Thursday, August 19, 2010
Thursday, August 12, 2010
THE MERCURY: Cloverleaf road plan wilts
CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO GO TO THE STORYCHARLES WATERHOUSE | August 12, 2010 08.45am
BAGDAD bypass planners have backed away from plans to build a cloverleaf interchange north of Pontville to connect the bypass near the town.
Owners of heritage properties in this area and heritage experts objected to the cloverleaf for the visual damage it would do to the historic landscape.
The Department of Infrastructure Energy and Resources said the cloverleaf was "now highly unlikely" to be pursued. .... READ MORE HERE
THE MERCURY: Plea to PM in bypass row DAMIEN BROWN | August 11, 2010 12.01am
"THE Aboriginal community wants urgent talks with Prime Minister Julia Gillard during her anticipated visit to the state this week, as its fight to protect a culturally significant site north of Hobart threatens to cause the first split within Tasmania's Labor-Greens government.
Aboriginal Affairs Minister and Greens leader Nick McKim has confirmed he will walk out of Cabinet if a vote is held on whether to support the building of a bridge over a controversial site at the $173 million Brighton bypass." ... CLICK HERE TO READ MORE
By early on today, today's article had drawn the comments below. What needs to be remembered here is that 'Cultural Heritage' is a very contentious area of concern. It was once estimated that well over a million vehicles traveled the Midlands Highway every year and thus the landscape it traverses is of interest to a great many of the people who travel in them – many of them multiple times every year.
There is both Aboriginal and European cultural heritage invested in this landscape and European heritage is not all that pretty once you peel back the layers. The creeping desertification of Tasmania's Midlands is just one element of all that. After that there is a certain irony to the DIER's willingness to negotiate with Bagdad landholders looking to protect their investment and on the other hand almost completely dismissing the Aboriginal community's claims for their 40,000 plus years heritage buried in the landscape – a landscape that the colonists profited greatly from.
The planning process here is totally out of kilter! One would think that a credible, best practice process would ask all the questions right up front. But no, the adversarial approach is taken. They get busy on their drawing boards spending all the money their high salaries depend upon them doing. Then the planners stand back an wait for the objections to come in. The Aboriginal community's objections are anticipateable mainly because they expect to be left out of the equation. Unsurprisingly they are always ready to protest to protect their interests – they are left with few other choices. Good planning would avoid all that!
Then comes a class of property owner out of the woodwork, surprise, surprise! A good planning processes (a best practice process) would have discovered them early in the piece. But no, it was a lazy process that relied on flushing out the objectors and dealing with them one at a time as best as time would allow – if at all.
One suspects there are going to be a few winners in this Bagdad Bypass process and many, many losers, due to all the missed opportunities. A compromise is just that, a compromise. This bypass was compromised at the very beginning of the planning process. This is evidenced by the early comments to this Mercury article.
COMMENTS TO THE MERCURY: #1 "Mr and Mrs Kernke, I suggest you keep a close eye on DIER. Having dealt with them directly through the development industry, they cannot be trusted. They have absolutely no care for impact on residents, visual impact, residential amneity impact, impact on European or Aboriginal heritage and use bully tactics to push applications through the development process. It all comes down to timeframes and economics with them and scant care for anything else. And they wonder why the Aboriginal community are hopping up and down about the bypass projects. I am not aboriginal but having dealt with DIER, I have complete sympathy with the aboriginal community as well as residents like the Kernkes." Posted by: anonymous 10:42am today
#2 "Let's get this right...The heritage of the stables is very important....Correct! It is heritage. The heritage of the 40,000 year old middens...(and the Stables are not even two hundred years old) is negotiable and part of the middens will be destroyed. If we were Aboriginal we would be wildly upset. We am not Aboriginal and we are wildly upset at the disparity of government actions." Posted by: Buck Emberg of Lton 10:28am today
Owners of heritage properties in this area and heritage experts objected to the cloverleaf for the visual damage it would do to the historic landscape.
The Department of Infrastructure Energy and Resources said the cloverleaf was "now highly unlikely" to be pursued. .... READ MORE HERE
THE MERCURY: Plea to PM in bypass row DAMIEN BROWN | August 11, 2010 12.01am
"THE Aboriginal community wants urgent talks with Prime Minister Julia Gillard during her anticipated visit to the state this week, as its fight to protect a culturally significant site north of Hobart threatens to cause the first split within Tasmania's Labor-Greens government.
Aboriginal Affairs Minister and Greens leader Nick McKim has confirmed he will walk out of Cabinet if a vote is held on whether to support the building of a bridge over a controversial site at the $173 million Brighton bypass." ... CLICK HERE TO READ MORE
By early on today, today's article had drawn the comments below. What needs to be remembered here is that 'Cultural Heritage' is a very contentious area of concern. It was once estimated that well over a million vehicles traveled the Midlands Highway every year and thus the landscape it traverses is of interest to a great many of the people who travel in them – many of them multiple times every year.
There is both Aboriginal and European cultural heritage invested in this landscape and European heritage is not all that pretty once you peel back the layers. The creeping desertification of Tasmania's Midlands is just one element of all that. After that there is a certain irony to the DIER's willingness to negotiate with Bagdad landholders looking to protect their investment and on the other hand almost completely dismissing the Aboriginal community's claims for their 40,000 plus years heritage buried in the landscape – a landscape that the colonists profited greatly from.
The planning process here is totally out of kilter! One would think that a credible, best practice process would ask all the questions right up front. But no, the adversarial approach is taken. They get busy on their drawing boards spending all the money their high salaries depend upon them doing. Then the planners stand back an wait for the objections to come in. The Aboriginal community's objections are anticipateable mainly because they expect to be left out of the equation. Unsurprisingly they are always ready to protest to protect their interests – they are left with few other choices. Good planning would avoid all that!
Then comes a class of property owner out of the woodwork, surprise, surprise! A good planning processes (a best practice process) would have discovered them early in the piece. But no, it was a lazy process that relied on flushing out the objectors and dealing with them one at a time as best as time would allow – if at all.
One suspects there are going to be a few winners in this Bagdad Bypass process and many, many losers, due to all the missed opportunities. A compromise is just that, a compromise. This bypass was compromised at the very beginning of the planning process. This is evidenced by the early comments to this Mercury article.
COMMENTS TO THE MERCURY: #1 "Mr and Mrs Kernke, I suggest you keep a close eye on DIER. Having dealt with them directly through the development industry, they cannot be trusted. They have absolutely no care for impact on residents, visual impact, residential amneity impact, impact on European or Aboriginal heritage and use bully tactics to push applications through the development process. It all comes down to timeframes and economics with them and scant care for anything else. And they wonder why the Aboriginal community are hopping up and down about the bypass projects. I am not aboriginal but having dealt with DIER, I have complete sympathy with the aboriginal community as well as residents like the Kernkes." Posted by: anonymous 10:42am today
#2 "Let's get this right...The heritage of the stables is very important....Correct! It is heritage. The heritage of the 40,000 year old middens...(and the Stables are not even two hundred years old) is negotiable and part of the middens will be destroyed. If we were Aboriginal we would be wildly upset. We am not Aboriginal and we are wildly upset at the disparity of government actions." Posted by: Buck Emberg of Lton 10:28am today
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Community Action May Cut Through
ITS OUR ABC!
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