Council needs to deliver more
IT IS pleasing to see the Mercury taking up the issue of the looming catastrophic fire danger season in rural Tasmania as well as nearby townships, accelerated by climate change and El Niño; causing grass that grew last summer which now needs to be urgently abated.
In Kingborough, unfortunately, we have a council that has deleted or privatised any responsibility for its private land abatement policy and practice in the municipality, reducing residents to a period of fear and undue reliance on the Tasmania fire service.
Recently, many organisations received an alert about the high bushfire danger at the proposed Huntingfield development from the high population density of the infrastructure planned so close to the near Peter Murrell Reserve.
I am speaking on behalf of Kingborough Ratepayers Voice. We have several longstanding and unanswered concerns about Kingborough Council’s failure in both the planning and compliance sections to play its part in fire abatement in the municipality especially in the neglected rural areas.
The fire plans required by council in planning proposals are after two years redundant, given that these plans are not reviewed by the compliance section. The annual fire abatement compliance required of council bylaw has been privatised or abandoned, and standards for rural areas in the municipality are not even stated on the council website.
The fire plans prepared by council for critical zones in the municipality are incompetent without standards, and are not consulted properly with the community. Council does not co-ordinate at the local community level the several agencies involved in preparing plans that acknowledge local skills and resources like water storage and facilities like pumps and generators as well
as strategic dangers like one-way and poorly constructed roads.
While the fire danger to the municipality was strongly noted in the Kingborough Emergency Management Plan that is now more talk than any action with this current council.
The Tasmanian Fire Service has brought many areas of concern in the municipality to the council’s attention without action.
Kingborough Residents Voice
Julian Punch AM OTL
LACK OF THOUGHT EVIDENT
ALONG with the Kingborough Council and many concerned residents of the area who are not in favour of this major development proceeding, we now have the bushfire risk unit of the Tasmanian Fire service coming out with a warning of the suitability of this zone for providing a bushfire safe community.
From the initial submission of this grand idea, it was quite obvious not much thought had been placed upon basic infrastructure to cope with the many hundreds of extra vehicles entering an already overburdened highway.
Someone came up with the masterplan roundabout which had failed to consider the effect on vehicles departing from Margate and further south, which would have to give way to vehicles entering from Huntingfield on the right. Some months later this was recognised and a suggestion put forward for a slip road to accommodate these.
Talk about planning on the run, this roundabout alone would cost a very considerable sum to build.
Roger Jaensch, the minister pushing the barrow for this magnificently absurd idea, should maybe watch a few episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, one episode particularly “The Ministry of Silly Walks”.
Surely someone, one of the many spin doctors, could spin him out of this one.
Phil Jones Margate
ALL SIGNS POINT TO ELECTION
THERE must be an election coming up.
On climate change we haven’t done very good. On bushfires we haven’t done very good, similarly on Covid we haven’t done very good. Let’s hit the security button. Anything to turn attention from the IPCC report warning of imminent climate disaster.
Bob Betlehem
Kingston
REAL FACTS NEEDED
BOTH Pullen from Miena, and Marshall from Loongarna (Mercury, September 20), take the view that a bunch of stuff announced in industry magazines is actually going to get built.
One says that the other states have adopted targets to fix their problems, and the other is into wishful thinking with batteries, only one small one is presently proposed to be built.
That is why, of course, the Victorian government is subsidising a coal-fired power station right now.
They both have an idealistic Greens view of the world, that there will be energy without transmission lines; energy without capital expenditure for a profit, or in other words socialised energy by some new technology not yet invented.
Well, the news for them both is that targets and forecasts are just nonsense without huge expenditures.
No one on mainland Australia is going to fund new high voltage interconnectors which are the key to renewables. So, I suggest these two entirely interesting persons actually get some real facts to support their arguments rather than forecasts and targets.
When Bob Brown retracts his statement “renewable energy wind turbines spoil my view of the coast” then I will start to consider their views.
Mervin Reed
Tolmans Hill