Are councils across New South Wales reclassifying community land by stealth?

Shoalhaven Council’s decision to reclassify land used by a homeless shelter, youth centre and disability services made me wonder whether this was an isolated decision. It is not. Across New South Wales, councils under financial pressure are reviewing the land they own, changing some properties from community land to operational land and creating the legal pathway for sale, redevelopment or longer commercial leases.

The language sounds administrative. Its effect can be substantial. Under the Local Government Act, council-owned land is generally classified as either community land or operational land. Community land has been set aside for public use. It can include parks, sporting grounds, natural areas and buildings used for community purposes. It must be managed under a plan of management and cannot simply be sold.

Operational land has far fewer restrictions. It can be leased commercially, redeveloped or sold. Reclassification does not automatically mean that a property will be sold, though it removes one of the major legal barriers preventing a sale.

That distinction became important in Shoalhaven this week. The council voted to proceed with the reclassification of several properties used by community organisations, including Safe Shelter Shoalhaven, Nowra Youth Centre, Noah’s Inclusion Services and Werninck Craft Cottage.

Safe Shelter Shoalhaven provides crisis accommodation for up to 12 people experiencing homelessness. The youth centre provides a place for young people. Noah’s Inclusion Services supports children with disabilities and their families. These are not vacant blocks tucked behind a council depot. People are using them.

The ABC reported that the organisations learned their properties were being considered only when the council report became public. The council’s chief executive apologised for the lack of consultation. Shoalhaven Council manages more than 3,100 parcels of land. About 1,700 are already classified as operational. Its property sales program includes isolated and underused land, land with strategic development potential and what it describes as underperforming community facilities. Council says community land must first be reclassified before it can be sold.

The question is not whether councils should ever sell land. Councils acquire properties for many reasons. Some become surplus. A small block may have no public access. A former depot may no longer be required. Selling genuinely unused land can release money for services or infrastructure the community values more.

The problem starts when council looks at a building and sees only the land beneath it. A homeless shelter occupies a valuable site. A youth centre brings in little income. A disability service fails the spreadsheet test. The market calls that underperformance. The people who rely on those places may call it the difference between being supported and being abandoned.

Central Coast Council offers one of the clearest examples of how financial crisis can turn public land into a source of emergency cash. After the council’s financial collapse in 2020, administrators began an extensive asset sales program. Properties were divided into those already classified as operational land and those requiring reclassification before sale.

Council reports openly stated that some community land would be reclassified and sold for no less than market value.

The council knew the process could take up to 18 months, with public exhibition and formal planning approvals along the way. This was not a debate about the future of public land. It was a plan to raise cash.

Kiama followed a different path with Blue Haven Bonaira. The land contained a modern aged-care and retirement complex completed in 2019. It had become community land by default because the council failed to classify it as operational within the required period after acquiring it.

The Blue Haven Bonaira case shows why every reclassification deserves to be judged on its own facts. This was not a neighbourhood hall or a sporting field. It was an aged-care facility built with substantial public investment that also included the heritage-listed Barroul House. The project later became central to Kiama Council’s financial crisis after the Auditor-General found construction costs had been underestimated by around $30 million. Council argued the land had become community land through an administrative oversight and that reclassification corrected its legal status. Community submissions took a different view, arguing that the public investment and heritage value strengthened the case for keeping the land protected. Whatever position people took, reclassification was the legal step that made the eventual sale possible.

Sutherland Shire Council offers another scenario. When it proposed reclassifying land at North Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club, community consultation led to a narrower approach. Only the part of the site containing commercial tenancies was reclassified, while the rest remained community land. Instead of treating the whole property as a single financial asset, the council separated the income-producing area from the part used for community purposes.

Sutherland Shire Council showed that reclassification does not have to be an all-or-nothing decision. After consultation, it reclassified only the commercial section of the North Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club site and kept the rest as community land. That is the broader lesson. Councils can separate the parts of a property that generate income from the parts that serve the public. Reclassification should not become a blunt instrument for turning an entire community asset into something easier to sell.

Shoalhaven’s decision is not just about one council or one group of community organisations. It raises a broader question about how councils plan for the future.

Kiama’s experience is a reminder of what can happen when long-term asset management falls behind. After selling Blue Haven Bonaira to deal with one financial crisis, the council is now facing more than $50 million in identified upgrades at its remaining aged-care facilities, including major fire safety works.

Every council faces ageing infrastructure and rising costs. Community assets will sometimes need to be sold. The question is whether those decisions are part of a long-term strategy or whether they are being made one property at a time as the next financial pressure arrives.

Communities deserve that conversation before their local hall, youth centre, homeless shelter or disability service appears on a list. Once it does, planning has already failed and the community is left fighting to save what council should have planned to protect.

This article is part of a series examining the decisions that shape our communities long before most people hear about them. I am following the stories behind local government decisions to better understand how public assets are managed, how communities are involved and what those decisions mean for future generations. See my first blog in the series here 

The question Shoalhaven has every NSW community asking

Shoalhaven Council has voted to reclassify a group of council properties from community land to operational land, opening the way for them to be sold. Some of those buildings are used by a homeless shelter, a youth centre and disability services. The organisations affected reportedly learned their buildings were on the list only when the council report became public. I have spent years arguing that governments should speak to the people affected before making decisions. So my first question was simple. How does that happen?

If a homeless shelter, a youth service or a disability organisation is using a council building every day, how do they not get a phone call saying, “We’re under enormous financial pressure and we’re looking at every option. We need to talk.”

Maybe there is an explanation. I want to hear it. Yes a number of Councils are under enormous financial pressure. They are expected to deliver more services, maintain more assets and somehow make the numbers add up. I don’t envy them.

What I do struggle with is a decision-making process that appears to leave the people most affected reading about their future in a council agenda. That isn’t how trust is built.

My community  has seen this in action. People in Kiama have already watched community land become operational land before it was sold. We know these decisions divide communities because we’ve lived through one ourselves.

That made me wonder whether Shoalhaven is an isolated case, or whether we’re seeing the beginning of a much bigger trend across New South Wales. That’s what I’m going to find out.

This is the first of three articles. The next one looks at other councils that have reclassified community land and asks whether a precedent is emerging.

The third asks the question sitting underneath all of this. Why are councils reaching this point in the first place?

This article is part of a series examining the decisions that shape our communities long before most people hear about them. I am following the stories behind local government decisions to better understand how public assets are managed, how communities are involved and what those decisions mean for future generations. See my second blog in the series here 

Governments created the trust crisis feeding far right politics

Governments have worn people down by asking for their views and ignoring what they hear.

Kiama Council’s draft engagement strategy shows how the pattern works. It uses the language of participation, then says the community will rarely be given influence because councillors make the final decisions.

That is democracy reduced to voting day.

In a true democracy councillors can make a community informed final decision after they have helped the community define the question, examine the evidence and develop the options. Instead, residents are too often invited in after the answer has already been decided..

I have watched this model play out in consultation after consultation. Residents read the documents, give up their time, write detailed submissions backed by evidence and explain how a proposal will affect their lives and their community.

Council thanks them for participating, then adopts a policy that looks almost exactly as it did before the process began.

All we were offered was an opportunity to comment on someone else’s answer.

We elect people to represent us. They set priorities, approve policies, question advice and vote on decisions. They also choose what kind of relationship they have with the community.

You cannot represent people unless you are prepared to have conversations with them.

A conversation begins early. Elected representatives explain the problem, share the evidence, listen to the people affected, test assumptions and ask questions. They explain the competing pressures, show what changed because people participated and give clear reasons for the decision they make.

When that relationship breaks down, the damage spreads beyond council chambers.

People who lose trust in those they elected become more willing to listen to someone promising to sweep the whole system aside.

Their hero on the white horse. Someone who says the institutions have failed, the usual rules are useless and only they have the strength or courage to act. They offer simple answers to complex problems, blame a clear enemy and ask people to trust the person rather than the process.

Calling voters ignorant is easier than admitting elected representatives stopped listening. Blaming social media is easier than examining years of predetermined decisions, staged consultation and carefully controlled public meetings.

People turn towards political extremes because they are desperate to feel represented by someone.

Elected representatives have helped create the conditions in which far right groups grow. They cannot dismiss that rise as a failure of intelligence or judgement among voters.

This is also where government loses one of its most useful sources of information. A trusted consultation process allows elected representatives to read the room, hear what people are experiencing, test whether a proposal will achieve its purpose and adjust before damage is done.

Kiama Council’s Draft Community Engagement Strategy 2026 to 2030 adopts the International Association for Public Participation spectrum. It lists co-design, working groups, deliberative forums, consensus conferences and citizens’ juries.

Then it says the empower level will rarely be used because councillors make the final decisions. What do you make of that?

The methods are listed. The strategy does not say when council will use them. Without clear triggers, councillors can continue accepting another survey, another exhibition and another invitation to comment on a proposal already framed by staff.

In my submission, I asked council to identify which decisions will involve collaboration, co-design or deliberative participation.

I asked council to begin those processes early enough for the community to help define the problem.

I asked council to publish the engagement level chosen for each major project and explain why, set clear triggers for citizens’ juries, deliberative forums, working groups and co-design, and report what changed because people participated.

Kiama also has access to expertise through Twyfords, based in this region. Vivien Twyford and her colleagues helped establish the Australasian chapter of the International Association for Public Participation and build the use of the IAP2 model in Australia.

Twyfords helps organisations and communities explore an issue together, understand competing pressures and define the dilemma before developing responses. That experience addresses the gap in the draft strategy.

Council has named the methods. Twyfords understands when to use them, how early the process should begin and how to design engagement that earns trust.

The organisation also knows Kiama, its history, relationships, tensions and different communities of place.

The draft uses the language around consultation while leaving the existing decision-making model intact.

Elected people created this trust crisis.

They can fix it by returning democracy to what it is meant to be, people governing together through representatives who listen, explain, involve and remain accountable for the decisions they make

The secret is out, our Hidden Treasures are hidden no more

Every hour of every day, around 150,000 people across NSW are volunteering. If NSW volunteers were a company, they would be larger than the Commonwealth Bank. Right now, someone is driving a neighbour to chemotherapy, coaching a child, running a stall, checking on an older person, caring for an animal or setting up chairs in a hall.

On Thursday 23 July, the Kiama Pavilion filled with people determined to make that invisible work visible. The Inaugural Kiama Electorate Recognition Awards, hosted by the Member for Kiama, Katelin McInerney MP, celebrated the local women named on the NSW Government’s Hidden Treasures Honour Roll 2025, an initiative of the Rural Women’s Network that has honoured more than 1,300 women and girls volunteering across regional, rural and remote NSW since 2010.

“These are the women who show up week after week, year after year, and who rarely seek the limelight,” Ms McInerney said. “They would prefer we not make a fuss about them. With this event, we are totally ignoring that.”

The women honoured show that volunteering looks different in every pair of hands.

It looks like Ebony Wilson of Jamberoo, whose first steps into volunteering were inspired by cows, helping young people see a future in agriculture through the Young Dairy Network and speaking openly about resilience and mental health in farming.

It looks like Dr Christa Wood of Gerringong, who co-founded Dementia Inclusive Dancing so people living with dementia can experience movement, music, joy and company.

It looks like Annette Young of Kiama, with more than fifty years of service to the Kiama Show Society, tennis, Meals on Wheels, her church and community organisations. Fifty years of seeing what needs doing and doing it.

It looks like Kate Whitworth of Jamberoo and Maree Shepherd of Kiama Downs, creating places where people find their voice through music, from the Flame Tree Project’s opportunities for hundreds of young people to the confidence and friendship of Sing Australia.

It looks like Jenny Ferguson of Kiama, leading a dementia-inclusive choir where singing becomes memory, movement, laughter and the feeling of still being part of something.

It looks like Karen Renkema Lang of Kiama, creating room for local voices through environmental protection, civic participation and Kiama Community Radio.

It looks like Esther Keenan of Kiama Downs, building a longer table. Through The Everyday Table, people find affordable pantry items, a shared meal and a place where everyone is welcome.

It looks like Rosemary Aldred of Kangaroo Valley, raising guide and therapy dogs and then helping other puppy-raisers do the same.

It looks like Sabrina Kelly of Kiama, creating a social club where neurodivergent teenagers feel accepted and understood, while leading a P&C and fundraising for the surf club.

It looks like Jessy Wiggins of Shoalhaven Heads, giving week after week to Girl Guides since 2013 so young girls can make friends, learn skills and test their courage.

And it looks like Nicole O’Brien of Kiama, running the sports club barbecue before heading off to champion local farmers, producers and small businesses at the next market.

Musical Director Antoinette Raynal, herself recognised as a Hidden Treasure in 2024, led the Katandra Women’s A Cappella Choir in a beautiful performance. Katandra brings women together through music, friendship and shared purpose, while also supporting local women’s initiatives through the proceeds of its performances.

The ceremony paid special tribute to the late Lorraine Ettingshausen, recognised posthumously.

Lorraine helped establish the Voluntary Home Nursing Service and gave decades to Camp Quality, supporting children with cancer and their families from the charity’s local beginnings until her retirement. She organised camps, trained volunteers, sat beside frightened parents and stayed with families as children were dying. She gave fifty-six eulogies, fifty of them for children. When poor health forced her retirement, three hundred people came to say goodbye. A year later she became a Volunteer in Policing and served another ten years.

Her granddaughter said it best: “She didn’t just fill her own life. She filled ours.”

The event also marked the first presentation of the Electorate Community Service Award, presented to the Sunday Community Group, founded by a group of Foxground-based women, in recognition of their dedication to supporting those doing it tough in our own community.

“Establishing this award means we now have a permanent way to say thank you to the groups, not just the individuals, who hold our community together,” Ms McInerney said.

People join to give. Along the way, they receive things they never expected: skills they never set out to learn, mentors, friendships and places where they belong. Every one of the women honoured has made her community stronger, warmer and more able to care for its own.

Think about the women and girls in your own community groups who give their time, energy and care without seeking recognition. Nominate one of them for the next Hidden Treasures Honour Roll at hiddentreasures.awardsplatform.com. Nominations close 31 December. The form takes ten minutes. The hardest part is choosing just one name.

 

 

A surge in Cyclospora cases exposes gaps in America’s food safety system

When the headline outruns the evidence

Headline in NYT 20 July 2026 that I believe is irresponsible. Source. 

The New York Times told its readers this morning that fresh produce “keeps making us sick”.

That is a powerful claim. It is also much stronger than the evidence presented beneath it.

The article begins with a serious outbreak of cyclosporiasis in the United States. More than 8,000 cases have been reported. People have suffered severe cramps, nausea and diarrhoea, sometimes for weeks.

The problem is that public health authorities are still trying to identify the source of the outbreak. Lettuce from Taylor Farms initially produced a positive test for cyclospora. The Food and Drug Administration later said that result was false. The investigation and recall were continuing.

IYes a company has been wrongly named and shamed – the source had not been established.

Yet the headline had already reached its verdict.

The photograph did the rest. A bright bowl of salad became the visual shorthand for danger.

The article repeatedly acknowledges how uncertain foodborne illness investigations can be. Most people who become sick never see a doctor. Many are never tested. People often cannot remember everything they ate days or weeks earlier. Only a small proportion of illnesses are linked to a particular food, and fewer still to a particular product.

These facts make the article’s accuracy impossible to justify..

Instead, uncertainty is acknowledged and then pushed aside as the argument broadens from one unresolved outbreak to a much larger accusation against fresh produce, farming and food processing.

The author argues that farmers must improve irrigation water, processors must adopt better sanitation technology and governments must improve surveillance and investigation.

All of that may be worth pursuing.

What the article does not establish is that the current outbreak proves those particular failures caused these infections.

It also leaves out the denominator.

Americans eat enormous quantities of fruit and vegetables. Many are eaten raw. A total number of illnesses tells us something, yet it does not tell us the risk of becoming sick from each serving, whether that risk is rising, or how it compares with other foods.

More illnesses linked to a widely consumed food category does not automatically mean that each piece of lettuce or fruit has become more dangerous.

The political argument arrives near the end. The author raises legitimate concerns about cuts to food safety research, public health staffing and scientific advisory bodies under the Trump administration.

This does deserve scrutiny.

The article would have credibility if it had been built directly from evidence showing how those decisions weakened outbreak detection and response.

Instead, the article uses an unresolved outbreak as the emotional entry point for a broader political argument.

The result is an opinion piece trying to do too much at once.

It warns readers about a current outbreak, criticises food production practices and attacks cuts to public health capacity.

Each is an important subject. Combined beneath a headline declaring that fresh produce keeps making us sick, they create more heat than clarity.

Public health communication depends on trust.

Trust is weakened when the headline says more than the investigation can prove.

History is full of people who could not spell their own names.

Christine Yeats Convenor of the Assessment Sub-Committee of the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Committee.

A sold-out audience gathered at Kiama Library today to learn from two of Australia’s most experienced historical researchers.

Kiama Historical Society was honoured to welcome Carol Liston AO, President of the Royal Australian Historical Society, and Christine Yeats, its Senior Vice President.

Carol is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on early colonial New South Wales, particularly the development of the County of Cumberland and the lives of convict women transported from Britain.

Christine is an archivist and historical researcher who spent much of her career with State Records NSW, now part of Museums of History NSW. She is also Convenor of the Assessment Sub-Committee of the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Committee.

Carol and Christine set up for their presentations with Vice President of the Kiama Historical Society Dr Tony Gilmour watching cleary please the AV is working 

For local historians, family researchers and writers across the Illawarra and Shoalhaven, having Carol and Christine visit Kiama and share knowledge gathered over a lifetime was a rare opportunity.

It soon became clear that historical research begins with persistence.

Our ancestors could not always spell their own names.

Neither, apparently, could the people recording them.

A surname might begin with Mc, Mac, M’ or a space. Trove may read it differently again. Christine’s advice was simple. Try every variation you can imagine, including a few you cannot imagine, and never assume something is absent because your first search failed.

She also demonstrated how to use quotation marks, AND, NOT and Trove’s persistent links, along with the importance of saving the newspaper title, date and page number. Search results can move as new material is added, meaning the article you found easily today may play hide-and-seek tomorrow.

Newspapers, Christine told us, are wonderful places to begin. They are not necessarily wonderful places to stop.

Historic Waughope House and the farm today is still and operating dairy farm

One article about Kiama’s Waugh family contained a letter and plenty of useful clues. It also elevated the wrong family member, incorrectly explained how Waughope got its name and confidently repeated details that did not survive contact with the original records.

Nobody had necessarily set out to mislead anyone. Someone filled a gap, another person repeated it, and eventually the story acquired the reassuring appearance of fact.

Carol took us further back, into colonial records created because Governor King wanted to prevent “fraud, confusion and perplexity”.

That may be the most honest description ever given to a government recordkeeping project.

The Old Register records what ordinary people were buying, selling, mortgaging, promising and fighting over from the earliest years of the colony. Carol showed us why one document is never enough. Every record reflects the knowledge, purpose and opinion of the person who created it. The researcher’s task is to compare it with maps, correspondence, newspapers, land records and other evidence.

Dr Tony Gimour Vice President Kiama Historical Society, Christine Yeats and Cameron McDonald Mayor and Patron

Then a Kiama silk mystery appeared.

Christine had been investigating Anne Waugh, who sent locally produced silk to the Paris Exhibition of 1855. That search led through parish maps, title records, primary applications and annotations left by long-dead clerks.

It also raised a new local question.

Are some of Kiama’s old mulberry trees survivors of its forgotten silk industry?

Kiama Historical Society has a well-earned reputation for bringing together outstanding speakers, fascinating local stories and food tables that deserve their own place in the archives. The magnificent lunch was prepared by the Children’s Medical Research team. 

Nobody walked out with a neat answer to every historical puzzle.

We left knowing where to look next, what to question and why the smallest handwritten number on the corner of a document may change an entire family story.

History, it turns out, is less about finding one perfect record and more about refusing to be defeated by a badly spelled surname, an intimidating website or a very convincing local legend.

Remember the “pinkie” campaign could it fix our e bike problem

Remember this campaign? Will it fix our e-bike problem?

Watch it again and then ask yourself a serious policy question: is this the answer to Kiama’s e-bike problem?

The Pinkie campaign understood something about teenage boys that every threat misses. The whole performance is for an audience,They think they are bulletproof. Fines bounce off them. Warnings bounce off them. The road toll belongs to other people. Could laughter from the girls on the corner be the answer

Kiama has tried the enforcement route before. I mean well before. In the 1880s this town had a big hoon problem. Mobs of forty and fifty boys patrolled the streets from ten o’clock. They damaged everything in sight. Joseph Weston lobbied hard for his solution, “bring back the whip”

Larrikinism, he thundered, was “a social and moral infection which should be stamped out like small-pox”

In November 1883 he got his wish. “LARRIKINS BEWARE! The ‘Cat’ has arrived.” Triangles, a cat-o’-nine-tails and two taws came down from Sydney on Saturday’s steamer, and the magistrate a Mr Connell announced he would happily show the appliance to anyone desirous of seeing it at the court-house. Kiama invented the pop-up exhibition a century early.

In March 1884 the cat made its courtroom debut, produced before three youthful offenders to rattle them. The delinquents smiled. The Bench promised them a taste of it next time. By the close of 1885 the cat was still waiting for its first customer, the most feared instrument in the British penal system reduced to a conversation piece with viewing hours.

This week Council opened a portal where residents can report e-bike incidents. Same recipe, new appliance. Acquire the instrument with fanfare, then wait for the teenagers to reform themselves. The boys on Collins Street will smile at the portal exactly the way the larrikins smiled at the cat, assuming word of it ever reaches them.

Which brings me back to the pinkie. It cost less than a steamer and it frightened more teenagers than the cat ever did. So here is my alternative submission to Council: skip the portal, commission the ad. Or save the money entirely. Collins Street, Saturday night, all of us on the footpath, little fingers raised.

Watch the add again. What do you think?

Here comes Pollyanna

I’ve just had a big birthday. The kind with a zero in it. You move into a new decade whether you’re ready or not.

Walking into the restaurant, half a dozen people I wasn’t dining with wished me happy birthday. That’s a small town for you. I’m noisy in this community. I have opinions, I used to write for the paper, and everybody knows what I think. Every time we have an election, people are convinced I’m standing for council. Apparently I’m just what council needs.

This post challenges that idea. Our community doesn’t need me. One person can’t deliver what this community deserves, and neither can nine. It needs an engaged community working together, not keyboard warriors: informed people with the skills to make sure the bureaucrats are working for us.

Around my own table were Greens, Labor supporters, independents and friends who had stood for council themselves. Between us we had campaigned, letterboxed, handed out how-to-vote cards and argued for change across more elections than any of us cared to count. If anyone in this district believed in democracy, it was us.

For the record, I’ve never voted for a party in my life. I vote for the person. Over the years that has meant I have voted Liberal, National, Labor, Greens and independent.

The talk turned to council. A councillor had resigned, and the by-election to replace him will cost ratepayers about $200,000. Our council is broke. That’s $200,000 it doesn’t have. The question went around the table: what could one councillor achieve when the bureaucrats seem to have the rest under their thumb?

This is how bad it is. I know our councillors. That’s what my year at the paper gave me. They spend a lot of time on social media trying to work out what the community cares about. So they’re hearing the loud voices, and like most communities, we have plenty of loud voices who all want different things.

I said I’d love to see us try what a district in north-east Victoria did. Build the community first. Find out what people want. Learn to solve problems together, and worry about who to elect after that.

One of my oldest friends smiled and said, “Here comes Pollyanna.”

I know her well enough to understand what she meant by that. Her focus was looking after her friend. She knows what twenty years of heart and soul in agriculture, encouraging people to believe we’re all in this together and the win-win is there if we go after it, had cost my mental health. I had witnessed failure first hand, and neither of us wanted a repeat. That’s how much my friends care. So I listen. I came home and had a big think about whether she was right.

This post is the big think. It ends in an electorate nobody at my dinner mentioned.

In December 2012, a small group from north-east Victoria got eleven minutes with their federal member, Sophie Mirabella. The meeting ended when she told them, “The people of Indi aren’t interested in politics.”

Her district knew her by then. She had boycotted the Apology to the Stolen Generations. She had stood beside Tony Abbott in front of the “Ditch the Witch” signs. Neither time did she ask her community what they thought. They had a member who didn’t speak for them.

They went home and proved her wrong.

The push had started with two young people who grew up in the district and moved to Melbourne for work, because they believed there was nothing at home for them. They decided to do something about it. The generation who had stayed backed them: young people with the idea, older people with the networks and the skills. Between them they ran hundreds of kitchen table conversations, asking what people wanted for the region.

And they argued. Some of the group wanted a seat at the table in Canberra. Others wanted the focus on the community itself. It was the same argument we had at my birthday dinner. Then they did what makes this movement so smart. They agreed to disagree and kept working, until they were confident the community was engaged and that a tilt at the seat was what the community wanted.

Before the 2013 election they wrote down what success looked like: engaged community members turning a safe seat into a marginal one. Winning came last on their own list of aims.

They won anyway. They unseated a frontbencher. They kept meeting between elections. When Cathy McGowan retired, the community chose Helen Haines, and the seat has now been theirs across five elections.

Hardly anyone in New South Wales has heard of Indi, and I’ve come to think that is the strength of it. They did it for the district, not for the fame.

My friend is right. People are hard to organise. Indi is proof that hard and impossible are different words.

It also helped me work out what all the council talk is about. When my neighbours decide I’m standing, it’s the habit we’ve all fallen into: find one noisy person, hand them the problem, and wait. Indi swapped that habit for a better one: believe you can do it yourselves.

We’re already proud of where we live. Imagine being proud of what we build together. Our dry stone walls have stood for a hundred and fifty years. They’re under threat and the reason they’re still standing is our community made it clear it cares about them. What we love survives because we stand up for it. That is true of walls, and it’s true of towns.

The people who wrote Indi’s story down ask a question.

“Have you wondered who is hearing your voice, listening to your community?”

My answer is the power is in your hands, too

So Pollyanna has a question of her own. Why does organising ourselves sound less realistic than spending another $200,000 on another election?

How my valley became Mosman or Toorak with a blowhole, one sale at a time

I have spent a lifetime at farm kitchen tables, and in every conversation the problem is someone else’s to fix. The council’s. Canberra’s. The person who never rang back. So we elect a politician every three years, and we wait.

Look at what that actually asks of them. I hand over my problem. My road, my rates, my paddock. So does my neighbour, and his neighbour, and every voter in the electorate. The politician ends up holding thirty thousand separate problems, most of them pulling against each other, and no honest hope of fixing them all. Politics becomes a queue of grievances, and campaigning becomes promising to move you up the queue. The politician can only promise, disappoint, and be replaced by a rival who promises louder. The loudest dog in the yard wins, every time. We built this machine, and then we blame the politician when it does what it was always going to do.

And while we queue, the big calls get made without us. Here’s how it works in my valley. A dairy farm comes up for sale. A Sydney buyer pays more than any farmer could ever earn back from milk, because he’s not buying a farm, he’s buying a view for six weekends a year. The farm next door is now worth city money too, so when that farmer retires, no young farming family can afford it either. Sale by sale, working farms become holiday homes that stand dark most of the year.

And it doesn’t stop at the farm gate. Every sale drags the price of an ordinary house up with it. Kiama is now the most expensive place to buy a home in regional New South Wales, dearer than Byron Bay. The nurse at the hospital can’t buy here. The teacher can’t. The kids who grew up here can’t. There is no affordable housing here, and no social housing. The school loses children, the shops lose staff, and the town that made the views worth buying slowly stops being a town. It becomes a postcode with scenery. Mosman with a blowhole.

Nobody chose this. There was no meeting about where it was all heading, no vote, no moment anyone could point at and object to. Each sale was legal and each seller had every right. But add it all up and my district has been rezoned by the market, one sale at a time, and nobody ever asked us what the best outcome would be for the farms, the buyers, the nurses the kids or the community. I watch it from my own front gate.

So here is the problem: we hand our say to a politician with thirty thousand problems in the queue, and the calls that change our districts get made elsewhere, by the market, the local council, the state government. What’s left for the rest of us is Facebook, one keyboard at a time. Each of us finds our tribe there, and the tribe does what tribes do: agrees with itself, louder every year. Plenty of conversations. Never one table.

And here is the goal: communities with the knowledge, confidence and skills to find the best outcome for everyone affected.

One rural community in north-east Victoria worked out how to get everyone to the same table, and it’s still going strong five elections later. In my next post I’ll tell you what they did. Then I want to work on the question that follows with you: how do we do it in every district in Australia?