Ian Gow, New Brighton (near the beach and not rich)
Here we go again. Yet another episode of the soap opera that is Belongil Beach. Let’s all take up our familiar positions and argue about the fate of “rich landowner” beachfront property. Nice Green, ecologically sensitive folk to the left and nasty, rapacious capitalist bastards to the right. My observation is that the “class warfare card” is almost always the first one played, not least in The Echo.
In the middle of this ideological warfare are hundreds and hundreds of normal ratepayers who live in normal houses somewhere near one of our glorious beaches. People who have often lived here for generations and watched sand and dunes go and return and are completely bewildered by the total fixation on a few houses at Belongil.
Could all the participants please keep in mind that these ordinary folk will be financially and emotionally devastated if some arbitrary Council policy designed to teach Belongil a lesson also unfairly costs them their house at some future point. Belongil and the housing there is simply not representative of the bulk of our beachside development.
Is there anyone out there (who actually owns a house) who would not want reasonable opportunity to defend it, in the face of natural disaster?
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
