Tag: farmland

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?

The Paddock That Grew Nothing

On why “save our farmland” is the wrong fight for the right reason.

Wollongong Railway Station, 1900. 

Take a good look at that old photo of the railway station. Timber and tin, a scatter of weatherboard cottages, and open paddock rolling away in every direction. Now go and stand where the photographer stood. There isn’t a vacant block for miles. Every one of those paddocks filled in, one approval at a time, and nobody felt the loss on the day it happened. That’s how it always goes. The green doesn’t vanish in a single bad decision. It goes in slices, each one too small to argue about, until one day you look up and the hills have a rash.

The same station, 1920. Twenty years on

And it didn’t stop in 1920. Local residents Lesley East and Annette Young and their now husbands still remember driving into Wollongong in the early 1960s to see Psycho at the Regent Theatre on Keira Street, then a grand Art Deco picture palace only a few years old. They parked in a paddock right near the cinema. A paddock, in the middle of town. Today Wollongong is a city of more than 200,000 people, the Regent has been a church since 2005, Crown Street is a pedestrian mall, and the idea of an open field to leave your car in near the main street sounds like a tall tale. But that’s the whole point. Every one of those paddocks was “just one block” once.

Nobody stood in it the day it was lost.

So I have a lot of sympathy for the worry behind Graham Pike’s comment on one of my Catch-Up posts. He was referring to a development application on Minnamurra Lane, Jamberoo, a house and a farm shed on a vacant block, the one Cr Lawton sensibly sent off for a second look and independent legal advice at the May Council meeting. Here’s part of what he said:

“We might not be using the vacant lands or the land in question for food production right now. but most of these lands have been used for farming within the past century or less and, most importantly, we’ll need them for food production again as the human population, even in our area, increases uncontrollably and unsustainably and the resulting suburbanisation sprawls across and fragments this same agricultural/food producing land. The zoning of the land as RU1 or RU2 is a human construct and immaterial. It is still land that we have used and will in future need to use, if any is left uncovered by concrete and asphalt, for food production.” Graham Pike, Jamberoo

I’ve turned that over for days, because there’s a lot in it I agree with. The slow creep of houses and sheds across those hills is real. I’ve watched it happen. And his bigger worry, that we keep paving over the very ground we’ll need to feed ourselves one day, is a serious one.

In a later note, Graham went further and put his finger on what he sees as the root of it all: too many people. Human overpopulation, driving an economy that chews through the natural world. It’s a heartfelt view and plenty of thoughtful people share it.

That’s too big for me to sort out. What I’d say is simpler: whatever any of us thinks about how many people there ought to be, they’re already here. They were born, they need a roof, and saying “there are too many of them” doesn’t put one over a single head. So my mind goes to the thing we can actually do something about, which isn’t the number of people, but where they’re going to live.

The thing is, all that green didn’t go in one big decision anyone could point to. It went in slices, a block here, a shed there, each one too small to worry over on the day. Nobody ever stood up and voted to lose it. It just happened while we weren’t looking.

So maybe the better thing isn’t to fight every single house, but to decide on purpose where the houses should go, instead of letting them turn up one at a time until the hills are full again and we’re left wondering how.

And there’s a part of these “save our farmland” conversations that almost never gets said out loud. Farming is a business. For most farmers, the land isn’t only where they work. It’s the biggest thing they own, the nest egg meant to see them through old age after a lifetime of hard years and thin margins.

So when we say a paddock must stay green forever, I think we should stop and hear what we’re really asking. We’re asking that farmer, and only that farmer, to lock away the worth of their own land so the rest of us can enjoy the view on the drive past. A person in town can sell their house for whatever it’ll fetch. The farmer gets told their paddock is a community treasure and they ought to keep it green for a fraction of what it’s worth. I’m not sure that’s protecting farming. It feels more like asking one family to foot the bill for everyone else’s nice outlook.

I’ve stood on that side of the fence. I dairy farmed for decades, and I know what it is to look at a paddock and see both a lifetime’s work and the only retirement you’ve got. So I find myself asking the question that doesn’t get asked much: is that fair?

And it’s a slippery word, fair. Everyone in this thinks they’re on its side. The people in town feel it’s only fair the hills stay green, they get the view and lose nothing. The farmer feels it’s only fair they get to realise the worth of the land they’ve worked their whole life, the same as anyone else can with what they own. Both are sincere. Both are “fair.” They just can’t both have their way.

And it tends to be the farmer’s fairness that gets left out, because the farmer’s usually not in the room when the rest of us decide their paddock is too precious to touch.

So where does that leave me? Not where you might think. I’m not saying build everywhere. And I’m not saying the green hills don’t count, they’re a good part of why people love this place, and why the visitors come. The slow spread of sheds and houses across those ridgelines is real, and worth watching very closely.

But if we want our farmers to keep the hills green for the rest of us, the least we can do is be honest that we’re asking them to give something up, and decent enough to talk about who carries that cost rather than pretending it’s free.

Lock the gate on a farmer’s land and we haven’t saved farming. We’ve decided their retirement is a fair price for our view.

Good on Cr Lawton for asking for a proper look before anyone signs anything. That’s the kind of careful, eyes-open thinking this deserves, on this block and the next one. The conversation I’d like us to have isn’t “green or houses.” It’s “if we want the green, who pays for it, and is that fair on them?”

I don’t have a tidy answer. I’m not sure there is one. But I think we owe the farmers at least the courtesy of asking.

A note on the photos: I came across these two images on Facebook, where they were dated 1900 and 1920 and identified as Wollongong Railway Station. I haven’t been able to independently verify the dates or the photographer, so if anyone can confirm the details or knows the original source, I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch.