Herald-Sun, 25/6:
Population alert
THE clowns are again reiterating climate-change nonsense, this time in Brazil. A waste of time and effort.
Who will be the ring master and both espouse and support our planet’s main problem, overpopulation? Poland has dispensed with the warming nonsense and others will follow. Nothing we do will affect the planet other than reducing population.
Please, one world leader stand up and promote population reduction. I know the Chinese are. Where in the developed world is the fortitude for the same? Your top hat awaits.
– Tim Stafford, Mt Eliza
27/6:
Tax welcomed
AS SOMEONE fortunate enough to have received a scientific education to university level, I do not feel we have a right to ignore environmental concerns in our quest for future existence on this planet.
It does concern me that various high-profile columnists espouse a mantra of continued population and economic growth, with their costs of unsustainable consumption and environmental change.
I for one do sleep more soundly at night with the thought that our government is implementing a carbon tax, no matter how ineffectual, as it is a start to recognising something that seems increasingly to be affecting us all.
Maybe it is time we all became more scientifically literate.
– Jim Royston, Heidelberg
Three weeks ago, the Victorian Bailleu government announced it would be rezoning yet more valuable farmland and green wedges around outer Melbourne for housing to accommodate the ever-growing population. Various developers, many of whom are lobbyists, will benefit, but the environment certainly won’t. A later article noted that “Urban spread poses new threat to endangered frogs”, but the government apparently does not care – for them, growth must come at any cost. I can feel only despair and anger at being so powerless to stop this destruction.
The Age, 14/6:
Boundary is a rubbery concept
DOES the state government have a mandate to open up thousands of hectares of green wedge land and farmland (“Government shifts green wedge boundary”, The Age, 13/6) for housing on the metropolitan fringe? Where is the democratic consultation and what are the long-term benefits of its plans?
What Planning Minister Matthew Guy considers “anomalies” were actually planned by the Hamer government to prevent Melbourne becoming a monolith of housing and concrete. There’s no “logic” in grabbing thousands of hectares of “logical inclusion” from green wedges, but there is pure greed for growth.
This extension of the urban boundary will be the fourth time it has been shifted since the Bracks government introduced it in 2002, so there’s no real boundary - it’s an imaginary rubbery line that expands with market forces and urban obesity.
When no one is in charge of properly regulating natural resources, cities grow in ways that are utterly unpredictable and without regard to optimising resources. Nature functions on balance, and perpetual growth is not natural. We could suffer the same fate as any other species whose habitat is destroyed by the blind pursuit of excesses.
– Vivienne Ortega, Heidelberg Heights
Try before you buy
PERHAPS there should be a scheme to allow people to try living on Melbourne’s furthest fringes for a week or so to see before they buy if they have the mental and physical stamina it takes. Try for a week driving to work on a scarcely moving freeway. Or be at the station by 7 a.m. to get a park and a spot to stand up in the train for 40 kilometres to the city.
Try booking your child into kinder or school and have a look at the sheer size of such educational facilities. (Note that size does not always equate with quality). Sit for hours in the only hospital’s emergency department. It is looking less and less appealing isn’t it? Perhaps we should encourage the Planning Minister and Premier to live such a week. It might make them less keen to jam more and more people into the city’s under-resourced fringe.
– Clancy Briggs, Berwick
Toxic consequences
IF I approached the state government with a planning proposal that would not only increase the cost of food, but also the levels of respiratory disease and other health problems, I would be quite rightly shown the door.
But this is what will transpire with the Baillieu government’s vision for greater urban sprawl and freeway development, concreting over Melbourne’s green wedges and farming belt to increase the costs of fresh produce and the levels of atmospheric toxicity.
The market will now capriciously determine all the worst possible scenarios, favouring short-term housing booms over long-term food security, freeways to the exclusion of rail infrastructure.
You’d think that with a degree in architecture, Ted Baillieu would possess some environmental sensibility that might embrace state decentralisation and a respect for the primacy of planning, but it seems not.
– John Ashton, Fitzroy North
A new model sorely needed
PLANNING Minister Matthew Guy says 37,000 lots of land will be developed over 30 years to house more than 100,000 people. This might boost the housing industry, but once the houses are built, there are no guarantees of employment near or far from the houses.
An economy largely dependent on land tax and stamp duty means perpetually being strangled by the challenges of meeting the costs of urban infrastructure, creating jobs in a declining job market, and relying on the cash flows generated by continually stretching the urban boundary. A report by National Australia Bank on Victoria’s health says the state faces challenges as the worst performing state, and that’s despite churning out more houses and land than we can currently sell. We obviously need a new economic paradigm not dependent on paving over irreplaceable open space just to create more empty houses.
– Jenny Warfe, Dromana
