As a result of recently daring to ask if I could sub-divide the land I own I have been told by a planning officer in the Meander Valley Council that it is impossible, as I would ‘Fetter the land’! He then repeated the mantra that my living on a rural property is ‘Sensitive’, as though I have no right to exist outside a designated residential area as defined by them. I have been asking them for such permission for over two and a half years, and always with the same response. ‘The laws are about to change. We are looking into redefining the area and please come back in six months time’. Now, after two and a half years, they are still no further forward and are clinging to these outdated and outmoded restrictive laws, and there is still, ‘Nothing we can do about it’!
The reason for this request is that at the age of seventy five I wanted to hive off and build myself a smaller and more manageable house on about five acres of the thirty two that we currently own and then sell off the main portion of the property with its large family house, gardens, paddocks and lake, which is currently far too big for myself and my wife to manage. Although the area I require to subdivide is both unsuitable for agriculture, being grade four, and is currently unproductive, this five acre block has every amenity for building , including water, electricity, telephone, existing access to a public road and a solid rock base to build on; but by doing so, we would be deemed to ‘fetter’ it, which translated means that it would no longer have the future potential to be turned into a wood pulp plantation! Nothing more than that! Our life style has to be put on hold for the rights of some hypothetical future owner wishing to plant a toxic crop of e.nitens in the middle of what is currently designated a ‘rural residential area’.
This is a prime example of the imbecilic laws that have been forced upon us by the vested interests of Gunns, the MIS schemers and the forest industry, for it is these people who framed and wrote these laws in an undemocratic land-grab under which we now have to live. To say that this was a conspiracy is an understatement. Successive planning laws worked on in secret behind closed doors for several years, where the only parties consulted and allowed input were the aforementioned timber industries and their legal representatives, and where council personnel were informed ‘if you want to object then you will be looking for a job on the mainland’, have seen laws forced upon us by government and local councils without due consultation or input from the public who are financially and otherwise affected by the outcome.
Oh yes, there was the infamous PAL Act Amendment scheme where they called for submissions AFTER the event, and in our local area, all 710 objections raised were unanimously quashed by the council who were subsequently backed up by an RPDC committee, who told the gathered audience that they were not interested in their complaints, and that any objectors would be ejected from the meeting. When asked what recourse we had and who would hear our complaints, we were told that there was no-one and none. It was then rubber stamped into law, albeit, a short-lived one before the council reverted to the 10 year old planning scheme that mirrored much of what had been rewritten into the PAL Act. About as sensitive as a blind bull elephant wandering through a jungle at midnight, and far from us fettering the land, it is we who are being fettered by these insensitive bureaucrats for the commercial interests of a purely profit oriented private company. It seems that truly Big Brother has arrived and is living amongst us!
Currently there are 36 planning schemes covering the actions of 29 local councils. There are also something like 5600 rules and regulations governing the building of a house, which keeps an army of local and state bureaucrats very busy at our expense. The State Government is now working on a new scheme, (in private) to amalgamate the current planning authorities into three main areas. Because of this pending legislation, which is still only in the conceptual stage, it has given the local authorities a reason to put many planning requests on hold and piss off quite a number of developers and local residents alike. Despite the absolute failure of the MIS Schemes, Forestry and very probably Gunns, these specifically drawn-up laws still control the thinking of the so-called ‘planners’.
Nevertheless, it does not stop the Government’s own ill-considered plan, at the behest of the plantation beneficiaries, to turn the actual food bowl of Tasmania into a green, toxic desert, and the totally unsuitable dry midlands areas into an uneconomic and expensive food bowl. This allows the country’s most lucrative assets to be mined for offshore shareholder profits and we, the residents, are being sacrificed.
I think it is time for a little reality check and for people to start asking the questions, ‘just who are the government and these councils and bureaucrats working for?’ It certainly does not seem to be for the people who elected them or pay their salaries.
A bit of truth might not come amiss. Maybe we need a Tassieleaks program?
Earlier on Tasmanian Times, Gwenda Sheridan:
One minute to midnight: The Brighton bypass
Tasmania’s landscape: Planning, heritage and forestry.
