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?
Yes, the loss of our quality of life and the fragmentation and loss of the quality of our long time rural amenity (following our theft of First Nationers’ land) is caused in part by the block-by-block purchase of farmland/productive agricultural land. But by far the greatest cause, at least in my experience in the Kiama LGA, particularly in the past 10 or 15 years, is the purchase of large swaths of this farmland by those intent on nothing more than building housing subdivisions.
If you closely examine our local history in this regard you will, without exception, find that State and/or local government planning laws and regulations are overridden or changed or simply not enforced in the rezoning from rural to urban, the developers’ first steps towards housing subdivision development.
Exactly the same situation occurs, in my close observations over the years, when the developers, in their second steps, seek final approval for their housing subdivisions and all the layouts and plans that go with those subdivision development applications.
And then, as we have all experienced or observed, these subdivisions cause the loss of the qualities of life and wellbeing that we have all cherished.
So instead of bemoaning these losses to our human habitats after they occur, how do we stop our local and State governments from continuing to water down the planning laws and regulations at the behest of property/subdivision developers?
Or is it too late? Are we already past the point of Kiama as the Noosa of the south; or villages like Jamberoo and Gerringong becoming more Calderwoods and West Daptos?
I fear so if past governance weakness (and worse) continues quietly but relentlessly.
– Graham Pike
Jamberoo
You ask important questions as alway Graham. My last big call out to the community focuses on community capacity building. No one can do this alone they have to want to believe it and drive it themselves