Mr/Ms Developer,
The people in our community are a creative, intelligent bunch who understand Byron is about so much more than just making a living. It’s about making a difference.
A positive difference to the space we call home and the people we share it with.
Those of us from corporate backgrounds also understand the slick nature of the PR machine, a fact-finding mission, under the guise of community engagement.
‘Go out there, suss out the community, come back to me with the bottom line. Tell me how little I have to give, to get what I want, to get my development across.’
That’s why real community engagement can never be about, the bottom line or a box ticking exercise. To succeed it must to be based on right relationship built with honesty, integrity, and respect.
In the same way, creative, intelligent design understands its right relationship with the landscape and existing built environment. The geology, water flow, floods, wind directions, acoustic impacts, solar access, bushfire threats, and the movements of the seasons. Nature as an integral part of the whole, not as a necessary afterthought to soften the ugliness of the built form.
You only see the community in opposition to you, because you’re coming from the perspective of how little do I have to give, to get what I want. What you’ve missed is what we’ve been asking of you this whole time, which is to step up.
To collaborate with the accumulated depth and breadth of the community’s wisdom and experience, freely offered in our feedback, to deliver something masterful, something which respects Byron Bay’s existing height limits, something built with sustainable materials, something we can all be proud of.
We’ve been asking you to step beyond the selfish competitiveness and insatiable greed driven purely by profit. To step beyond delivering the same kind of high-density concrete buildings which, like a cancer, spread rapidly to destroy their host. We’ve been asking you to become more than just another developer who’s here to make a killing.
We’ve been asking you to dare to become a developer who makes a difference.
A positive difference.
Because, at the end of the day, what the rest of us already humbly know is Byron Bay doesn’t owe a single one of us anything.
It’s not just about making a killing Mr/Ms Developer. The real gift of First Light country is that it offers us an invitation to become a better human.
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. 
