Am I naive in thinking politicians are elected to represent the interests of constituents? And to do so fully and fairly, don’t they need to understand both sides of an argument?
So how in the name of all that’s sane can an alderman who attends a public meeting to hear objections to a proposed development be deemed to have a conflict of interest?
That four Hobart City Council aldermen were excluded from voting on a contentious housing proposal for land in Ancanthe Park adjacent to the Lady Franklin Museum because they chose to acquaint themselves with community feeling is outrageous, farcical and profoundly undemocratic.
Hobart City Council has, in Mr Brendan Lennard, an informed and respected heritage authority.
He recommended to council that David Crean, a former state minister, be refused permission to develop one of the most architecturally and historically important sites in Australia.
Council seemed prepared to accept this expert advice when suddenly a legal spanner was hurled into the works.
Most rational people take a conflict of interest to mean a pecuniary interest. Yet none of the four aldermen who were barred from voting has any known possibility of financial gain from this odious proposal.
Given the council was then left without a quorum it fell to one Neil Noye, the Council’s Director of Development and Environmental Services, to decide and he came down in favour of the applicant.
Now for all I know Mr Noye may have the aesthetic sophistication of Robert Hughes, the combined appreciation of colonial architecture of two of the country’s acknowledged experts Dr James Broadbent and Mr Clive Lucas, the sensitivity to cultural landscape of Tasmania’s distinguished landscape historian Gwenda Sheridan (TT: Ancanthe: All that will be lost)with a nice helping of the wisdom of Solomon thrown in for good measure, but I suspect he has few of these qualifications.
So here we are in the ridiculous situation of a jelly-backed government remaining mum on a matter of astonishing importance to Tasmania’s credibility and a council in retreat behind legal flim-flam.
It would be interesting to know what opinion the new chair of the Tasmanian Heritage Council, Dr Dianne Snowden, has of this ghastly development.
Where Leo’s love sprang from …
As a teenager living in working-class Sydney suburbia, I often spent Sunday afternoons in the State Library of New South Wales.
I’d take the train to Wynyard, walk to Macquarie Street, enter that great temple-like building, breast the counter and request access from the despectacled lady librarian to W. Hardy Wilson’s Old Colonial Architecture in New South Wales and Tasmania, a hernia-courting tome bound between still marbleised boards and stamped with the author’s seal, a stylised bat in gilt.
Published in 1924, it was the first, and remains the finest, record of many of Australia’s finest Georgian buildings.
It comprised the aesthete/architect/author’s haunting etchngs of old houses in our two earliest states.
Among these, the one that remains, six decades later, most powerful for me was as remote not only from the Greece that inspired it, but from the drab ham and beef shop above which I grew up after a forced remove from a pub my feckless father ran in far west of New South Wales.
It was Wilson’s magisterial depiction of the Lady Franklin Museum, a classical tempietto in the midst of the Aussie bush.
It is this exquisite, unique building and what’s left of the original landscape that once surrounded it, that so many passionate Tasmanians are fighting to preserve from the depredations of a developer who should know better.
• John Hawkins:
It would appear that some people doubt the connection between the current Chair of the Heritage Council and the Heritage Assessment conducted by Paul Davies for DM Crean, November 2011 as attached.
Para 5, I quote “Historical research on the history of Ancanthe Park and the surrounding lands has been undertaken on behalf of the applicants by Dianne Snowden (historian) copies of the various documents are attached.”
