The NSW government plan for development from Tweed Heads to Port Macquarie is all about growth so business will grow. Politicians will call it sustainability. It isn’t.
Planning for an environment crisis is missing. The way we currently deal with an environment crisis is to pretend there isn’t one.
Long-term planning would have decided ages ago that some of the best land in Australia for food growing is on the eastern seaboard so it should rarely be built on.
There needs to be planning for no more development east of the Pacific Highway for example. That is left for holiday-makers who are encouraged to primitively camp.
People on the east coast, those who experience scarce, wet Australia, need to be proportionally taxed heaviest the closer they are to the ocean. That money is then sent westward.
It should end up that people in semi-arid areas find the cost of living extremely cheap, as tax money comes from the east.
Swaling, water tanks, farm dams, biodynamic agriculture, compost heaps, weed use for soil building, reafforestation all become part of a gardening agriculture where people co-opt rather than live in isolated housing.
Australia is the driest occupied continent in the world. There is the illusion of planning when the Great Artesian Basin is threatened by fracking poisons and wetlands are built on at West Byron.
Geoff Dawe, Uki
Geoff I have long held a view akin to yours that we should not be encouraging development in the sensitive coast lands of our region, but defining that area by the Pacific Highway is a very arbitrary way to do it and it is arguable that development upstream in our river system has caused great damage through flooding (but I am not disinterested living just East of the Highway!). A better approach is to work at sustainability at the ground level wherever people live, while expanding our National Parks to cover all sensitive areas. A good start is by putting in the sort of public transport that city Australians enjoy, so people in places like Uki are not dependent on cars to commute to nearby employment centres like the Gold Coast. In line with your council’s transport plan that means more frequent bus services. Add well lighted parking so people can drive short distances to the bus, and slow down and make safer the local feeder roads so cycling to the bus is safer and you can create a viable alternative to the environmental and economic costs of car dependence and over-use.