overdevelopment

ABS stats released today 11 August 2009 tell us that:
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Products/3235.0~2008~Main+Features~Main+Features?OpenDocument

Total Population

The estimated resident population of Australia at 30 June 2008 was 21.4 million people, having increased by 1.5 million people (7.7%) since June 2003, at an average rate of 1.5% per year.

Note that this is ABS looking backwards --to guarantee accuracy in hindsight -- at not very recent figures.

Growth is accelerating! Danger Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!

Since then, more recent ABS estimates of growth are that it has accelerated to 1.8 and then 1.9%.

We may note from this acceleration in the past 6-12 months how rapidly things can get worse. Not that 1.5% p.a. was exactly slow. It gave a doubling time of 47 years, whereas 2% would give 35 years and 1.9% about 38 years.

If you look up the ABS site you will find a lot of other details of sex ratios and population distribution. None of this makes much sense without a context. What does a population of 21.4m mean in absolute terms?

Population numbers without context are meaningless

Nothing. It is the impact of that population in a certain setting. In Australia we are running out of water, soil, land for affordable housing and adequate infrastructure. And we have gone into debt to provide for this population. The growth lobby that is pushing our population upwards by lobbying politicians to adjust the levers of immigration and birth rate, always costs population growth against imagined future profits. It did this in the past and we are now in debt and in biophysical overshoot. But the commercial interests that benefit from debt and population growth are not interested in reviewing their past predictions in the light of current reality. They tend to accuse anyone who does that of being a pessimist.

Population growth is a political and an economic addiction which citizens should not be coerced into supporting financially, ecologically or socially.

What Ever Happened to Royal Park?

[1]

The Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc, of which the Royal Park Protection Group Inc. is a member, has lent us their logo for this newsletter.

Unfortunately we have failed to save Royal Park from “shark” attack. Over the short space of the past 13 years first the Kennett Government, then former Premier Bracks and his operative Bronwyn Pike MP, Member for Melbourne, plus compliant past and present Melbourne City Lord Mayors and Councillors, have presided over the progressive carve up, degradation, clear felling and concreting over of Royal Park, previously one of the glories of Marvellous Melbourne – set aside by our first visionary Governor, Charles La Trobe.

Park death by a thousand cuts

Construction of a multitude of developments include: concrete super-market style carparks round the Zoo for the Zoo, including the VCAT approved expansion at the north entrance; super tram stops; bike paths; a bus parking bay on Brens Drive for the Urban Camp; the State Netball and Hockey Centre plus carparks, ostensibly for the 2006 Commonwealth Games; and a mega, private real estate residential development “The Parkville Gardens” on the former Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital (RPPH) site, used for a few weeks for athletes’ accommodation for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. In addition, the Federation style Heritage listed buildings of the RPPH, restored at taxpayers’ expense and promised for community use, have been included in the Parkville Gardens, divided into units, handed over to the developer Australand and then sold for up to $800,000 a unit.

Hospital

Currently still under construction is the $1 billion plus new Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH), which has involved alienation of a huge section of south Royal Park to the west and north of the original hospital. Over 7 hectares, additional to the original 4.1 hectares hospital footprint, have been alienated for the “project construction site”, without guarantees that any land will be handed back to the park. In addition a 2,000 underground carpark for the expanded hospital is being built under the Park and, apparently, under a PPP deal a private hotel is to be built in the new hospital complex. The “Mercy Health” development, an aged care facility, is now being built on the former RPPH site. Although we believe that original contracts show approval for only a 100 aged care bed “social housing” facility, this aged care facility has 140 beds. Additionally a “Mercy Place” multi storey apartment complex is being built with 53 units for private sale, priced up to $600,000, and has use of a wing of the heritage buildings on the site. A “retail hub” is to be built for the flats and the aged care facility with consulting rooms. Also a Catholic chapel.

Freeway extension aborted

Thanks to the extended campaign last year up to December 2008 by RPPG with a coalition of community allies, extension of the Eastern Freeway - through under or over Royal Park, planned by Sir Rod Eddington as part of the $18 billion “East West Link” will now not proceed. It has been quietly deleted from the Victorian Transport Plan.

Ex Liberal leader, Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, cuts funding and protection of parks

Of grave concern is the fact that, as the present Council under Lord Mayor Robert Doyle has downgraded the care and protection of city parks and cut funding to the community, Royal Park will accordingly suffer. (See over.)

“This is my Land, this is your Land, this is our Land, this is not Australand’s” Banner at protest over loss of RPPH site.

Breach of Royal Park Master Plan by City of Melbourne

Breach of Royal Park Master Plan by City of Melbourne: As members may recall Lord Mayor John So sacked the Director and Deputy Director of Parks and Gardens plus a number of staff to save funds. In March this year Council terminated the Royal Park Master Plan Implementation Advisory Committee (RPMIAC) on the grounds that the implementation of the Master Plan was complete. This is far from the truth.

In April we saw the extraordinary departure from the Royal Park Master Plan by staff. The hill top in West Parkville with views of the Macedon Ranges was, in the Master Plan, to be kept clear. RPPG heard that staff planned to plant 120 forest eucalypts – Red Ironbarks. This species is not indigenous to Royal Park, was not included for this location in the Master Plan and will obscure the magnificent views. It is entirely unsuitable for a picnic area as the trees are prone to “limb drop”. RPPG plus other community groups’ members appealed to Councillor Cathy Oke to request staff to put the planting on hold until future discussions could be held. Staff apparently ignored her instructions and went ahead the next day and planted 120 Red Ironbark Trees. In June RPPG made a submission to the “Eco-City Committee” on the agenda item on Master Plans and included our complaints but have had no response. Members formerly of RPMIAC supported by RPPG and the North and West Melbourne Association have put in a formal complaint to the City of Melbourne over this breach of the Master Plan.

Phoney Parks Advisory Committee

Establishment of a Phoney Parks Advisory Committee: RPPG understood from Cr Cathy Oke from the May Council Committee meetings that Council was to establish a Parks Advisory Committee. By the June meeting it had morphed into a “Community Engagement Committee” It was then further altered when the CEO Cathy Alexander spoke to explain that it really was a committee to help set up consultations in the community. The Lord Mayor also had a go at explaining. So there is now no central Parks Advisory Committee as promised when the individual parks committees including Royal Park were terminated.

State Netball and Hockey Centre’s Obtrusive Hockey Lights

State Netball and Hockey Centre’s Obtrusive Hockey Lights: RPPG has a representative on the SNHC Advisory Committee. At the beginning of May installation of new lights was discussed and RPPG presented the Executive Summary of Dr Barry Clark’s latest research paper on the health risks associated with exposure to powerful light at night which includes increased risk of breast and prostate cancers. (As 2/3 of the Zoo is flooded with light when the hockey lights are on then the animals’ health is also at risk.) The State Sports Centres Trust is to be advised. This is serious because it puts the SSCT on notice of risk to health of users and staff of the Centre.

Volunteers not supported where it counts

Issue of Certificates of Appreciation to Royal Park Protection Group Inc. Volunteers: Representatives of RPPG – Rod Quantock and Julianne Bell - were invited to an afternoon tea on 11 June 2009 hosted by Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, Federal Member for Melbourne “to acknowledge the important role that volunteers from the Royal Park Protection Group make in strengthening the well being of our local community.” Moreover we were presented with “Certificates of Appreciation” for “our outstanding contribution to the community.” Compare the scant recognition to community groups ever been given by the City of Melbourne!

Sewer Mining to supply parks and gardens with water

Report of the Parliamentary Environment and Natural Resources Committee Inquiry into Melbourne’s Future Water Supply: The report was released in June 2009. It contains a section of RPPG Convenor Julianne Bell’s submission to the Committee on 2 February 2009 on Sewer Mining (Page 204) which would be a means of supplying the City of Melbourne with recycled water for all its parks and gardens. (The Committee’s recommendation is to pursue sewer mining projects.)

RPPG Next Meeting:
Time: 11:30 am
Date: Saturday 1 August 2009
Venue: Walmsley House Royal Park corner of Gatehouse Street and Royal Parade Parkville.
Transport: Park in Gatehouse Street; tram up Elizabeth Street to Royal Parade. Get off at Gatehouse Street. Train to Flinders Street then tram as above.

Unreasonable rules for grant submissions

Rejection of RPPG’s Application for a 2010 Community Grant: As RPPG Committee members were ill and away overseas RPPG submitted our application by email. This was not accepted as only postal applications were specified. It is extraordinary as many organisations including the State Government accept online submissions and by email. It appears to us an excuse to cut back on grants.

This notice was printed with the support of the City of Melbourne through the 2009 Community Grants Program.

[1] This article comes from The Royal Park Protection Group Inc., News Bulletin – July 2009

Painting: John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark (1777)

The nationally publicized assault of a 38 year old black man

The nationally publicized assault of a 38 year old black man in Courtenay, BC by three young white thugs was predictably amplified by a media eager to sound the siren of politically correct paranoia. There was racism under every bed! White racism that is. The other kind, of “black on white” assaults, which statistically is much the more common event in America, is not the subject of polite conversation. It is, after all, socially outrageous to speak the truth in Canada. Best to ban the publication of ethnic crime data to smother bigotry in its cradle. Then again, statistical profiling may very well do the opposite by revealing that crime is not the trademark of any ethnic community but only of a tiny and troubled minority within it. And that culture, not skin pigmentation, is a relevant factor, among many.

When the Mayor of Courtenay, Greg Phelps, failed to comply with a PC injunction to support a “feel good” anti-discrimination ‘protocol’ he found substantially meaningless, to address a problem too over-blown to warrant panic, an activist of self-righteous disgust raised the specter of rampant subterranean racism. You may not see it, but trust me, it’s here, there and everywhere! Courtenay may project the image of placid tolerance, but scratch the surface, and it’s a town in the Jim Crow South. “The mayor,” he said, was “just the tip of the iceberg. And it’s not about the three young white men either. There’s got to be a large peer group who shares their racist views. And don’t forget racism begins at home. These men obviously have parents. And these parents have peers too…” Implication? Let’s find them and root them out! I wonder if Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” is included by the school board in the canon of student texts, along with the slogans of intolerant tolerance that the Ministry of Education mandates.

How inconvenient it was then, when it was later learned that apparently, the three aggressors subsequently attacked a Caucasian man. One wonders would words they applied to taunt him. Was it “fatso”, “gimp”, “four eyes”, “baldy” or “fag”? If so, would it indicate that they were motivated by a hatred of obese, handicapped, bespectacled, hairless or gay people? Or would it reveal that their despicable aggression was more accurately the result of three young punks spoiling for a fight and looking for any handle or epithet to goad their victim and get under his skin?

Media alarmism and rent-a-crowd fury

This media alarmism and rent-a-crowd fury recalls the outrageous claim made by the then Minister for Multiculturalism, Hedy Fry, that racism had reached such a fever pitch that ‘they were burning crosses in Prince George (BC).” That too was a ridiculous hyperbole and a blatant lie. Prince George was no more a racist hotbed than Courtenay is today. Nevertheless, these kind of charges serve a purpose. And what purpose do they serve? They stoke up a hyper-sensitivity not only about racism, but issues about that are peripheral to it, but not necessarily connected.

The bogeyman of rampant white racism creates an atmosphere of social intimidation that already greets anyone who dares to criticize the state policies of mass immigration and official multiculturalism. And as we have seen here and elsewhere, racial vilification laws and the revision of history are the logical complement to it. The need to suppress and punish odious views is thought necessary to smother any nascent challenge to the corporate agenda of growing the economy by growing the population. Hysteria inflates the constituency for more restrictions on contrarian speech and the ethnic cleansing of textbooks. Since Canada’s immigration selection criteria, in tandem with the second highest per capita immigration intake in the world, ensures that the country will evolve as Courtenay is evolving, into “a growing community increasing in diversity”, ethnic harmony must come at any cost.

Given that imperative, free speech can no longer be regarded as the very condition and pre-requisite of all other rights, but in the classic Canadian light, of merely one right to be weighed against others in determining the public interest.

"Cultural diversity" a sweet-sounding syrup to coat the bitter pill of naked profit and greed

“Cultural diversity” is the clarion call of the liberal-left, but it is also the mask of the corporate elite, a sweet-sounding syrup to coat the bitter pill of naked profit and greed---and the environmental degradation that comes with it. Big banks, developers and cheap labour employers fly its banner as a smokescreen to obscure their efforts to widen the labour pool and recruit more homebuyers. Immigration is openly promoted as a life-preserver for the shipwrecked home mortgage and home building industry by the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotia Bank and other credit institutions. Cultural diversity is the flavour of the month for an agenda that has no sincere interest in ethnic folk dances and exotic cuisines, but only in the making of money, and the fragmentation of a once cohesive society so that united opposition to its aims become less and less likely as the process unfolds. It is a kind of diversity that comes at the cost of both biological diversity---the staggering loss of species from human population growth in Canada----and intellectual diversity. A nation where people of different origins and hues can co-exist only if they sing the same tune, and the old slogans of “white” nationalism are supplanted by the cant of fake “diversity”. It is the ideology of current convenience, like the “Manifest Destiny” or “White Australia” of times past, to camouflage and disguise the continuing quest to dispossess whom ever happens to be the native population of its share of the economic pie.

For good measure, school textbooks, and history itself, has been revised to advance the new state religion of “Multiculturalism”—Canada’s Ingsoc. The falsehoods of the past have been replaced with politically correct falsehoods of the present. The Chinese head tax and the Exclusion Act, together with the Komagata Maru incident, now form the centerpiece of White Guilt 101, which never looks at the historical context of these events, but assigns retroactive blame on working people and politicians whose main objective was simply to defend wages and living standards from cheap imported labour. No mention is made, for example, that “Chinese exclusion” did not apply to students, diplomats or Chinese business men and their families. Some kind of ‘racism’ that.

Don't play into the PC game-plan

But making the foregoing case plays right into the PC game-plan. That is, draw us into a verbal maelstrom on race, away from the critical issue of sustainability. Away from what should be our primary concern, which is not about how people in our lifeboat treat each other, where they are from or how they look, but how many damn passengers the boat can carry sustainably past the tumultuous storms of peak oil, peak water and peak everything that loom over the horizon. The relationship between humans is secondary to the relationship of humans to nature and the resources it provides. HMCS Canada is a lifeboat, not an aircraft carrier. It is not a vast and boundless land begging for more people to unlock a treasure trove of limitless resources, but a big “little’ land in ecological terms. A nation of frozen tundra, short growing seasons, mined out and marginal soil where 20% of its best farmland is paved over and the rest is under threat from continuing sprawl and the impending loss of oil-based fertilizers. A ship hurtling toward the iceberg of overshoot with politicians on the bridge who want to stop to pick up more passengers and encourage those already on board to have more children.

It is in this context that the crusade of “anti-racism” must be seen. It is the sand that is thrown in our face to get us off our game----stopping growth. And growth is no bogeyman. It is here and it is killing us.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
July 14/09

One of several speeches made at Melbourne 14 July 2009 rally against undemocratic rezoning of green wedges to benefit developers by making it possible to continue high immigration by providing housing at the expense of wildlife, open spaces and democracy.

The speaker is Michael Hocking of Taxed Out. The GAIC tax proposed is quite medieval, like a tax on peasants to benefit lords, which is how the feudal system worked. Where modern practice in the anglophone land-tenure systems is to tax developers the windfall they make on rezoned land, the GAIC tax would tax landowners if they sold land which had been rezoned against their wishes. The choice is a Hobson's one; if you stay you pay very high rates based on the theoretical value of resale. Hard to stay under the circumstances. A recipe for driving farmers and wildlife out and ushering suburbia in. A policy driven by the Growth Lobby.

The final version of Jaws dwarfs all the others. This new monster is eating towns up alive. This is not just a battle to the death; this is WAR! In the novel, Jaws, the monster was not really a white pointer shark, it was the property development lobby, which metastasized with the colonisation of a modest fishing town by rich people from other places. Developers drew power from the wealthy tourists and sea-changers. They took over the original fishing town for their own purposes and democracy seemed fatally wounded. Right to the point of the shark (the developers) trying to eat the boat (symbol of the fishing industry which had begun the town). Until an odd bunch of people had the guts to stand up to the big developers.

How many people stopped swimming in the sea after reading the Peter Benchley blockbuster of the 1970s, Jaws? Well you can stop looking down now, because there is a much worse enemy and it has two legs.

In the novel, Jaws, the monster was not really a white pointer shark, it was the property development lobby, which metastasized with the colonisation of a modest fishing town by rich people from other places.

Developers drew power from the wealthy tourists and sea-changers. They took over the original fishing town and the mayor listened to them more than he did to the citizens. The local police became confused about their powers because of this. People were encouraged to risk their lives for the sake of 'economic growth'. They shut up in case they sounded stupid.

Sound familiar?

Because the mayor's ear was tuned to the tourism and development business it was tuned out to local democracy.

Local government and democracy looked as if it was fatally wounded. Right to the point of the shark (the developers) trying to eat the boat (symbol of the fishing industry which had begun the town). Until an odd bunch of people had the guts to stand up to the big developers. But were those people really so odd or was the rest of the town in a trance?

Hard to imagine anything worse than that shark, isn't it? But, since 1975 the problem has got so much bigger. The monstrous cold black-eyed machine of 'economic development'; sub-prime species, which only exists to patrol the world in search of food for its disgusting and insatiable appetite is now so big that it is engulfing the world. Destroying whole forests. Digesting democracies in a single livid gulp.

Are you ready to stand up to the developers?

You will need to understand ecology, be able to think against the tide, and get your ideas somewhere else besides television and the Murdoch and similar newspapers, because all these media-sources are major real-estate marketers and barrack for population growth.

In an article published on Freedom Arizona, bankruptcy is reportedly racing through the US, threatening governments at all levels.

46 Of 50 States Could File Bankruptcy In 2009-2010

"There is a high chance a majority of the States within the United States of America could file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. There are currently 46 states with high budget deficits, Arizona being one of them."

"The ... State of Arizona has 90 to 120 days before they completely run out of money. After that, all bills and tax refunds owed to the citizens will go unpaid. ... With neighboring California on the verge of bankruptcy this year, many States will follow in their steps.

"Many States are already scurrying to cut unwanted costs, cut State-funded programs, raise taxes, not issue tax refunds to their citizens, and borrow money just to survive in 2009.

[...]Many banks — the same banks the Fed bailed out — are refusing to loan money to the States and their Treasury agencies.

At the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities website you can see that 46 of the 50 States are clearly in the financial red.

Freedom Arizona comments, "It’s very possible you’ll see the end of the United States as we know it. If the Fed doesn’t bailout the States when their cash dries up and the banks don’t loan them money, then our States will be left in financial ruin. This would be a tragic and unprecedented event never experienced in the United States. No State has ever filed bankruptcy, but it could be coming to a State near you this year."

"We are on the brink of something far worse than the Great Depression," the article concludes.

Canada, Australia and Britain are in the same ... um... boat

Unfortunately Canada, Australia and Britain have all fallen prey to similar population-growth-and-land-speculation systems. Spain has also managed to become the premier basket case in Europe due to its having abandoned its economy to the construction industry and now has 20% unemployment.

Land sharks belong in prison

We have to get rid of the property development lobby which is running our country and ruining our ability to democratically restrain such excesses. We have to find some real ecological heros. We won't find them in the traditional places. They won't be ordinary people. They won't be well-known. They will come from the outside.

We have to find or make laws to stop our governments from engineering population growth against our welfare and from serving our countries and citizenship up to the developers and bankers. Work that is necessary can be shared. Wealth can be shared. Sharks are just fine in the sea, but property developers and their hangers-on belong in zoos, museums and prisons.

The title of the article is the clue to its meaning, "Populate without perishing". Ziggy Switkowski, who was on Australian Prime Minister John Howard's nuclear power team, is writing for the Murdoch press, which is always spruiking for population growth. If you read carefully, Switkowski doesn't actually say that Oz's 21 millions (plus) are bad; he says what they do is important. (Fine political distinction usually used to promote or excuse more population growth).

Ziggy is alluding to climate change, but he is not, I think, talking down Australia's population, any more than is Frank Lowy, of the Lowy [Climate Change] Foundation.

Why do I say this?

There are a bunch of investors and developers out there who seem to be creating a ... um... climate ... where the idea of population growth and fuel depletion and climate change can be used to promote the need for nuclear power and therefore to promote investment in it.

That might be defensible on the face of it, since the Energy Returned Over Energy Invested (EROEI) of conventional nuclear has become relatively defensible with the the centrifugal separation of U235 from U238, if some very rich men, associations, and politicians did not seem to be relying on further driving up population numbers to enhance the chances of schemes for giant new nuclear-powered cities getting up. They intend to invest, not just in nuclear - and nuclear may simply be the flagship that will take a loss further on after they get out early with profits from land-speculation - but in big cities which they have managed to goad Australian governments to promise them. (An early document talked about somewhere between 50 and 150 huge new cities all around Australia.)

Continuous massive development schemes rely for funding on gambling on profits from continuous land speculation, but this is not possible if there is no project, however unsustainable, upon which further population and industrial growth can be pinned. Some big development speculators would be interested in the land and infrastructure associated with big new cities that population growth they have been promised by politicians (without agreement having been obtained from the community) will bring, far more than in investing in the power and plants themselves. They have been more or less guaranteed large dependent new cities to consume the nuclear power. They will make money on selling off land in advance and in floating schemes for other infrastructure - at least this is what they hope for.

Never mind that the nuclear power plants - at one $2bUSD plant per million or so Australians, just to provide per-capita electricity needs now [1] (not future expanded needs or replacement of fossil fuel) will probably never be achieved due to the financial cost of these plants and materials in a debt-ridden country in a debt-ridden world (where ultimately population and demand will fall in line with fossil-fuel). The gamble is that the promoters of these big city schemes will get away with funding the initial big ideas, leaving a host of unseen costs and unresolvable debt to smaller investors, and a gutted economic and political system for Australia with vast numbers of people in worse poverty than landless Mexicans, without a wealthy USA close-by to emigrate to.

In Australia the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (AATES) put together a document for a scheme like this a couple of years ago for government, with the collaboration of the Australian Multicultural Foundation. Note that Scanlon has also invested in tollways. Article and links to it below:

Scanlon report underpins threat to Australian democracy
Posted April 23rd, 2008 by Sheila Newman

What organisation has only 24 members of which the first ten comprise the current Prime Minister and nine past and present Australian Prime Ministers or Prime Ministerial contenders? And why would they be so dedicated to an organisation with a focus so antithetical to democracy and Australians? Read on.

[1] Figure based on French nuclear electric provision per capita in 2009 as provided by France 2 News covering provision of electricity during interruption to gas supplies from Russia and during severe cold spell. Note that Australians actually use more electricity per capita than the French and they also use more petroleum and more coal.]

(Photo of Mary Drost) The Brumby Government tried to undermine this crucial Melbourne Rally and to avoid criticism by announcing they were modifying their offensive Bill, so the mainstream journalists stayed away. But the alternative press is growing and we will not fall for such simple ploys. PEOPLE POWER AT WORK See video of the demonstration.

What you can do: attend Virtual Inaugural meeting of Immigrants' Memorial Association to be held 19 Oct 08.
What has been done: Protest at Community Cabinet at 12:45PM on Sunday 14 Sep at Belmont State School, Old Cleveland Road, Carindale to protest Minister Paul Lucas's decision to disallow the appeal.

Yungaba Action Group Inc Media Release 10 September 2008

Originally published 2008-09-12 13:25:54 +1000

The recent action by Paul Lucas, Minister for Infrastructure and Planning, in "calling in" the approval process for the redevelopment of the heritage listed "Yungaba" site stands in stark contrast to the action taken by the Government against the owners of "Keating House" another heritage listed building located at Indooroopilly.

While Mr Lucas has effectively removed the proper planning process from the State owned "Yungaba" by the "calling in" of the development application, thus facilitating the redevelopment of the site, the owners of "Keating House" stand to be penalised to the extent of $75,000 for allowing the building to fall into disrepair.

Ms Delene Cuddihy, convenor of the Yungaba Action Group (www.yungaba.org.au) said that Mr. Lucas, by using his "call in" powers and thwarting the normal appeal process, had demonstrated for all to see just how inconsistent and arrogant the Bligh Government had become.

She said "The actions of Mr. Lucas amounted to nothing short of profound hypocrisy and inconsistency and he should reverse his "call in" action if for no other reason than to show that the legal process was not subject to political tampering other than in the most extreme situations e.g. affecting the security of the State.".

Ms Cuddihy said that Yungaba was a State (taxpayer) owned and heritage listed property with a long and rich history of Queensland's past immigration, directly touching many Queensland families. Unfortunately, as the site is located in a well-known prime real estate precinct, it also has enormous speculative potential.

She said that the privately owned "Keating House", came to the attention of Queenslanders only recently, owing to its alleged state of disrepair. Yet, this type of neglect has been allowed to creep in at Yungaba since the sale of the property started looking as a safe bet for Government.

Ms Cuddihy said that large parts of Yungaba have been condemned as unsafe. She asks "How could they let this happen to one of the ten most significant buildings in Queensland history? This is an indictment on their ability to manage Queensland's heritage. I'm sure they won't fine themselves for allowing the building to fall into disrepair."

Ms Cuddihy said the Yungaba Action Group would continue to make representations to the Minister in an effort to save "Yungaba", but suggested the Minister was now expediting the matter, without public consultation, to ensure it was finalised well before the State election.

For further information on the peaceful Public Rally at the Community Cabinet Consultation Meeting on Sunday 14th September, commencing 1.00pm at the Belmont State School, Old Cleveland Road, Carindale

Media contact: Ms Delene Cuddihy on 0402 597 259

Urgent: please attend protest Sunday 14 September

We are inviting you to our protest at the Community Cabinet. The theme of the protest is "Save Yungaba - excise it from the current development application and save it for future generations of Queenslanders".

The protest is about the failure of the State Government to consult with the community on the sale of Yungaba. It has used it's "call in" powers to shut down the YAG appeal to the development.

Here are the details:

Assemble: 12.45pm for a 1.00pm start.

Date: Sunday 14 September, 2008

Venue: outside Community Cabinet at Belmont State School, Old Cleveland Road, Carindale (on your right after Carindale Shopping Centre if you are coming from the city)

Community Cabinet: We will be able to enter the Community Cabinet if we leave any placards outside. Questions will be taken from the floor at the Forum by the Premier. Get your Yungaba questions ready! Following the one hour Forum, there will be informal deputations to ministers for one hour (2.30 - 3.30pm) and this will be followed by formal deputations to ministers. YAG asked to see Minister Lucas, instead we have been given an appointment with his Parliamentary Secretary at 3.30pm.

I do hope you are able to come out and stand up for Yungaba with us.

If you are intending to come, could you give me an indication?

Delene Cuddihy
Yungaba Action Group
Ph 040 259 250 
dc [AT] yungaba org au

12 September 2008

This article, by Mary Drost, was originally published on Marvellous Melbourne on 8 Jul 08.

More than 30 years ago I moved to live in Indonesia and resided in Jakarta on and off for 21 years.

The first Governor of Jakarta under the Soeharto regime, Ali Sadikin, was an outstanding leader and one of the first things he did was to seek advice from a team of planning experts from the United Nations on how to manage this fast growing city of 3 million people.

The U.N. advice was:

• Don't let the city population increase. They said if the city became larger it would become unmanageable.
• Develop five or six satellite cities in a semi-circle around Jakarta but far enough away from the main city so they would not become suburbs at some future time.
• Ensure that these satellite cities were self sufficient and self-sustaining.

The Governor accepted the U.N. advice and commenced to put the plan in place by immediately closing the city. However, President Soeharto refused to accept the policy and the city eventually opened up and was allowed to continue its rate of population growth and development.

Ali Sadkin told me all this during my recent visit to Jakarta. He said that it is now a city of 12 million people and a nightmare. His advice was do not let it happen in Melbourne as the State Government's Melbourne 2030 decrees.

Through developer greed and Government corruption Jakarta now suffers from poor public transport, massive traffic congestion, pollution, inadequate sewerage, overcrowded schools and hospitals, loss of public space, etc. Sound familiar?

Steve Brack's is on record as saying he would be happy to see six million people in Melbourne and be Australia's biggest city and his Melbourne 2030 plan is pushing us towards a population of five million in this city by 2020.

But stopping population growth is not like turning off a tap, it does not magically stop in 2030. What will the situation be in 2040 or 2050 – a lot closer to the Jakarta situation I suspect.

At what point do we say enough is enough? Maybe we should heed the advice the Governor of Jakarta got from the U.N. and maybe we should look very hard for a better alternative to the Government's very flawed Melbourne 2030 plan.

In my last visit to Jakarta I had nightmares that this could well be Melbourne in 20 or 30 years time if we follow the Melbourne 2030 principles. I spent hours in tightly packed traffic all day, every day, in all roads, in every direction, and I longed for the days when I drove myself everywhere in Jakarta with no problems. Longed for the time when I could see blue sky and breathe fresh air. It was a good lifestyle but it has gone.

How could the Indonesian administration have let this happen? We all know that corruption is quite open there but there has also been a lot of stupidity in what has occurred and a huge amount of developer greed. There certainly has been no vision.

Development through population growth leading to greed and corruption and all the infrastructure problems and social difficulties that follow must not be allowed to happen here. There are clear signs right now that we are well on the way. We of course have a problem Jakarta does not have. We are short of water, they have plenty. Maybe we cant keep many more people clean and hydrated, let alone keep our 'Garden State' from becoming the Concrete State.

We must take firm action now to ensure my nightmare does not become a reality".

Mary Drost Convenor of Planning Backlash
A network of 120 plus resident action groups across city, country and coast.

See also: Will Rudd Government's high immigration program turn Australia into Argentina? of 19 Jul 08, Melbourne 2008: Life in a destruction zone of 29 Jun 08

Original article from Macedon Ranges Residents' Association (www.mrra.asn.au)

(16/7/08 - SG) How do we know if our politicians, councillors or decisions have been bought? The short answer is, we don't.

We need look no further than New South Wales and the Wollongong scandal for confirmation that money can buy governments and decisions, particularly planning decisions. Yet NSW has an Independent Commission Against Corruption [ICAC], something we don't have in Victoria.

So how bad is it in Victoria, where accountability in any form no longer seems to kick up as one of the State's strong points?

In the past week, 3 articles have appeared in the Age newspaper - shocking and revealing stuff. Written by veteran journos Royce Millar and Kenneth Davidson, the articles snap the spotlight onto Victoria's lack of an ICAC, lack of accountability, and shifting views on and stubborn political denial that there's a problem when it comes to who is paying who in politics. From these articles, it seems Victoria's Premier sees political donations not as potentially corrupting influences but just part of a healthy democracy. Like kissing babies, perhaps?

You can access the Age articles by clicking the following links:

• In a healthy democracy, influence cannot be bought, Royce Millar, The Age, 7/7/08 at
  http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/in-a-healthy-democracy-influence-cannot-be-bought-20080710-3d4i.html
• Money is the root of all Political evil, Kenneth Davidson, The Age, 10/7/08 at
  http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/money-is-the-root-of-all-political-evil-20080709-3cji.html
• A Little Bit of Give and Take, Royce Millar, The Age 16/7/08 at
  http://www.theage.com.au/national/a-little-bit-of-give-and-take-20080710-3d51.html

MRRA Says:

In the first article, Millar takes the discussion to the next logical step, and raises the issue of political donations and sponsorship in local government. And what a good discussion it is.

Anyone who thinks buying influence doesn't happen in local government should think again. It's bad enough if it's happening at Federal and State levels, but in those arenas there is more scrutiny and access so potentially more public pressure, and more chance of being caught.

In comparison, it can go almost unseen and undetected at local government level. A nod, a wink, a quiet word; rarely anything as crude as a brown paper bag or a pair of white shoes. Delivering 'favours for mates' can be something as subtle as promising to vote for what another Councillor wants if they'll vote for you this time, overlooking a conflict of interest, or orchestrating noisy albeit minority support for pet projects. These are just some of the ways private agendas can be delivered.

Millar raises an interesting point: while Councillors have to declare donations received during an election campaign, they don't have to declare them until well after the election. Their sponsors remain anonymous when you go to vote. It's all a secret, until they start to vote.

MRRA finds it a very relevant subject, given the recent invention of Macedon Ranges Residents' Secretariat Limited, a company representing development interests, possibly even political party interests, that seems intent on trying to confuse the Macedon Ranges' community into thinking it's us, MRRA Inc - i.e. a 'good guy' acting in the interests of the wider community - to the point of even pinching most of our name! Flattering, but...

MRRA estimates that to date, MRRS Ltd may have spent something in the order of well over $10,000 launching itself and its agenda (the latest effort being a survey sent to all households in the Shire, replete with reply paid envelopes - who could afford that!!!). Not to mention the individual numbering on each "ballot paper" (survey form) which must have cost a fortune to print. But wait, there's more! No, not a free set of knives, but MRRS Ltd is even giving away an expensive free meal - and free transport to and from home - to tempt residents into playing its game. And the feeling in our water is that neither the 'spend' nor the 'big sell' is over yet...

What could be worth that type of investment by business, development and real estate interests? And who exactly are all those interests? What do they want? Will all be revealed anytime soon?

Which leads us to the next question. Is the long-term objective of MRRS Ltd to get people elected onto council who will do what MRRS Ltd wants? Is that why MRRS Ltd says on its survey form, "MRRS offers assistance to potential candidates prior to elections and post elections, when elected..."? [our emphasis]

And how does MRRS Ltd's invitation to residents to become members work? MRRS Ltd has already publicly stated its recruitment will be through hand-picked secondment of like-minded people by its directors. In any event, don't you usually have to buy shares to be a 'member' of a company? MRRS Ltd is a public company, so do residents need a stock broker to become a 'member'?

Crickey, it's all too convoluted and complicated for us, but then MRRA is just a grass-roots community group used to its members joining up normally - they make a written application and pay an annual fee.

The grubby world of buying political influence is one where decisions are consistently made to serve self- and vested interests. Merit and 'public good' doesn't come into it. Is there really that much at stake? You betcha. There's big, big money in buying governments and influence (look no further than Wollongong, for example), and in stacking Councils with 'like-minded' mates to ensure favourable outcomes. Under the right conditions, it can spread like an aggressive cancer. Does Macedon Ranges have the disease?

by Sheila Newman and Richard Laverack

Why build more roads now?

Why on earth, with petroleum supplies not meeting demand and oil prices through the roof, are we still engaging in public-private partnerships with road builders???

Australia is currently set to be criss-crossed by new roads, tunnels and tollways. A case in point, which we have studied is the SEITA Eastlink tollway, which is being built by ConnectEast in a private-public partnership with the Victorian Government.

So, why is Victoria engaged in massive road construction just now? And, why are we persisting with Eastlink, all the way down the Mornington Peninsular when we could simply stop it now?

We found some strange answers to our question towards the end of a SEITA document called, "Frankston Bypass Environment Effects Statement, Strategic Transport Modelling Technical, dated 3rd March 2008, in "Clause 5.7 - Impacts of Fuel Price Changes."

"The MITM adopts current estimates of vehicle operating costs (fuel maintenance etc) on a per kilometre basis in order to assist in determining route choice behaviour. However, these estimates remain constant for forecast years (2011, 2021 and 2031) since vehicle operating costs are unknown. However, it is worth investigating the elasticity of traffic demand with respect to fuel price in order to gain insight into the effects on traffic demand if fuel prices were to change in the future.

"Table 17 shows both short and long run elasticities of demand for fuel consumption and Vehicle Kilometres Travelled (VKT) with respect to fuel price. In the long term, and elasticity value of - 0.29 for VKT with respect to fuel price would mean that a 10% increase in fuel price would result in a 2.9% decrease in VKT. However, in reality motorists adjust much more to fuel price rises in relation to fuel consumption, either through more fuel efficient vehicles or better driving techniques to conserve fuel. This situation is likely to be even more relevant for the Frankston Mornington region where limited alternative transport options exist.”

SEITA then lists its source as Goodwin Dargay and Hanley (2003), referring to "Elasticities of Road Traffic and Fuel Consumption with respect to Price and Income: a review," ESRC Transport Studies Unit, University College London.

Let's analyse those statements.

Note that, In 2002, when the 'research' into trends for that review would have been done, oil was $22 a barrel. 10% of $22 is $2.20.

If all we had to cope with now was a $2.20 increase on $22, a freeway might still make some kind of sense. Now, however, only 6 years later, oil is over $140 a barrel. This is about 6 times the 2002 price of oil and represents a rise of 536% !

What has happened here? Well, we cannot say for sure, but what usually happens is that projections are based on past trends, and, since from 1987 to 2002 prices did vary more or less only by about 10%, to assume they would go on doing so would be to base one’s projections on past trends.

But those were not the only trends in the past.

Between 1973 and 1987 prices rocketed, but SEITA and the Victorian Government are proceeding as if the 1987 to 2002 trends will last for at least another half century.

The reality is that, since 2003, prices have increased continually, and have gone well beyond any previous levels in 2008, with little sign of ever coming down to the kind of trends relied upon by the Victorian government and ConnectEast to make the tollway a profitable, worthwhile or sensible transport option.

Have a look at trends in oil prices in the graph below:

(Source is "Oil Price History and Analysis," WTRG Economics' Energy Economist Newsletter, http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm. Prices are in 2006 dollars.)

Now why would an engineering company like ConnectEast, in the business of making roads, be unaware of the rising oil prices? Oil prices severely impact on the cost of the construction materials and the fuel used by roadmaking vehicles. Building Eastlink must be costing more every day. "Well in excess of 90% of the total construction budget has been spent," already in February 2008, according to The Age, in Simon Mann, "Long and winding road nearly ready to roll", February 16, 2008.

It would be strange if all ConnectEast's engineers and other staff, and SEITA's government advisors, were not aware of oil production curves and theory.

What of the Victorian Government - ConnectEast's partner - in tollroad ventures?

The government has received submissions and press releases from various groups about petroleum depletion projections and oil prices and there has been a Senate enquiry into oil depletion.

The Australian CSIRO study by Barney Foran and Franci Poldan, Future Dilemmas: Options to 2050 for Australia's population, technology, resources and environment, published in 2002, was already flagging problematic trends. See Chapter 4, "Natural Resources and the Environment".

The VAMPIRE study from Griffith University, Queensland, drew attention to Melbourne for its oil-reliant transport vulnerability.

Apart from that, explosive oil prices and depletion fears are constantly in the news. One would therefore be entitled to expect the Victorian government by now to be aware that business as usual has gone completely off the radar.

One has only to go to Amazon com to find a hundred or so books written in the last ten years about the coming energy and fuel crisis, most restating and reaffirming projections made for peak oil production and then decline to start around about now.

If that were not enough, in the past few days, on July 11, 2008, the CSIRO came out again and warned that the cost of petrol could rise to $8 a litre in the next 10 years.

Yet SEITA and the Government still seem to be basing their traffic projections for the next 30 years on a series of totally obsolete oil price trends. On this achronistic basis they openly state that they forecast 30,000 additional vehicles to be travelling along Moorooduc Road in five years time.

What sort of reasoning is this? How can spending $700,000,000 dollars be justified in these circumstances? And how can all the suffering by people and animals who live in the path of this freeway be justified?

After allowing for a 10% increase on $22 a litre fuel price of 2002, which they think might reduce the number of kilometers motorists might travel by 2.9%, SEITA diminish this feeble concession to reality with the rationale that motorists will deal with higher prices by using more fuel efficient vehicles or better driving techniques:

“However, in reality motorists adjust much more to fuel price rises in relation to fuel consumption, either through more fuel efficient vehicles or better driving techniques to conserve fuel.”

But, over the last six months motorists have flocked to public transport. So much so that Connex has ripped the seats out of trains to make standing room only! The metropolitan public transport network is at breaking point. There is no argument about this. The state has asked the Federal government to put funds into public transport.

What will happen if the Frankston and Mornington Peninsular region doesn’t get better public transport?
Is the poor public transport situation from Frankston down through the Peninsular one that ConnectEast, with its shareholders in mind, hopes the government will preserve? This would partly protect ConnectEast's investment. SEITA write, for a project meant to serve the Peninsular for more than thirty years into the future:

“This situation is likely to be even more relevant for the Frankston Mornington region where limited alternative transport options exist.”

This notion is problematic on a few grounds – to say the least. It would mean leaving the public to wear high petrol costs with no reliable public transport option, so that, if people could not pay for petrol, they would not be able to travel to work, shops, doctors, schools, hospitals. Presumably people would, as SEITA hopes, prioritise petrol costs in order to continue to travel for vital and income earning reasons.

SEITA does not canvas, and neither has the government, openly, the logical corollary to continuing very high petroleum prices. It is this: high petrol prices will bankrupt many businesses and leave many people unemployed or underemployed. In the short term businesses will cut whatever costs they can and pass costs on to consumers. The first cost-cut will be wages. Higher costs for products, higher costs for private transport, and lower wages and more unemployment, is a recipe for a sustained, possibly permanent economic depression. Some might describe such a situation as an economic and social collapse.

Colin Hampton,Frankston Councillor/SEITA advisor pushes for tollway through Pines Flora and Fauna

It looks like this tollway project, which SEITA says was on the Melways maps 40 years ago, has just gone out of date and should be abandoned. We could save ourselves the trouble of the last 50km or so. Yet, only a week or two ago, Colin Hampton, Frankston councilor and member of SEITA advisory council, at meeting with low attendance, pushed through support for SEITA’s Option 1, which is the one that goes through ecologically sensitive territory and divides the Mornington Peninsular in two, severely curtailing the few remaining chances for viable wildlife corridors.

What's what:

SEITA stands for the Victorian Southern and Eastern Integrated Transport Authority which was formed by the Victorian Government to manage private public tollway-construction ‘partnerships’. SEITA managed the selection of the private sector bids and now oversees the State's ongoing commitment to this project. In October 2004, ConnectEast was awarded the contract to fund, design, build, own and operate EastLink for a period of 39 years. ConnectEast was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in November 2004.

Who's responsible

The members of the advisory council to SEITA was set up with John Nicol, as 'Independent Chair'; Janet Holmes à Court, Deputy Chairman; and Frank Corr, Northern Community Representative; Norman Galbraith, Central Community Representative; Geoff Griffiths, Southern Community Representative; Cr Mick Morland, Casey City Council; Mr Tim Tamlin, City of Greater Dandenong; Cr Colin Hampton, Frankston City Council; Mr Ian Bell, Knox City Council; Ms Lydia Wilson, Manningham City Council; * Cr Tony Dib, Maroondah City Council; Cr Craig Shiell, Monash City Council; Cr Tim Rogers, Mornington Peninsula Shire Council; Cr Chris Aubrey, Whitehorse City Council.

The responsible minister is John Pallas, Minister for Roads and Ports.
Your Victorian leader is John Brumby.

(See also: “What Can YOU Do To Stop Road Tunnels Destroying Royal Park and Democracy?”
“Roads to wildlife extinction,”
“Wildlife Campaigner: "SEITA preferred Frankston bypass route will severely impact wildife"”)

Aerial View of Royal Park Showing proposed Road Tunnels in white, drawn by Dr Jan Scheurer.

The extension of the Eastern Freeway in tolled road tunnels through Royal Park was announced in Sir Rod Eddington’s report on “Investing in Transport - East West Link Needs Assessment” released on 2 April 2008. The State Government then called for public submissions on the Report.

The closing date is next Tuesday 5 July 2008. If you have not already done so, could you make a submission? To assist, there is a proforma letter for you to send urgently, published at the base of this article.

Click here to see a map of Royal Park before Australand, Commonwealth Games and proposed Road Tunnels.

Construction of Road Tunnels through Royal Park, as proposed in the Eddington Report, will devastate the Park and badly affect residential West Parkville.

The Road Tunnel starts at Hoddle Street; goes under the Melbourne General Cemetery; and proceeds underground until it comes to the surface to form a T junction in Royal Park, adjacent to the State Netball and Hockey Centre (SNHC). This huge junction area will be a quarry for 5 to 10 years and, although said to be constructed by "cut and cover" methods may never be "covered" due to security concerns.

The southern spur of the Tunnel heads south under Flemington Road, emerges in Holland Park in Kensington and exits at the Port of Melbourne. The northern spur carves its way through Royal Park sports grounds, wetlands and underground water storage areas and exits in the middle of CityLink.

In the last ten years we have seen massive land grabs for the SNHC, the Games Village and, recently, the Royal Children’s Hospital.

To the left is the Candobetter artist's rough interpretation of what is happening and the recent past. The white lines are the new tunnel. Highlighted in red is the approximate area of 20ha given to Australand by the State government a couple of years ago.
More accurate drawings are welcome.

Road Tunnels are the final nail in the Park’s coffin. And you might as well bury democracy in that coffin, along with a lot of other nice things.

See in the top illustration, the aerial photo with graphics drawn by Dr Jan Scheurer of RMIT. This is the only graphic representation to show exactly where the Road Tunnels with 4 lanes of traffic will go in Royal Park. (The Eddington Report’s little line drawings fail to graphically present the reality and the enormity of this project.)

The dotted lines represent tunnels with open cut-and-cover construction and the filled-in lines the underground tunnels. The fine lines represent walls or fences around exit and entry points and the one line to the south of the SNHC is a roadway needed to drive around the perimeter of the Road Tunnels junction.

Roads Minister Tim Pallas is reported to have said at a meeting with the Kensington Association on 25 June 2008 that it was “not possible to construct major infrastructure without impacts, and that some had to be tolerated for the wider good”. Are you willing to sacrifice Royal Park for Road Tunnels?

What’s Been Happening?

The Royal Park Protection Group Inc. (RPPG) has been involved in the campaign to oppose Road Tunnels together with a number of other community organisations and political groups. These are (in alphabetical order): The Coalition of Residents and Business Associations – Melbourne (CORBA); Carlton Residents’ Association; Flemington Association, Great Public Transport not a Tollway Tunnel and Freeway (a Western suburbs group); Greens (particularly MP’s Greg Barber and Colleen Hartland); Kensington Association, Mount Alexander Road Campaign Group (MARCG); and Yarra Campaign Against Tunnels (YCAT).

Significant Recent Events in the Campaign Opposing Road Tunnels:

25 May: “No Tunnels” Rally at Debney’s Park organised by RPPG and MARCG.
3 June: “No Tunnels” Rally outside Melbourne Town Hall prior to Planning Committee meeting.
18 June: Meeting of Western Suburbs groups in Footscray organised by Greens.
21 June: “Hands off Holland Park” Kensington Association Rally in JJ Holland Park, Kensington.
24 June: “No Tunnels” Rally outside the Melbourne Town Hall prior to the Council meeting.
4 July: Eastern Transport Alliance Forum at Manningham Council on Public Transport esp. rail.
5 July: “Climate Emergency Rally” City Square then march to Alexandra Gardens.

Coming Events:

Friday 11 July: The Premier is going “Live on Line” re Eddington Report. www.premier.vic.gov.au
Tuesday 15 July: D Day - Closing Date for Submissions to Eddington Review.
Tuesday 15 July: “No Tunnels” Rally outside Yarra Council Meeting 6:45 pm Fitzroy Town Hall.
Monday 4 August: Meeting Public Transport not Tunnels 7 pm 10 Hyde St. Footscray.

OTHER NEWS:

Dispute over Commuter Cycle Path through Royal Park

The long saga of the cycle path proposed for the Park next to Macarthur Road ended at the Planning Committee meeting of 8 April 2008. The Committee decided as follows: "that the Planning Committee resolve to … grant a Planning Permit for the construction of the shared path subject to conditions… to this report keeping the pathway as close as possible to Macarthur Road with a minimum of three metres separation from the road without widening the path or decreasing the number of trees." Sounded clear enough to us. But we discovered that, over the long weekend in June, a path was being carved through the Park up to 17 metres away from Macarthur Road and that 23 trees were being felled. Correspondence ensued with the CEO, Councillors and Council officers and we were told that it was all a matter of “interpretation.” Could have fooled us! It appears to us that Council staff call the shots at the Town Hall.

Dispute over Dogs-off-Leash in Royal Park

At a meeting of 8 July 2008 the Environment Committee of the City of Melbourne considered the proposed new areas for Dogs off Leash in Royal Park. Unfortunately Councillors appear to have been swayed by arguments put up by Minister Bronwyn Pike, Member for Melbourne and Patron of the Royal Park Dogs Group, and Minister Dick Wynne whose wife is a member of the Dogs Group. Thus means that an extensive area of parkland of high habitat value populated with ground nesting birds has been confirmed as a Dogs off Leash area. This threatens many species of birds documented recently in a professional birds’ survey.

Minister Bronwyn Pike is reported to have said at a meeting with the Kensington Association on 25 June 2008 that she was: “working assiduously with her Government colleagues to alert them to possible impacts of such a proposal (i.e. road tunnels) on Kensington and other parts of her constituency. It was not possible or practicable for her, as a Government Minister, to rule out any specific aspects of the Eddington proposals … Rather, she believed that she was best able to serve her constituents by working 'from within', rather than by excluding herself from the process by prematurely condemning the proposal.” (We have heard the self same words over the Games Village and the Royal Children’s Hospital)

Editor's comment: Apart from the tactics, obviously overpopulation in Melbourne is forcing indigenous animals to compete with dogs, and dogs to compete with local people, and locals to compete for parkland with developers and the new populations of consumers which they have imported, and which are the cause of these new roads.

We can all only lose.

Minister Bronwyn Pike should be protesting to stop the freeway because it will take away from dogs and humans as well as from trees and indigenous animals. It is tragic that this park, which goes back to the time of early settlement, is being sacrificed for very transient benefits to a few people. These tunnels and roads will become monuments to folly and vested interest in the face of oil depletion.

The Royal Park Protection Group is an incorporated organization and its objectives are as follows:

1. To protect, regenerate and conserve the Royal Park as a unique, indigenous, central city park for present and future generations, consistent with principles of the 1987 Royal Park Master Plan; and
2. To oppose alienation of parkland by government, commercial, sporting and other bodies to ensure public access consistent with the terms of the establishment of the Royal Park.

The group has learned close up of the erosion of democracy over the past few years. Their experience seeded the formation of the peak body, Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc (PPLV).

SUBMISSION PROFORMA

The Chief of Staff
East-West Transport Options Review
Department of Transport
GPO Box 2797
Melbourne 3001
Email address: eastwestyoursay[AT]doi.vic.gov.au

Dear Sir

I wish to make a submission to the East - West Road Transport Review.

I am totally opposed to the construction of road tunnels as proposed in the Eddington Report. Here are the points I wish to make to support my argument:

1. This proposed project involves construction of 4 lane freeway/tollway concrete road tunnels for 18 km., which will blow out Victoria’s green house emissions at the very time a “climate emergency” has been declared by the Federal Government.

2. Major parks - Royal Park and Holland Park - will be destroyed as they will be turned into major tunnel construction “staging” sites for 5 to 10 years. Open parkland and sports fields will be ripped up and community facilities removed. The Royal Park wetlands, developed with a $5 million grant from the State Government plus its water storage facility under the adjacent Ross Straw Field, will be obliterated as they are in the path of the Road Tunnel. The north of the Road Tunnel will exit on CityLink, which will be widened by two lanes over the Moonee Ponds Creek and Travancore Park.

3. Residential amenity of inner city neighbourhoods along the Road Tunnels route will be seriously compromised and heritage streetscapes threatened. Compulsory acquisition of residential properties along the route of the tunnels is inevitable.

4. The Road Tunnels are, in reality, a city by pass for trucks from the Port of Melbourne. There will be massive traffic congestion on surface roads as most traffic off the Eastern Freeway is headed for the city yet there are no outlets for commuters.

5. Vent stacks 12 storeys high will be built at the entry/exits (“portals”) of the Road Tunnels and every 3 kms. on their route. An example of these obtrusive polluting chimneys - the Burnley Tunnel vent stack – can be seen outside the Malthouse Theatre in Sturt Street, South Melbourne.

6. The $10 billion of funds designated for the Road Tunnels should be diverted into public transport, in particular rail extensions to Rowville and Doncaster and upgrading the Belgrave-Lilydale rail line.

I trust you will take account of my concerns over the proposed Road Tunnels. I would be pleased if you can acknowledge receipt of my submission.

Yours sincerely

Name:
Address:
Phone:
Email Address:
Date:

Planning Activist, Christine Pruneau, of the Macedon Ranges Residents’ Association Inc, said, of the reasons for the public meeting in Melbourne yesterday, that the meeting was about the imminent New State Residential Zones and State Government removal of Council planning powers.

Ms Pruneau stated that the meeting was of interest to, "All Victorians who are concerned about what’s happening with planning in Victoria."

Although the meeting was to focus in particular on the impending new residential zones that "remove residents’ rights to object to or even know about planning applications," and removal of Councils’ planning powers by the Victorian government, Ms Pruneau said,

“This is as much about civil rights as it is about planning. It cuts to the question of whether the principles of consultation, transparency and accountability will survive in Victoria’s democracy."

"In Victoria, planning is being taken over by (handed to) development interests. Even the Department of Planning and Community Development is a member of the Property Council of Australia," she explained.

She added that, "The Department says this doesn't mean it has a conflict of interest," but, "MRRA says it does."

Just because you live in regional Victoria, does not mean that your rights and your environment are safe:

"Not only do these new residential zones wipe out residents' rights, but they’ve been written for Melbourne, and as usual, rural areas like Macedon Ranges and Bendigo will be forced to take them. It’s the same old story, same ghastly deficiencies, same ghastly outcomes. The difference is, this time residents won't be allowed to know or have a say when that ghastly (suburban) development happens," Pruneau stated.

Candobetter says that this is an Australia-wide stalking of our rights.

Ms Pruneau told of changes which had already happened in New South Wales.

"The NSW government has just changed its planning Act to remove, by law, residents’ rights in planning matters. This meeting is an opportunity to say we don’t want that to happen in Victoria."

Summing up, she said,

"There comes a point where if people don't stand up against injustice, they are condemned not only to live with it, but more and more of it."

She invited Victorians to take a stand.

For more information on the meeting and public transport, go to MRRA’s website (www.mrra.asn.au) or Planning Backlash (www.marvellousmelbourne.org), or call Christine Pruneau on 03 5427 1481.

NB Macedon Ranges Residents’ Association Inc [MRRA] is an affiliate member of Planning Backlash and of Sustainable Population Australia, Victorian Branch.

See also: Melbourne protests mass pop growth.

Poet pens a plea to stop population push

By Mark Uhlmann Assembly Reporter

(Growth Concern: Mark O’Connor)

As the federal and ACT governments preach the virtues of high population growth a few individuals are prepared to put an alternative view.

One of those is Canberra poet Mark O’Connor, co-author of a book soon to be published by Enviro Books called Overloading Australia.

The Stanhope Government boasted this week of increases to interstate and international migration to Canberra, but O’Connor said, “Canberra’s going downhill rapidly."

“We have this mad pro-development Government that tries to push more and more people into it.”

He said most people wanted Canberra “kept more or less the way it is”, but could not get representation for this view in the ACT Legislative Assembly.

Canberra’s present population was more than enough and Government programs encouraging more people to come were irresponsible.

At the very least there should not be an open-ended commitment to ever more suburbs, which was the case at present, he said.
The economy was dependent on more suburbs being built. The result was a declining quality of life for those faced with higher population densities.

O’Connor said “citizen disobedience” was now appropriate. For example, that we should not conserve water.
This would “only be encouraging (Chief Minister) Jon Stanhope to push us further into a position where come the next drought we’ll have an even larger population”.

Until the Government had a plan to cap the population, it was counterproductive to conserve water.

Across the country, population growth was being demanded as a necessary part of economic growth, putting an increasing strain on the infrastructure of cities.

Australia’s annual population growth was 1.5 per cent.

“The UN Population Fund regards 1.1 per cent as too high in Asia.” O’Connor said.

The growth was about half natural increase and half immigration. Immigration was at record highs and all the pressure from government and industry was to be even more irresponsible.

There was recognition by governments that greenhouse gases had to be cut, but by some trick that had to be divorced from economic growth, and the economy just had to keep on growing. “That’s an unsustainable position, that will come unstuck before long,” O’Connor said.

There was a “selective deafness in the media” on the population issue.

The president of the Australian conservation Foundation, Ian Lowe, had tried to raise the population issue at the 2020 Summit, but had been up against a belief that population growth and economic growth were good.

O’Connor said, “Unless you win this (population) battle, in the long-run every environmental battle will be lost.”

(Reprinted with the author's permission from From The Canberra Times Saturday May 24 2008 page 15 News)

Toll-road operator, ConnectEast, has only one asset, a 39km motorway running from Mitcham to Frankston, at the cost of $3.5billion. In "A testing time for ConnectEast," The Australian Financial Review on 12 June 2008 reports that ConnectEast's shares are at their lowest value ever, just as it is about to open the toll-way, five months early. AFR Journalist, Chanticleer, thinks this is part of the 'thrashing' handed out to the 'debt-laden infrastructure sector in general'.

This is yet another private-public pet State Government project. The Victorian State Government's bias for new roads is looking sillier and sillier in the light of peak-oil, yet it continues to ram these costly anachronisms through against all kinds of public protests.

We reported on this toll-way in "Roads to Wildlife Extinction", where a proposed route for a bypass threatens to cut through a major flora and fauna reserve and to bisect the Mornington Peninsula, ruining plans for wildlife corridors in the area.

Transurban, is also sinking fast on the share-market. This is the company behind the unpopular tunnels in the Victorian EastWest link, which includes an 18km road tunnel linking the Tullamarine and Eastern Freeways and a 17km rail tunnel linking Footscray to Caulfield. These enormous automobile-intensive and invasive works have sparked massive protests, despite the fact that the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, just 'kicked in' $12 million to help

Rudd's contribution comes under what everyone in the government and the mainstream press is referring to as
"nation building'. This quaint term is creepily colonial and one wonders why our leaders have accepted to mouth such clunky terminology, then one remembers that they are clunky leaders.

Anthropologist John Posthill has devoted an entire book to the term, and here is an apt quote for what's going down in Australia:

"The notion of nation building is no less problematic than that of nation. This term has long been marginalized from serious Western social theory for its association with modernization theory (Smith 2004:195, cf.Deutsch and Foltz 1963, Deutsch 1966). The latter had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s as the U.S. government recruited scores of social scientists in its efforts to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of Third World populations in rivalry with the Soviet Union and China. Modernisation became an elastic notion used by U.S. academics and policy-makers to explain the persistence of traditional ‘mind-sets’ and ease the transition to market-driven, ‘democratic’ regimes in the post-colonial world. In other words, it was used to promote a form of nation building modeled on an idealized United States (Latham and Gaddis 2000). In Vietnam, ‘the other war’, the propaganda war over hearts and minds, was fought and lost by American social scientists who failed to agree on a nation building strategy for that country (Marquis 2000). At present, the term is often used in the Anglophone media and popular scholarship with reference to America’s half-hearted attempts at ‘reconstruction’ in occupied countries such as Afghanistan or Iraq (e.g., Ignatieff 2003)."
Source: John Postill, Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became Malaysian, Berghahn Books, 2005

At the elections of 15 March pro-developer councils were trounced in Redland City and on the Sunshine Coast, but this popular rejection of over-development means little to the State Labor Government of Anna Bligh and the property developers she serves.

On Thursday 5 June the Bligh Government announced its intention to push aside objections from the Redland and Sunshine Coast Councils in order to fast track developments in 17 South East Queensland sites purportedly to “improve housing affordability”. Of course, the obvious measure of selling land directly to the public in order to spare them the cost of extravagant developers' margins, as suggested by at least one correspondent to the Courier Mail recently, has not been taken up.

On 9 June Anna Bligh announced further measures to clear impediments to housing development in South East Queensland. The Courier Mail article Green Space Land Grab reported:

The Bligh Government is set to take the brakes off urban sprawl by making it easier for developers to build on South East Queensland's precious open green space.

Just three years after the Beattie government put protections in place to control rampant development in the region, a review of those controls is now flagging big changes.

Among them is a proposed expansion of the so-called “urban footprint” in a move that would allow new housing and commercial developments to sprawl beyond the existing boundaries.

Against previous undertakings to allow local communities plenty of chances to have their say on future planning, it was announced that discussion of the expansion of SEQ's urban footprint into surrounding green spaces would be kept secret until the release of a draft plan in December, supposedly because this knowledge is “commercially sensitive”.

The office of Urban Management, which was set up with the stated goal of keeping rampant development in check, has been abolished. (The link to www.oum.qld.gov.au returned with the Google search term "Office of Urban Management" is now redirected to www.dip.qld.gov.au/seq.)

This accelerated development is proceeding well ahead of infrastructure upgrades necessary to accommodate the extra population. Earlier on 5 June it was reported in the Bayside Bulletin story Transport projects “too far away” that Redland City Council had raised concerns over the long wait for public transport and road upgrades which could be 10 to 20 years away. On 2 June the Bayside Bulletin story Call to upgrade roads reported growing traffic congestion in the Redlands area and increasingly long travel times along the major routes to Brisbane.

On 5 June, on hearing of the new state Government mandated developments in the Redlands area, a local taxi driver in a post to the Bayside Bulletin wrote:

Our state government has learnt absolutely nothing about infrastructure being in place before known growth - pushing for SE Thornlands development 11 years before an upgrade of the Cleveland-Redland Bay Road in 2019 is absolute stupidity. Redlands voters will have much to remember, none of it good, at the next state election.

Sunshine Coast Mayor Bob Abbot said it was “madness” to turn big areas of land into housing estates when proper transport links had not been established.

The expansion of the urban footprint was made in spite of assurances only two years ago that there was already enough land within the existing urban footprint to acommodate growth.

Bligh claimed that the fast tracking of the review was prompted by the new population forecasts showing that the region was likely to be home to an extra 1.5 million people within 18 years.

The ‘new population forecasts’ undoubtedly were the direct result of Federal Immigration Minister Chris Evans' announcement on 14 May of a massive increase of the annual immigration to 300,000. Both the Queensland Government and the pro-population-growth Courier Mail have been curiously silent on the increased immigration rates. As one example, for a whole week following from Friday 16 May, when a single opinion piece in favour of Pacific Island guest workers was published, there was a news blackout in the Courier Mail as its pages were full of stories about the chaos caused by existing population growth. This was in marked contrast to the reporting in The Australian (the national newspaper) which, like the Courier Mail, is owned by US citizen Rupert Murdoch. All along The Australian has stridently pushed the pro-immigration barrow.

It's as if both the Queensland Government and the Courier Mail don't want the Queensland public to draw the link between high international immigration into Australia and the resultant inter-state immigration which Bligh insists makes her trampling over the rights of Queensland communities necessary.

See also: More chickens of population growth come home to roost in Queensland of 14 May 08, How to end the Queensland economy's addiction to population growth? of 26 Apr 08, Courier-Mail beats up on public for complaining about cost of 'progress' of 14 Apr 08, The Australian laments outcome of Queensland local government elections of 30 Mar 08.

(illustration by Sheila Newman)
In “Population grows at record rate", an article by Tim Colebatch, The Age, June 6, 2008, an Australian journalist has once again been given license by the Fairfax Press to frame Australia’s overpopulation problem as some kind of triumph.

In an article akin to the spin used to sell large bags of potato crisps and sugar, caffeine and phenelalanine-laden soft drinks to adolescents, Tim Colebatch sells overpopulation to Age readers.

Whilst relating the latest ABS statistics, the journalist chooses resoundingly positive terms for this undemocratic and frightening complex phenomenon:

Australia “turned the corner” into 2007 by having ‘almost 21.2 million people'.
In Victoria, the state’s population grew by a “record” 82,430 people. Tasmania “reached a milestone” and is ‘now “on track” to reach 500,000 residents’

Portraying this bizarre engineered growth as some kind of race for supremacy, Colbatch comments that Victoria “lost slightly” ‘in net migration flows to other states.’ ‘Queensland (+25,647) was the “big winner” from interstate migration, as usual, while NSW (-24,028) was again the “big loser”.’

The article concludes with some of the costs of population growth in Australia, but without portraying them as costs. In contrast to the hyped up descriptors for the growing numbers, journalist Colbatch leaves right for the end a peculiarly unemotional account of some of the suffering involved:

“The rapid population growth is driven by business recruiting ready-trained skilled workers from poorer countries rather than training Australians. In the six months to April, almost 100,000 temporary workers arrived, while the Government has just increased the quota for permanent skilled migration from 102,500 to 133,500. Critics point out that there has been no increase in housing supply, so the arrivals are intensifying the housing shortage and helping to drive up rents.”

There is no warning of how the extra people will affect the chances of Australians to weather oil, soil and water depletion.

The statistical news is actually unrelievedly awful, especially as related with ghastly flourishes like these for Victoria:

‘VICTORIA's population has “soared” to more than 5.2 million, with the Brumby Government "claiming the biggest growth in 35 years”' and ‘Treasurer John Lenders said the figures were "an endorsement of our Government's record investment in making Victoria the best place to live, work and raise a family"’.

No mention at all of the growth in groups all over Victoria and the rest of the country protesting at the loss of democracy and control over their environments. This is not reporting. This is propaganda, pure and simple.

Please circulate this article to help to counteract mainstream-media propaganda for population growth.

India: Oil prices to increase by 11%
Diezel goes up by 9%
Cooking gas goes up by 17%

The Indian Government is reported to fear that the price of oil may cost it the next election₁.

Such are the politics of petroleum. There is nothing it does not touch.

The 'rich countries' appear to have much more of a buffer than most of India, but their road transport and agriculture industries are already in trouble. It is well-known that starvation is never far away for many people in the tropical Asian countries, but less well-known is the large class of people living in precarity elsewhere, especially in the Anglophone countries.

In London around 10,000 finance workers have lost their jobs this year and it is anticipated that perhaps up to 40,000 will lose their jobs in the current months. (France2 8pm News, 21 May).

In "Job loss a sure road to skid row"₂ in the Herald Sun of Tuesday May 27, 2008, it was reported that a Citibank survey showed that, in Australia, "one in two workers would face financial ruin within four weeks of losing their jobs;… almost 20 per cent of workers would not last a week. Only one in four workers would be able to survive more than three months."

Some 'rich countries' don't know when to stop and part of their population is sliding ever so quickly into third world status. For instance, the Australian government has become a 'banana republic' massively endebted and engaged in energy-intensive infrastructure expansion programs everywhere. Under the behest of the Australian academy of Technology and Engineering Sciences, the Property Council of Australia, The Australian Population Institute, and its own state governments, all heavily peopled by big development lobbyists, Australia is trying to double its population as soon as possible, planning new megacities. For these 'programs' of infrastructure building and population increase, worker, business and family reunion immigration have been stepped up, and families receive baby bonuses for having children, just as though the days of cheap oil were just beginning, instead of in their twilight. Yet, as in the USA, evictions and personal debt are sky rocketing.

And really, what is three months security in a century of oil depletion? Who is safe? We all need more solidarity. France, so far, shows the best example.

Sheila Newman

Footnotes

1. ↑ Rhys Blakely, "India concedes in battle to keep oil price down", The Times, 6 Jun 08

2. ↑ Craig Binnie, "Job loss a sure road to skid row" in the Victorian Herald Sun(Australia) of 27 May 08

The Australian government will do anything to save this little fellow except stopping developers from building over his habitat.

You would think that the Federal and ACT government really cared that his species is nearly extinct to read how far they are prepared to go to make other species pay for what some leaders of our species are responsible for doing.

In the wake of the Belconnen kangaroo massacre, some of us thought that the government was drawing a very long bow to expect the public to take seriously the implication that 400 odd Belconnen kangaroos were mercilessly purged from nature in order to protect the earless dragon, charming though he is. Just between friends, we still aren't convinced.

Yet, in Peter Robertson & Murray Evanshttp, "Draft National Recovery Plan for the Grassland Earless Dragon Tympanocryptis pinguicoll, "native grazers" as well as "introduced grazers" have been newly included as threats to Tympanocryptis pinquicoll. "Native grazers" is zoo-speak for kangaroos and any other indigenous wildlife that eats grasses.

In fact, the draft paper reveals an absurd situation and we need someone like Alice to tell the government it is nothing but a pack of cards. How wildlife officers and zoologists can stand working in these arcane conditions is beyond me. According to the government's own sources, in the paper,

"The main factors involved in the decline of the Grassland Earless Dragon are thought to be loss and fragmentation of habitat due to urban, industrial or agricultural development, and these processes still threaten extant populations."
"... development at the Canberra Airport does not require the approval of the Minister for the Environment (under Section 160 of the EPBC Act) and proposals both underway and in planning at that site have resulted in the loss of known habitat and threaten further areas of occupied habitat."

Yet kangaroos have to wear all the blame! We also know that the Belconnen site is to be surrounded by new developments and there are rumours that the site itself is to be developed. So, between the airport and the developments at Belconnen, what hope is there for the earless dragon? What hope is there for kangaroos?

The problem is clearly not kangaroos, but the government's obdurate, undemocratic and unsafe insistence on growing Australia's population at the behest of developers. (See "Scanlon report underpins threat to Australian democracy"). This in the face of an expected indefinite world wide depression associated with oil decline. And they are building a new airport when the future of cheap air-travel is doomed by the lack of replacements for petroleum-based jet-fuel. It's not just kangaroos and dragons who should fear our government; it's us!

Actually, this situation where humans are blaming kangaroos for their own actions reminds me of the case that biologist, Farley Mowatt made for wolves in his 1963 book, Never Cry Wolf. He went to work as a government biologist in the Arctic on a project to find out why caribou herds were diminishing. The government thought they were probably being eaten by wolves (although both species had co-existed for millenia). After living adjacent to the wolves for months, Mowat reported that the wolves lived on a diet of field mice supplemented by the occasional elderly or sick caribou. The local trappers in the area were killing all the caribou to eat and to feed to their dogs. Mowatt's book, Never Cry Wolf, is a classic and it is said that it led to the Soviet Union banning the killing of wolves.

SEITA is the acronym for the Victorian Southern and Eastern Integrated Transport Authority which was formed by the Victorian Government to manage private public partnerships to build ... um... not free ways, but tollways. The Frankston bypass is part of the EastLink tollway.

According to information on the SEITA Eastlink site, the project route appeared in Melways street maps forty years ago.
(Photo by Narelle Smith)
Predictably, over this period wildlife habitat and populations have been severely impacted. Despite this the Victorian Government and SEITA seem to have failed to seriously consider several other routes, but are persevering in plans to bisect the Mornington Peninsula Biosphere and other crucial habitat for wildlife, according to Gillian Collins of the Pines Flora and Fauna Protection Group and Maryland Wilson of the AWPC.

Their preferred route begins with a major cut through The Pines Flora and Fauna Reserve which provides sanctuary vital to the AWPC and Coalition for Wildife proposed wildife corridor leading to and from the Peninsula Biosphere. For this the Victorian Government, SEITA and Eastlink, have been accused of failing to plan adequately to avoid significant impact on natural habitat and wildlife.

The paradigm of tollways has also been criticised as outmoded and economically unsound because it relies on road-transport and collecting tolls in an economy where many believe that all bets on road-traffic projections should be off because of looming oil and fossil fuel depletion. The motorway will collect tolls using ConnectEast tolling products. www.eastlink.com.au

EastLink decribes itself as "the largest urban road project ever constructed in the State of Victoria with a construction cost of $2.5 billion." It hopes to be "Victoria's second fully-electronic tollway" It will link "the Eastern Freeway in Mitcham with the Frankston Freeway in Melbourne's south-east" in a 39 km motorway.

Eastlink say that they are "one of the largest Public Private Partnerships ever undertaken in Australia." They hope to open on Sunday 29 June 2008.

The Southern and Eastern Integrated Transport Authority (SEITA) was established in 2003 to manage the EastLink Project on behalf of the Victorian Government.

SEITA managed the selection of the private sector bids and now oversees the State's ongoing interest in this landmark Project.

ConnectEast

In October 2004, ConnectEast was awarded the contract to fund, design, build, own and operate EastLink for a period of 39 years. ConnectEast was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in November 2004.

Thiess John Holland

ConnectEast contracted Thiess John Holland to design and construct EastLink. Thiess John Holland is a joint venture between two of Australia's largest construction and engineering companies - Thiess and John Holland.

An advisory council was also set up with John Nicol, as 'Independent Chair', Janet Holmes à Court, Deputy Chairman; and Frank Corr, Northern Community Representative; Norman Galbraith, Central Community Representative; Geoff Griffiths, Southern Community Representative; Cr Mick Morland, Casey City Council; Mr Tim Tamlin, City of Greater Dandenong; Cr Colin Hampton, Frankston City Council; Mr Ian Bell, Knox City Council; Ms Lydia Wilson, Manningham City Council; * Cr Tony Dib, Maroondah City Council; Cr Craig Shiell, Monash City Council; Cr Tim Rogers, Mornington Peninsula Shire Council; Cr Chris Aubrey, Whitehorse City Council.

John Nicol, the Chair of the advisory council, is a city engineer with Werribee City, and was recently awarded the Order of Australia medal. John Pallas, Minister for Roads and Ports, commended his understanding of 'building a winning image', his ability and character in the following speech, recorded on Victorian Hansard.

Maryland Wilson, President of the Australian Wildlife Protection Council, stated yesterday that the Southern and Eastern Integrated Transport Authority (SEITA) has failed to adequately address the concerns she raised on behalf of the Australian Wildlife Protection Council or the Coalition of Wildlife Corridors.

Wildlife campaigner says SEITA route for Frankston Bypass will severely impact wildlife

Maryland Wilson, President of the Australian Wildlife Protection Council, stated yesterday (May 14, 2008) that the Southern and Eastern Integrated Transport Authority (SEITA) has failed to adequately address the concerns for wildlife she raised on behalf of the Australian Wildlife Protection Council or the Coalition of Wildlife Corridors. These concerns were specifically about the threat posed to wildlife and their habitat by the infrastructure and traffic which will be created if the SEITA proposed bypass route goes ahead.

Ms Wilson said that the AWPC's observation as well as discussion with persons well-informed in road-engineering, population and land-use planning, Peninsula Biosphere maintenance, wildlife-ecology and social amenity leaves the AWPC in no doubt that

a) the proposed route will severely impact on scarce habitat for local, regional and State biodiversity
b) SEITA and the government have not seriously examined viable alternatives
c) the Pines draft master plan – part two and part three fail to remedy these problems
d) the Pines draft master plan suggestion of a connection between the parts of the Reserve it will split would only present a very insignificant mitigation of the overall drastic damage
e) the proposed restructuring and popularisation of the reserve inaccurately markets new and additional habitat-stress as habitat and wildlife friendly.

"Even worse", said Ms Wilson, "The proposed route will divide the Peninsula in two, making any hope of interconnecting wildlife corridors from East to West of the Peninsula impossible." "Plans for interconnecting corridors have been on the AWPC website now for over a year," she said.

The Wildlife campaigner explained that it is not acceptable for the government or its chosen contractors to go ahead with a structure which, despite some rhetorically supportive policies in Pines draft master plans, parts two and three, is in practice oppositional to international, Australian, and local practice and science for protecting the needs of wildlife.

She added that people needed to be made aware that, "At the moment Frankston and the Peninsula, although part of an international UNESCO agreement for a biosphere that protects fauna and flora, are facing unacceptable decimation of indigenous animals in all or most areas where they struggle to survive."

"Roads, through habitat fragmentation and isolation, through very high rates of road-kill, and through their spear-heading of suburban expansion, are the drivers of animal deaths and species loss."

President Wilson said that SEITA will only encounter and should only encounter opposition if it fails to use alternative routes to protect any indigenous fauna habitat from being cut off from the rest of the Pines, or indeed where similar fragmentation is threatened for any other habitats.

"Australian fauna is at greater risk than at any other time in history due to climate change, drought, habitat-fragmentation and annihilation. The need for more, not fewer, bio-links to save species and individual animals is critical."

"With regards to the other areas of Frankston and the Peninsula, if SEITA continues with the same lack of awareness as previous road-builders in this country, of the many modern methods for mitigating road-kill, such as bridges, tunnels and overpasses, then it cannot expect and will not deserve support."

Her concluding remark demonstrated that the AWPC has a more sophisticated awareness of economy perhaps than do investors in freeways and the governments which support such massive infrastructure projects:

"The population growth and urban expansion which SEITA and similar industry corporations rely on in Australia for customers and investors is not supported by the incumbent population and will probably become very problematical very soon due to oil depletion."

Maryland Wilson, President of the registered charity, Australian Wildlife Protection Council Inc., and spokesman for the Coalition for Wildlife Corridors can be contacted at kangaroo AT peninsula.hotkey.net.au or at 03 59788570, mobile 0417 148 501 The AWPC is located at 247 Flinders Lane Melbourne, Victoria 3000. For further details go to www.awpc.org.au

The Play and folklore exhibition at the Victorian State Museum is a really interesting one because it testifies to the disappearance of accessible natural places for children, without consciously linking this to overpopulation and development, currently rampant in Victoria.

Ironically it uses photographs by Jim Quirk, the father of SPA Victoria President, population activist, Jill Quirk. The photographs are of his children, whose play he minutely and lovingly documented during the 1950s in Victoria.

These pictures will seem incredibly familiar, perhaps achingly familiar, to many people who grew up during that time in Australia. Jill's father, Jim Quirk, was a bank manager who loved wildlife and, like his daughter, worried greatly about the impact of overpopulation on natural spaces and freedom. He was also an expert colour photographer.

A photograph of Jill and her sister - where, I wonder?

Here is a worthwhile quote from a part of the exhibition:

"Not only do children have less freedom than they once did, but there are also fewer natural spaces available to children to play. Robert Pyle, an American naturalist and writer, explained that a sense of place is gained through intimate contact with natural landscapes, emphasising the importance of the ‘presence of special places and the liberty to encounter them at will’. He argued that as children’s actions are limited by regulations in genuinely wild areas such as national parks, we should be protecting small pockets of unofficial countryside – such as overgrown vacant lots or abandoned buildings – where children can play and explore freely.5"

The exhibition is by museum curator, Carla Pascoe.

ABC Breakfast Show host, Ross Solly, gives Property Council of Australia 20 minutes-plus free advertising at tax-payer expense to market industry hobby-horse.

Since when did our taxes go to fund the ABC as a national real-estate agent or an arm of the PCA?

Ross Solly

Why was there no counter-argument?

These publicly privileged views come from a professional lobby-group which markets population growth on behalf of commercial property developers, yet they were put without any counter argument, as if they emanated from a disinterested scientific or analytic body, like the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

"Ms Carter says the Territory's sluggish population growth is also a threat to economic well being." "A good size for a medium size city, we think that kind of population target is one to aim for," she said.

Catherine Carter

Ms Carter opined, on behalf of the PCA, that Canberra's economic fortunes should be pinned on population growth at "1.75 per cent" or "5,200 people per annum."

For Canberra, 500,000 people over the next 20 years would average at something like an increase of 7,500 people a year, and on a divider of four, about 2,000 new dwellings a year, or 40,000 over the Council's defined period.

In fact there are many reasons, not just to question such a promotion of population growth for Canberra, but to severely filter it out of the national public medium, because Canberra's land, water, housing, schools, hospitals, roads and transport are not coping with the current population and neither are similar services all over Australia.

To advocate artificially increasing population growth anywhere, when the world faces a petroleum supply and price wall, and widespread famine related to the unwise diversion of agriculture for biofuels seems like arrogant and dangerous folly.

The percentile growth rate of 1.75% per annum is the same one promoted by the Scanlon Report (written by the populationist Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE), which is part of Australia's development lobby). [See also Scanlon Report on this site.]

Peter McDonald

Rebecca Kippen

.

The rationale for this figure was to prolong and expand the population of working age as if our economy will continue forever in the mass production factory mode of last century, for the benefit of big business. If you read between the lines of the Property Council's press release, you will realise that their concern is labour for construction sites. Their agenda is to get the local, state and federal governments to grow populations through immigration and higher birth rates. Thus it is hoped to continue to stimulate the already over-stimulated demand for building materials, new houses, roads, water technology, and raise, not only interest rates, but the price of land-holdings, agricultural produce and water itself.

Among other methods, Ms Carter is pushing for the integration of "programs like the ‘Live in Canberra’ campaign and the Skilled and Business Migration Program." Growthist lobby groups seem undeterred by the fact that,according to Dr Bob Birrell of the Monash Centre for Population Research, less than one third of skilled immigrants are working in their field; most are merely cogs in the engineering of population pressure and housing demand.

Of little or no concern to big-population-lobbyists, apparently, is the increase in the cost of living which results from this aggressive promotion of land-speculation, the rising numbers of homeless and indebted, and the short-term nature of this kind of employment and industrial activity. The risk for Australians of starvation and disease from population pressure on food supply and water, present already in many parts of the world, is never mentioned.

For those of you who may resent the spending of public funds to promote commercial ventures which will rely on increasing Australia's population and who fear the resultant social and environmental stresses, you may make your complaint to the ABC

On 22 April 2007 Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, then Deputy Premier, rejected calls for ending Queensland's population growth, claiming that it "would have a very serious impact on the construction industry that a lot people rely on for jobs."₁.

A year later, on 25 April 2008 as reported₂ in the Sunshine coast daily, town planning lawyer, Andrew Davis, similarly objected to the plans of newly elected Sunshine Coast Mayor, Bob Abbot, to cap the coast's population growth at 400,000 from the current population of 300,000₃. Davis claimed that Abbot's initial plan to reduce annual population growth from 3.5% to 2% would result in the loss of 8,500 of the region's 20,000 construction jobs. He also claimed that there would be further job losses in the transport, property and business service sector, with flow-ons to other sectors of the economy like retail, tourism, manufacturing.

Indeed, in a manner uncharacteristic for property developers' advocates, even Andrew Davis implicitly acknowledged that such a transition would be necessary when he said, “Turning off the tap of growth, without first achieving success in creating sustainable business, will cause enormous pain for everyone, whether you work in growth industries or not.”

Given that the region does not have adequate water resources, transport infrastructure, electricity generation, or health and education services to meet the needs of the existing population, many argue that it is urgently necessary to end growth now rather than to increase the number of people who will become dependent, for their employment, upon further growth. At the very least, a plan to end the region's dependence upon growth must be adopted without further delay. Sunshine Coast residents should not hold their breath waiting for Davis and the Sunshine Coast developers to devise a plan for a sustainable economy for the region.

Putting back the date for the necessary transition from a growth-addicted economy to a stable steady state economy will only make the eventual adjustment more traumatic.

At least Bob Abbot's plans for a cap are a step in the right direction. As far as it goes, he can rightly claim a popular mandate for his stance, having won the election for Mayor against pro-developer candidate Joe Natoli, with over 70% of the vote₄.

Comments posted to the web-site of the Sunshine coast Daily News, in response to the story, also confirm the overwhelming popular support enjoyed by Abbot. (See Appendix 1 below).

Saturday's Sunshine Coast Daily in the story Coast told to grow up and diversify₅ of 26 April reported that Sunshine Coast business leaders supported Abbot and called for the diversification of the economy away from dependence upon tourism, retail and the property industry.

Sunshine Coast Business Council chair Paul Pettigrew said, "Reliance on the mainstays of tourism, retail and property development industries must be reduced. The growth of the knowledge, creative, research and innovation, manufacturing and other such skills-based industries will create a larger total economic base that is better positioned for the region’s social and economic future."

Sunshine Coast Environment Council manager Ian Christesen said the time was right to have a debate about growth₅.

“The time is right, the people have spoken at the elections, so let’s get on with rational discussion,” he said.

“The rhetoric the state government has been going on about for some time is ‘we’re managing growth’. Everyone realises that’s not the case, growth is managing us.

“We have to diversify our economy. We can’t rely on the vagaries of construction and development to underpin our economy.

“We need to move on and develop something a bit smarter.”

However, as former State Labor MP, Cate Molloy, warned (see Appendix 2) Sunshine Coast residents may see their expressed wishes to curb the demands of the developers frustrated. State Labor Government's supposedly independent assessment panel, has powers to over-rule planning decisions of the Sunshine Coast Council and other local governments.

Already in 2007, at the behest of the Property Council of Australia (PCA), the State Government forcibly amalgamated a number of local governments, against the wishes of the residents served by these councils₆. The Property Council viewed the abolished Noosa and Douglas Shire Councils and many other councils, as impediments to its agenda for unrestrained development.

However, the Property Council and the State Government's plans suffered a setback when anti-development candidates in a number of key local government areas including the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, Cairns, and Redland City overcame the additional difficulties caused by the amalgamations and defeated candidates heavily financed by developers₇.

In response to this democratic resistance, the Queensland State Government, encouraged by pro-developer Murdoch Newsmedia, set up the independent assessment panel, of which Molloy warned.

Clearly, if Queensland is to be saved from overdevelopment and overpopulation, then anti-development councils, together with their grass roots supporters, will have to show at least as much determination as the developers and their government stooges.

Footnotes

1. Qld govt rejects population cap in the Age of 22 April 2007.[back]

2. Curbing growth 'would cost jobs' by Jane Gardner in the Sunshine Coast Daily News of 25 April 2008 [back]

3. Sunshine Coast plan to cap population on Radio National's PM of 24 April 2008 [back]

4. See Electoral Commission of Queensland's results for the Sunshine Coast Mayoral elections. [back]

5. Coast told to grow up and diversify by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily News of 26 April 2008 [back] [back]

6. Cate Molloy : Forced council amalgamations planned by Property Council of Australia of 7 Sep 2007 [back]

7. The Australian laments outcome of Queensland local government elections of 29 March 2008 [back]

Appendix 1: Some comments in support of Mayor Abbot's population cap

Comments were posted in response to Sunshine Coast Daily article Curbing growth 'would cost jobs' of 25 April 2008.

"The coast cannot cope with the current growth. ..."

"Growth on the coast needs stemming. At present there are subdivisions without supporting services. The building quality is less than desired, but maximum price is called for by the developers. All in the name of greed."

"It is ignorant for anybody to suggest that we need "Growth" to sustain a economy, most problems in the world are caused by growth, sure there may be "some" job loss for a while, but this will naturally adjust after a while.

"Nothing is gained without pain.

"It's good to see somebody like Mr Abbot standing up to the development industry."

"There are so many examples across the coast of where we are playing 'catch-up' because growth has not been carefully monitored. I invite any Coast residents to try getting around the Sippy Downs / education precinct between 8am - 9am and again from 3pm - 5pm. I sat in traffic there yesterday for 35 minutes - to move only a couple of hundred metres. We're all waiting for the new Dixon Interchange to open and look forward to a reduction in congestion. I'm sure the residents of Maroochy North Shore are also looking forward to the Maroochy River Bridge project completion.

"What Mayor Abbot is suggesting is reasonable, and shows an interest in the long-term livability of the Coast region. I think his vision proves that we have elected the right man for the job - someone who looks at the big picture and doesn't play into the hands of developers and their dollars."

"We don't have a infrastructure now to cope with the people we have here, Look at the most important stuff like the poor state of hospitals,the lack of public transport, the traffic nightmare."

"I don't see why we have to concentrate so many people into one place changing the entire coast into a rat race, ..."

"Enough is enough.Overdevelopment only puts money into the pockets of large developers who are not domiciled on the coast. They are only here to make fast easy money at the ultimate expense of residents. ...

"We can't afford any further development on the Sunshine Coast that only puts money into the developers pockets and leaves the rest of us to pick up the bill. More strength to Bob Abbot and his plans. And an end to the Natoli 'sleep with the enemy' policy.

"From the story and the comments all I can say is, Good for you BOB!"

"The increase is being driven by the federal government via immigration, due to the failure of various other ridiculous schemes to maintain the human plague i.e 'baby bonus'.

"Since 2003, our immigration rate has doubled. This is short term economics; selling state forest, water supply, and sacrificing entire species for a quick-buck. This is a threat to our future far worse than terrorism."

"Perhaps Mayor Abbott's proposed growth rate will help alleviate the difficulties house buyers are having getting their homes completed due to a shortage of tradespeople. (see Saturday's Daily)."

Appendix 2: Cate Molloy warns of threat of dictatorial use of State Government's planning powers.

This comment by Cate Molloy, former Labor state member of Parliament who was expelled from the Labor Party for opposing the Traveston Dam was also posted in response to the abovementioned Sunshine Coast Daily article Curbing growth 'would cost jobs' of 25 April 2008.

The current Minister for Infrastructure and Planning Paul Lucas has stated a five member independent assessment panel would be given the first right of refusal on all Noosa development applications so that means they also have first right of approval, of those applications not just the ones in conflict with the planning scheme.

We now have this Famous Five who are about to duplicate the work not only done in council but also that which is referred to the State government for review- a call in- how can any council operate effectively if the responsibility to plan and approve is removed from their hands.

OK so Noosa is only one part of the cake but this kind of eroding of democracy smacks of arrogance.

Noosa got much of its planning done well with a great deal of community input, that is now being removed not only from the mayor but also all the councillors.

We can address this by pressuring the mayor and those councillors who enjoy close relationships with both federal and state government ministers to reinstate our democratic rights.

There is a specific tactic of turning the heat up on our elected representatives to stand up for us on this important issue and not simply roll over, making a few noises about how they hope the process is thorough enough and the state government doesn't select poorly.

I would like to see those councillors who have used state and federal politicians to advance their campaigns to now actually do something with that endorsement.

Vivien Griffin and Glen Elmes have openly declared they want to work together that's great so now Viv and Glen you have to take these issues to state parliament and report back to us the people what you have both achieved.

Debbie Blumel has represented as a labor candidate at least 4 times with endorsements from Wayne Swan and a tinny full of state pollies so now come on Debbie, you can get down to Brisbane get Wayne Swan to go with you, to see Minister Lucas.

You then can report back to us on what you have achieved to get Minister Lucas to rescind this ridiculous Famous Five duplication and removal of our democracy.

Russell Green has mates in State Government and has even turned up at a State Labor retreat. This level of friendship surely must allow you Russell to put forward our case.

Of course we have other councillors who also have close ties in government but lets start with this small but highly and well connected group to really start using their connections as they have so implied they would do.