WHAT PASSES FOR CIVIC PLANNING IN LAUNCESTON

You just know that you have entered some kind of bizarre time warp if you are an 'outsider' and you engage with the so-called 'planning department' at Launceston's Town Hall in Tasmania. If you bump into 'the Mayor' at a ribbon cutting ceremony chances are he'll be all blinged-up in his quasi vice regal garb with lace ruffles and everything. 

Interestingly, even in 'MUVVA HINGLUND' they've for the most part stopped this silliness but there we go in colonial Launceston – the elsewhere place at the end of the earth. Not a good marketing look in 2022.

Have a chat with the planning department and you will discover a whole lot of things that are written in stone back in the time when convicts did Launceston's roadworks and the city's founders were profiting from what they managed to get onto ships bound for elsewhere. It was a time when it was OK to use a waterway as a sewer. Indeed, you are likely to be told that it is too expensive now to do anything different – and that's not just with sewerage.

Mention 'the climate emergency' and you'll quite likely be told that Council has a policy for that but not an action plan yet because that too is too expensive – and anyway the jury is still out on that one. Mention 'placescaping, placemaking' and you'll be asked "what do you mean ... please explain" – with no hint of any real interest in what you might mean. 

And, worryingly 'placemaking' is what Local Govt is all about.

Make that observation and the conversation will quickly swing to revenue collection and your need to know about that. Talk about cultural landscaping and you'll get a lecture in English grammar and you'll be introduced to the notion that 'it' (cultural landscaping) is a 'thing', a noun and not a verb 'a doing word' –one wonders how it became a thing if nobody did it. 

It turns out that the planning department at Launceston's Town Hall is a wondrous place to have your vocabulary expanded in extraordinary ways. And you'll quickly learn that while there are 'planners' at Town Hall but they are tasked to manage 'development'. Yet another linguistic twist to take on board along with the advice that 'architecture' has lost its original meaning.

Raise the issues of history, heritage, cultural diversity, terra nullius even, and you'll be advised that these things are nothing to do with 'planning' since whoever had the most or biggest guns won and that's that. They do however get in the way of 'development' and thus they are the kind of ideas that need to be neutralised in development processing if development is go forward uninhibited by irrelevant detail.

Mention "trees" and you will be informed that developers think that they are annoying and therefore there is a need for them to be gone – best of all over a weekend. Mention the possibility of offset 'cash payments' coming into play, as is the case in other jurisdictions, and you'll told, as likely as not, that such an initiative would be inconceivable in so much as it would be cost neutral to Council.

Mention "the spectre of the flood" and again, as likely as not, you'll be told the Council has done the research and asked property owners to flood prone areas, how many times did they imagine that they imagine they could 'tolerate' being flooded. Mention that Launceston and say Lismore in Northern NSW have much in common and you'll discover that you are deluded and that your research is flawed.

The City of Launceston under appreciates the intellectual might that is at work in the city's planning and especially so when the elected representatives come together as a 'PLANNING AUTHORITY' resplendent with their skills, qualifications various and expertise. Voters need to think long and hard about all this relative to THEIR aspirations in regard to PLACEMAKING in their precinct, their cultural landscape, their cultural realities, their fiscal contributions, their cultural identity.

Robert Peel, the father of policing, tells us that "the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence." 

PERHAPS NOW IS TIME FOR CHANGE !

QUITE POSSIBLY TIME TO CONSIDER WHO IS PAID FOR WHAT 

PERHAPS NOW IS THE TIME NOT TO VOTE FOR THE INCUMBENCY