Whilst I’ve had a look at some of the documents relating to the cable car proposed for kunanyi by the Mount Wellington Cableway Company, I’m not professing to be an expert.

As others have urged, if you are making a submission (against or for) you would do well to refer to specific parts of the Development Application and how they fit with the planning scheme.

Because I’m not doing that the rules don’t apply, so here goes:

I hate the cable car proposal because it’s a colonialist piece of shit.

Vica Bayley came at the issue when he spoke at the Town Hall meeting organised by Residents Opposed to the Cable Car:

“I just want to unpack one thing, remembering that this is a company that went to court, went to the tribunal, to try to low bar Aboriginal heritage, to try to avoid doing an onsite Aboriginal heritage assessment. Put that aside for a minute. And then think about the assessment that Nala just mentioned. It’s a stones and bones assessment, to look for stones and bones under the footprint of the development. It didn’t look at cultural landscape issues. For 200 years in Australia, we’ve been using the lack of evidence of occupation as an excuse to take land, to appropriate culture, and to ignore the concerns of Aboriginal people. This is terra nullius, on our very own mountain, kunanyi.”

I’d go even further. I’d say that to the developers the mountain doesn’t exist with any kind of heritage or inherent value of its own. It just happens to be the best vantage point over one of the most beautiful estuary cities in the world. It might as well be a concrete block 1271 metres high. Nice big rock pylon you got there Hobart, thanks. We’ll have it for nothing and you should be grateful.

And this is the story of colonialism the world over, for centuries. One group – entitled, powerful, and usually driven by a whiffy combination of ego and greed – roam the landscape and indeed seascape in search of anything they fancy. And they take it. And if it ever had value to anyone else for any reason, or any intrinsic merit of its own, well bugger that.

Resources. Timber, gold, diamonds; we will take them, and enslave you to do it for us. Cash crops. Coffee, spices, tea; we will grow them on your lands, and enslave you to do it for us, and take them where we make money from them.  You’re starving now? Pity.

We are the gods. Forget your old deities, we are the new masters. Anything that gets in the way of our pillage and plunder cannot be allowed. Forget your cultures and their quaint dreams. Forget your long-lived native prosperity. Your existence, and your lands and your resources, are now solely to be purposed for making us prosperous. For this you shall be thankful, as we toss you scraps from the table of the Very High Kings.

We are building ‘a world-class attraction’ for Hobart, you peasants should be grateful.

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Let me suggest that one of the reasons that ‘reconciliation’ with indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere is struggling for air is that colonialist attitudes are still pervasive. The wealthy and powerful still feel that the planet is there to be endlessly gobbled up in bite-sized chunks. “(It’s only) 200 hectares out of 447,000,” tweeted Labor MP Shane Broad on Friday in response to a bit of the Tarkine rainforest being cleared even prior to ‘environmental assessment’ of the MMG tailings dam. Just another gobble after all.

Colonialism is when a recommendation on an Aboriginal voice to the Tasmanian Parliament – in a report endorsed by the three parties currently represented in the said parliament – lies unactioned and is not mentioned by any of them in an election campaign.

As bad as it is for humans, it’s even worse for animals. Colonialism declares that native marsupials should be shot when they dare encroach on golf courses that have been carved out of their landscape. Colonialism shoots seals when they interfere with making fat profits for ASX-listed companies. Colonialism introduced the carp, and now native platypus die in nets used in Tasmania’s carp eradication program under permits issued by the Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment.

Even further down the scale are plants. Swathes of forest and woodland and Aboriginal fire-farmed plains were converted to ‘grazing’ lands, whereupon colonial favourites the sheep and the cow now damage the soils with their hooves and pollute land and water. Have a think about how many times you’ve seen ministers doing hi-vis cosplay at construction sites compared to raising awareness or actually spending money on the threatened plant communities that we can still save. If only biodiversity was ‘worth something’ that showed up on Treasury balance sheets.

I remember when this incarnation of the cable car – a kind of Halley’s Comet of bad development ideas with 7 failed iterations since the early 1990s – was first proposed around 2013, then Glenorchy Alderman Sharon Carnes suggested that an environmentally-friendly option might be run it as a kind of funicular railway from Glenorchy. Over the hills and around the back of the mountain, away from view, and without giant pylons.

‘Hell no’ came the response in about so many words. This cable car has to ‘make a statement’ … was it said by Adrian Bold, originator of this folly but so toxic he’s been effectively banned from being the public face of the project for a few years now? Or by Bob Clifford, Mister Incat, who demanded in 2017 that he would invest in it but it had to start at Macquarie Point and had to go right over the city centre to make that statement?

Lest anyone try to tell you that the cable car lobbyists are ‘for public transport’ to the summit of kunanyi, remember that this is the same Bob Clifford who fought furiously against the Hobart Council’s proposed Salamanca to Sandy Bay walkway because it went in front of his Battery Point residence and underwrote a legal case against it. And, for the time being, killed that proposal.

Thus the visual obscenity right over the Organ Pipes is not some kind of design accident; the mountain has to be conquered! Los Conquistadores need to beat the bejeesus out of the kunanyi so we can collectively bask in the glory of having put a great big ugly cable up her. Shouldda seen her squirm while Oldie and Aydo and Floggsy had a go at the bitch, ay. Raise a martini to that in the flash restaurant at the Pinnacle, before you go out to trample the fragile alpine landscape for fun and then quaff an artisan Columbusberry gelato on the ‘aerial tram’ ride home.

Just because the mountain already bears some ‘scars’ of human presence is no reason for this latest wanton proposal. Hello Flimsy McPretext, what do you have in mind sir?

If you’re currently proposing to build a multi-storey building with three and a half thousand square metres of commercial space up there, what next? How about the world’s biggest billboard? Why not, after all. That would make a statement.

The Development Application as is is very poor, and Hobart City Council will rightly reject it. That will not be the end of the matter, as a planning appeal could then be lodged or the ever-colonialist state government may step in and have a swing with its newly-minted Major Projects Legislation bat.

But the principle remains: we need to end colonialism in all its forms. Not just Israel in Gaza, not just the paternalistic Northern Territory ‘intervention’, not just in the way we treat all living beings as subservient to human whim, we need to ditch the lot.

Respect the mountain. In case you are more rational than me and want to Councilspeak, you still have a few days to make a representation.

Alan Whykes is Chief Editor of Tasmanian Times, and likes timeless mountains just the way they are.