Letters saved from the last month.
The Age, 26/11:
Tall syndrome
WHY is Melbourne so obsessed with tall buildings (“Building the future, prefab style”, The Age, 23/11)? Since landing here in 1965, I have observed the malaise of the Melbourne skyline and the growing alienation of the city from its street-level precincts. Give me any European city: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Vienna, Berlin, and we don’t see this obsession with height. Why do we lack the determination to halt this 300-metre-plus madness? Surely more than just 3000 local residents and owners should have a say on how our city should look and function. Where is the social inclusionary policy to ensure at least 25 per cent of these 600 apartments are social housing units, the way some key European cities with higher density residential developments have done for years?
– Henk van Leeuwen, Elwood
System must be fair and orderly
FROM the articles in The Age criticising government policy on asylum seekers, one would think this is the majority view. It is not. In The Age poll (23/11), 67 per cent voted in favour of the tougher new conditions. Our migration and refugee system is a mess. Many formal migration applications languish in “in-trays” while others are fast-tracked. Boat arrivals and visa overstayers make a mockery of orderly process. This is the crux of people’s concern. We want an orderly, regulated, fair and modest immigration stream. Only when politicians do something to achieve this will community unease decrease.
– Geoff Hall, Mentone
4/12:
Minister for what?
LAST week I had to take my wife to Casey Hospital’s emergency department. As is usual in many EDs, the scene was chaotic. There was an expected wait of three to four hours for a bed. Although the staff were professional and tireless in their efforts, my experience highlighted the enormous problems that confront the state as we continue down the path of "expand at all costs". As our population grows at breakneck speed, the essential services (health, education, transport, law and order) continue to be treated as afterthoughts.
Casey Hospital cannot cope with current demands, let alone those that will follow as Berwick, Pakenham and Cranbourne continue their massive sprawl into farmland. And this experience is not unique to the south-east growth corridor.
There is a distinct lack of planning around the expansion of housing estates. Railway stations are inadequate before they are even completed and road infrastructure continues to play catch-up. Until such time as the future needs of all Victorians are taken into account the Minister for Planning should be renamed the Minister for Building.
– David Glover, Berwick
I DON’T get humans – disastrously heating the planet, using up dwindling resources, and yet we’re still encouraging people to have more babies. Good thing we have Planet B to move to.
– Mick Webster, Chiltern
Sovereignty issue
“DEVELOPERS may have inadvertently compromised the majority of the council" (“Cash may gag council vote”, The Saturday Age, 8/12). What’s inadvertent about it? Surely they donated to Melbourne City councillors knowing full well what they hoped to get out of it. No such thing as a free lunch and all that. As for the councillors: whatever it takes to maintain power and all its perks, eh?
So, we sell off our city – and our farms – to the Chinese. The Kuwaitis are also getting in on the act of changing our skyline. We sell our infrastructure to overseas interests, and send profits offshore. But we cunningly maintain responsibility for costs. And we don’t bat an eyelid at airborne foreign nationals overstaying their visas by the thousands.
So just what does make Australia a sovereign country? That’s right. We stop people in leaky boats who seek asylum.
Our safe borders and all that cash from developers and investors are contributing to my wellbeing by, um, let me think. There’s a reason I’m sure. By God, I’m proud to be an Aussie.
– Margaret Callinan, Balwyn
Cracks are showing
THE general tone of commentary in The Age implies that Australians who are against asylum seekers arriving by boat are heartless and incapable of seeing what is right or wrong.
I resent both implications. Politicians should be guided by the wants of the majority of their constituents – partly because that is their mandate, but mostly because that is how to get elected.
There are 40 million refugees and if they are resettled satisfactorily, there could be a billion more. A tiny fraction of that number can wreck our economy in the short term (the cracks are already showing). Australians do not have to be heartless to see these threats.
– Patrick Shiels, South Clayton
Herald-Sun, 29/11:
Numbers game lost
EVEN the biggest environmental vandals agree on one thing; the world is overpopulated. The Middle East, Asia, India, China, Africa and South America are the most grossly overpopulated areas, about 700 per cent over capacity.
Australia would be the least overpopulated country.
We’re only 100 per cent over our human-carrying capacity and climbing.
The reason we’re climbing is because our traitorous major parties insist on continuing with mass immigration, despite the overwhelming opposition from the Australian people.
They argue that we can’t refuse because of the distressed circumstances of the countries these immigrants come from.
Overpopulation causes these distressed circumstances in the first place.
Are we supposed to become exactly like the countries these countries the immigrants are so desperate to leave?
– Frank Brown, Richmond
3/12:
Growth economy a vicious circle
A GROWTH-based economy flies in the face of any logic, or recognition that the world is finite and that life-giving resources are in rapid decline— not to mention the grave threats of peak oil and climate change!
It’s a way of digging ourselves into an abyss, with further to fall when we hit the limits to growth. Growing our economy is compounding further the threats and tangles we already have in Melbourne. Economic growth will consume us!
Our food bowls are under threat from urban sprawl, and the consumption of green wedges for housing and businesses, etc, is a symptom of excessive population growth.
The congestion on our roads is constricting productivity. Our politicians are living in a parallel past world of plenty, when we benefited from population growth.
Planning Minister Matthew Guy is not planning but facilitating zones for open-slather developments in reaction to high population growth.
It’s incredibly stupid to be driven by habit, and addicted to an economic model that’s not only expensive and environmentally threatening, but can’t be maintained into the future.
The next generations will be forced to accept less amenities, higher costs of living, loss of land, home ownership only for the privileged and a Melbourne destroyed by greed.
The planning we have today, rather than true planning for future contingencies and global threats, will make Melbourne, and Victoria, a worse place to live.
Any perpetual growth on finite resources, both natural and monetary, is madness and suicidal.
The growth-based economic model needs to be replaced by a steady-state, sustainable economy. The short-circuiting of a long-term habit will have its pains, but future generations will condemn us unless we do.
– Vivienne Ortega, Heidelberg
28/12:
City being zoned to death
NEIGHBOURHOOD disputes will escalate within councils and local communities with the rezoning policies that Planning Minister Matthew Guy wants to introduce.
It’s a re-engineering of suburbs where people live, to actually enforce less planning and less regulations with higher-density housing (in most areas) and more stressful living.
We should be moving away from a car-based mentality to more efficient, seamless, public transport. Fuel will inevitably continue to increase in price, along with all the other pressures causing the increases in the costs of living.
Our Government is locked into a retro past, when growth benefited and suited us.
Now, it’s causing discontent, the destruction of family-friendly communities and the erosion of our living standards.
Building cities is expensive, and the Government wants us, the voters, to quietly accept that Melbourne must be re-engineered to become bigger, denser and busier, jammed with traffic, noise and millions more people so they can continue to propagate their outdated growth-based economic model. Bigger is not necessarily better!
– V. Ortega, Heidelberg Heights
