Coffs Harbour City Council
Friday, 17 June 2016 - 6:09pm
Ha! We stride boldly into a vision of the future from the 1970s. More roads! More cars! More shopping malls! More dormitory suburbs! Knock it all down, and if you can't knock it down, knock something else down to bypass it!
Soon the current plague of property investors will pass, leaving ghost malls sitting alongside the ghost arcades of a previous plague. A home for tattoo parlours, the ever-expanding offices of the privatised dole police, and placards proclaiming "This space for rent" and "Vote Hartsuyker".
Tuesday, 14 June 2016 - 12:24pm
If there's one thing you can say about Coffs, it's that it's never afraid to build on its weaknesses. Our local university campus dropped it's Bachelor of Arts course three years ago to make room for an expanded range of business studies courses (on this at least I'm not kidding). We're celebrated as the region with the highest per capita concentration of Elvis impersonators, and the home of "Ain'tmusic: the Original Australian Adam and the Ants (and Tears for Fears) Tribute Show". And the local thigh slappers and scenery chewers collective is currently rehearsing "Rocky Horror Get Your Gun!" The combination of suburban sprawl and inadequate public transport means that for most of the population an evening out involves sitting on an upturned milk crate in the garage listening to Cold Chisel records, gulping rum and coke from a can, and wondering where it all started going so wrong.
I can save us some consultancy money and and deliver a report on the viability of a new performing arts centre right now: There is none. Anybody in Coffs interested in seriously pursuing the arts has already left. A performing arts centre will, in approximately three years, be hollowed out and refitted as the new expanded headquarters for one of our flourishing Job Services providers. We might as well consider the viability of establishing a space exploration program.
Wednesday, 2 March 2016 - 8:33pm
I'm assuming the new sign says "Pioneer Park" because there wasn't room for one that says "Pioneer Roadside Verge". I can't say I know what steel history pods are, but I'm glad they're "vandal proof". The last thing you want when you've taken the trouble — through the sheer goodness of your heart, not because there's any demonstrable need for it — to plough a bloody great road through a very small park, is for vandals to come in and wreck it all.
I fondly remember shopping at Gowings when I used to live in Sydney, so I'm very pleased that Gowings Bros. Investments has chipped in to partially fund this expensive elective park-ectomy operation. It appears the brothers Gowing consider the welfare of the Coffs Harbour community a vital part of their business. And they would never let a vital part of their business go bust, would they?
What? Have I missed something?
Excellent he-said-she-said reporting, by the way. A master class in the art of non-investigative journalism. It's like I was there in the room, yet curiously unable to ask a question, or subsequently fact-check or seek expert opinion. I take my hat off to you! Or at least I say I do. You don't need to confirm this.
Tuesday, 22 October 2013 - 9:14am
Coffs Harbour City Council is trying to pursuade us to accept its own assumptions about its role, under the guise of "feedback". I encourage everybody in Coffs, or for that matter elsewhere, to make use of the comments field in their feedback form to challenge those assumptions. An example:
"The idea that the users of sporting facilities wouldn't pay for their maintenance is ludicrous; the council doesn't subsidise private gyms, yet they flourish. 'Economic development' is the dinner bell for scam artists. Coffs Coast Marketing is one of the most egregious of these scam artists, and should be disbanded. The elephant in the room is that the council has spent the last couple of decades rubber stamping unprecedented urban sprawl, and the resulting social catastrophe from the deliberate construction of one of the most inequitable and unsustainable urban environments in the country will soon make every item on this list look trivial."