The NRRC, shoving it down unwanted throats, just like despots.
Sadly, I take the view that planning changes are inevitable.
You should first know that councils are being strong-armed to release land to meet short-term political needs which will produce long-term problems for the community. These will scar us forever unless they seriously embrace the community and its true desires (not its NIMBY desires).
Second, it seems that the federal and state governments, their pet tiger NRRC and all the affected councils are set to forget the successes of the past and repeat all its mistakes.
Third, the Northern Rivers is seriously short of critical social infrastructure, schools, health services, hospitals, police, fire, water, waste, recycling, and power. The shires are faced with outdated and inadequate roads and transport infrastructure, to support the current, let alone the future, population.
Consultative planning needs to occur for our kids’ sake. I say do it correctly up-front. We need an unqualified commitment to build the necessary infrastructure first (NOW) and the governments can be part of the solution.
Council cannot provide the infrastructure without upfront state and federal money (by the $ billion-sized bucketload) yet they seem to want developers, ratepayers and the flood victims, to pay the cost of their past penny-pinching, current miserliness, and mismanagement.
The local ratepayers can’t afford this without increasing rent. The developers need stupid scale and density to fund the shortfall, the NRRC will give a pinch and call it assistance.
This desired housing growth is for the benefit of the whole nation. Australia has learned by its Canberra planning and Darwin suburban expansion that the services need to come first and the governments (the whole nation not the few locals) need to bankroll the core infrastructure for any sustainable growth – after all they are the low-cost borrower or equitable tax recipients.
Private sector funding has a higher cost and requires a significant return on investment, which makes the resultant cost unsustainable and unaffordable.
It’s about time state and federal governments stepped up and led growth from the front like good leaders rather than shoving it down unwanted throats, like despots.
The style of development proposed is unsuitable to the Northern Rivers and is Mt Druitt and Macquarie Fields revisited. The need to listen to the community.
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. 
