It is sad that Tweed Council cannot settle on a proper agenda to heighten the (positive) profile of Murwillumbah following a series of Planning Commission approvals that did not exactly benefit the aesthetic of the town.
I thought the proposal to develop M’bah into an arts and culture centre was excellent. However Mickey D’s is not exactly the embodiment of either. I cannot imagine McDonald’s hosting an art show or a poetry reading. Any art hung on the walls would need to be degreased and any poetry would have to rise above the din of the literati that typically congregate at these locations.
The only way I see of Tweed having it both ways is to try to incorporate the laughingly ‘scaled down’ Golden Arches with other retro iconic sculpture like giant Warholean Campbell’s soup cans standing 15 metres high to disguise these eyesores.
The five-minute feeding of road transients who could not care if they were at McDonald’s in Ballina or on Mars does nothing to help build the long-term sustainability of M’bah. These multinationals do create jobs… the lowest-wage jobs with little career future. They repatriate all other profits to the McDonald’s supply chain: dollars leave and have zero impact on the financial growth or even maintenance of a village.
In the case of McDonald’s, it would result in a negative sum result as the M’bah café and resto owners, families, employees, their family members, and local food suppliers would be the losers in the end. Oh yeah, so would M’bah as moneys earned by local business to spend locally would evaporate too. But they do get those groovy arches, a teen-gang 24-hour hangout to tax already thin police budgets, heaps of rubbish from pre-packaged everything, etc.
I apologise if I’ve missed any benefits that Council has so clearly seen. Seen clearly enough to probably go through with this approval.
MO Greene, Mullumbimby
