter’s day. The sky was crystal clear and there was hardly a breeze. However, I was not prepared for the massive of crowd that greeted us. After 15 minutes of looking for parking, we decided to hedge our bets and head over to Scenic World. I figured it might be slightly less busy, given it is a paid attraction as opposed to free. We arrived at 1:30pm, and were lucky to get into the carpark, as it was full, and they were only letting people in when someone left. We lined up for 45 minutes to get in, paid our money (was a very pleasant surprise that a family ticket actually covered all your children for a change) and then went in… only to line up again for another 25 minutes to catch the Scenic Railway down into the valley. Now this is not any reflection on the establishment or their workforce, who were some of the most enthusiastic I had ever seen, this is an illustration of just how many people were there. It was literally packed, I would estimate many thousands of people at the time we were there. Whilst waiting in line, I was able to take the time to learn the history of the place. An enterprising Harry Hammon and his sister Isobel Fahey bought the lease of the Katoomba Colliery Limited in 1945 and started operating the tourist attraction. To this day it is still a privately held family business.
This proves something I have said many times over the last few years; it is entrepreneurs who change the world not governments. If we are to entice people up and over the great sandstone curtain that separates us from Australia’s largest population, we need people to have a go and take a gamble on creating something great. This is not the job of Council. Nor is it the job of the State Government. It is always up to us to create our destiny, not to ask it of others. If Lithgow wants to be an internationally recognised tourist destination, we need to attract people willing to invest in creating attractions like Scenic World. There are some out there, and there are already many things underway. Halloween is of course a great event to attract attention, but we need more - much more. Surely I am not the only one that thinks this, so I am inviting you, our readers, and the broader community to send in your ideas. We will put together a special edition of the Village Voice to showcase these ideas - if we receive enough and see if together we can create something that will put us on the map for international tourism.
Giving to charity is one of the most selfless things you can do. You’re giving away your hard-earned money and expecting nothing in return, except the satisfaction of making the world a little better. And it’s easy - all you need is whatever cash you can spare and awareness as to who you’re giving it to. We like to know our donations are going to help people and not paying for charity employees long lunches. By donating to charities with low administrative costs, it makes us more confident that our money is going to proper charity work, instead of wages and office costs. And that’s common advice given to people looking for a good charity why pay for office supplies when there are people in need? The reality is that charities need those supplies to operate efficiently. Charities with higher overheads are generally better than their cost-cutting counterparts, because of a simple business fact: You have to spend money to make money. The same principle applies to building schools, feeding and housing disaster victims, or whatever else a charity deems charitable. And when we favour only those charities with low overheads, we’re actually encouraging them to cut corners. They can hire unqualified people and run cheaper but unhelpful programs. And this results in much less useful aid - exactly what scrutinising administrative expenses is supposed to avoid. Earmarking your donation for a specific project is like choosing charities with low overheads; it makes you feel confident that your money is going to something important. But in the charities world, it means that some projects are considered more desirable than others. Funding a children’s hospital sounds much better than giving to a village sewage system. When donations are earmarked, it creates a huge imbalance in funding that can lead to serious bureaucratic anomalies. For example, charities working in Indonesia could only help areas that had been directly affected by the 2004 tsunami. People further inland were poorer and in desperate need of aid, but because they hadn’t been inundated charities could do nothing for them. After the 2011 tsunami in Japan, so many donations were earmarked for housing that charities built mini-mansions for displaced people, to dispose of the excess cash that literally couldn’t be spent on anything else. So, if you want to donate to a global charity, do it. Just try and avoid messing it up.
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