Road to renewal beckons
IS A LOCAL COUNCIL’S ROLE TO SAVE THE WORLD AS WELL AS FIX POTHOLES? AMANDA DUCKER ASKS BRIGHTON COUNCIL GENERAL MANAGER JAMES DRYBURGH
STICK to your core business. Roads. Rates. Rubbish. The old lines are all too familiar to James Dryburgh, but the new Brighton Council general manager has no intention of sticking to the basics.
The former chief operating officer, environmental planner and author replaced long-serving GM Ron Sanderson in the role in June.
The council area takes in centres including Bridgewater, Brighton and Gagebrook, as well as rural communities, and is the state’s fastest-growing municipality.
An industrial and transport hub, it is also home to significant socio-economic disadvantage.
Dryburgh’s remit, as he understands it, includes both leading a climate change response in the municipality and fixing potholes.
His mantra is “the triple bottom line” — economic, social and environmental.
“Climate change is not just for latte sippers,” he said.
“The most vulnerable people in society will be the most affected by climate change in a number of different ways.”
Local government no longer had the luxury three Rs-only approach.
“It must grapple with the broad range of environmental, social and economic issues that face our civilisation as a whole, and Brighton is not isolated from this,” Dryburgh said.
“And there is no issue bigger than climate change.”
In spearheading direct action, Dryburgh is confident he has the blessing of Mayor of a
Tony Foster, who has been a mentor to him over many years, and the support of most of the local community.
It’s an approach that opens him up for criticism from the “three Rs guard”, though.
In an opinion piece for the Australian Financial Review last September, for instance, former Australian Stock Exchange chief executive Elmer Funke Kupper scoffed at local councils taking climate action. Beyond being as energy-efficient as possible themselves operationally, local councils should leave climate change off the agenda, Kupper said.
“Two layers of government worrying about climate change surely should be enough in a country with fewer people than Shanghai,” he said.
Kupper was scathing of the councils around the country that declared a climate and biodiversity emergency last year and were “now busy saving the world”.
Hobart City Council was the first council in Tasmania to declare. Kingborough Council was the second. Anyone keeping an eye on Brighton Council’s generally progressive direction, even before Dryburgh stepped up, might have predicted it would join the call.
It skipped that step, though, but Dryburgh said it used the focus of the discussion to galvanise direct action.
On Tuesday night the council is expected to endorse the implementation of a comprehensive Climate Change and Resilience Strategy.
The aspirations outlined in it will also feed into a 2050 vision process the council will launch in coming weeks with community surveys and workshops.
I’ve interviewed Dryburgh before, but not about council matters.
It’s his writing projects we’ve talked about, including his 2017 non-fiction book The Balfour Correspondent, about a 14-year-old girl who lived in a Tarkine copper-mining community more than a century ago.
Until now, the well-travelled father of two has chosen to keep his writing and council selves separate in the public eye, but he says he is feeling at ease about connecting them now. He seems to be taking a holistic approach all round.
“Our Climate Change and Resilience Strategy goes across the whole organisation and gives us a plan to work on in everything we do,” Dryburgh said.
CHOSEN SHOW OPENS Chosen, the exhibition of Aboriginal art and cultural objects that I wrote about last week (“Let’s lift the lid off the cultural box”), opened on Friday in Hobart after its week-long online outing to the Darwin Art Fair. You can see it at The Longhouse at Macquarie Point, 6 Evans St, this weekend, from 11am-3pm, as well as next Thursday-Sunday.