I’ve gotten caught up in the challenge of trying to work out the network of laws and regulations and bodies that we are all subject to here locally that we are governed by.
Turns out the more you look at it the more complex it gets and the more it grows. Just about the only people who don’t have much part in governing us or saying what our laws should be are us!
Why does it matter? Well that is another evolving question that the answers slowly emerge to.
Take for example local council governance. We are governed by 2 local councils. Brisbane City Council has always been huge. In recent years the requirement put by the Queensland Government on councils to amalgamate meant that the Pine Rivers Council got amalgamated into the Moreton Bay Shire Council now another huge region.
For both councils The Grove is a long way from their administrative centre although the Division councillor for Moreton Bay lives and has an office in Ferny Hills which is a real asset. The Ward office for BCC for here is close to Alderley at the opposite end of what is a large Ward from here.
When councils allocate resources they tend to ‘favour’ nodes or hubs either as active policy or passively because they don’t see the voids and applications come from places where there are already facilities. For example with the Brisbane City Council they have a special focus on a 5km radius of the CBD and some other hubs. We are right out on a fringe at the edge in every way. And we just simply get missed out. We are out of sight out of mind. We pay our rates but it would be very hard for BCC to demonstrate that our area isn’t a net outflow of funds to developments in other areas. (This definitely hasn’t been the case with Pine Rivers Shire Council and it remains to be seen what happens with the bigger Moreton Bay Shire Council model but the local Councillor is clearly doing his best.) The biggest thing we had spent on this area by BCC was probably the clean-up after The Storm in 2008. When BCC focus on developments in the CBD they are not explicit about what we here in the outer suburbs are meant to do: go into the CBD and access them? But in reality all the development in the CBD has made it very inaccessible for people living in the suburbs. We used to be able to drive in and park easily and walk by the river at night. Quite impossible now. Using city parks is scarcely an option now and expensive because of parking. Roma St Parklands for example maintained in botanic garden condition at huge ratepayer expense and well lit at night are a virtual private parkland for the exclusive apartments within their enclosed boundary. There are tight parking restrictions for people travelling from elsewhere and real costs. BCC isn’t even slightly apologetic about the loss of access to the CBD parking by people from suburbs like ours. They want us out of our cars onto public transport. OK but to get into the CBD costs quite a lot – think of a family getting to a city park or museum by public transport – and public transport to the train stations here is abyssmal which the council doesn’t address at all. For suburbs like Upper Kedron for example public transport doesn’t exist on weekends and during the evening (last time I checked the bus schedules). Basically a CBD focus is a process of transferring our rates to the benefit of those who live in city apartments while reducing our ability to access the city at the same time.
When the BCC allocates funds for cultural and sporting activities it can miss us out time and again or make decisions that divide us as a community – for example where Moreton Bay Shire Council support a community Christmas event on one side of Kedron Brook and Brisbane City Council supported a community Christmas event on the other side of Kedron Brook a couple of kilometres apart on exactly the same day and time each year. How about treating our one Valley as one community! Not as two alien states!
One of the big problems we have locally here is that funds migrate to those who already have most. They accummulate resources like buildings and facilities and expertise in applying for grants. For Keperra Ferny Grove and Upper Kedron this mainly means missing out completely because we haven’t got much to start with and we are up against some powerful players. For example for 5 years we didn’t get any activities for older people in these suburbs. We have to bootstrap ourselves up from scratch and establish a presence. We consistently get told to go and use facilities elsewhere (Samford Mitchelton Brookside CBD The Gap) but this continues to aggravate the lack of facilities here locally and means a big dependence on cars and transport. It blew me out of the water when the Lord Mayor literally advised me to travel 30 kilometres to attend a one-hour seniors physical activity session (and there was absolutely no public transport to it) as the best available option instead of addressing the need to get stuff locally here (for a mere 15000 of his ratepayers).
With all the Federal Government grants for halls our suburbs will now have big halls in every school but that doesn’t mean our suburbs have ready access to easy meeting places. There are very few small facilities and the processes for getting access to them can be extremely bureaucratic. For example the Upper Kedron Community Hall proved a daunting exercise in red tape and complexity. Not least is the requirement to come up with copies of your public liability insurance cover documentation which if you do not have you can complete a complex three page form to go to council for special consideration which you will eventually hear about. To hire the hall for an hour for about $8-$15 in theory you are being asked to pay around $1000 for public liability insurance cover first! That said the practice seems to be to mainly provide access to such facilities to well-established businesses and make it very difficult for ordinary folk to have easy use of a meeting place in any informal low-key way.
Having just come back from Woodford Folk Festival we couldn’t help but be aware of how much people love having places like the Chai Tent where they can drop in and ‘be’. There is a stage with an ‘open mike’ and a big space with low tables and low seats or sacks to relax on. Can buy a chai but no commercial pressure to keep buying to justify being there.
In England we enjoyed local community centres that operated similarly. Small centres in walking distance that you could walk to and drop in make a tea or coffee relax and chat with others there and a place for the kids to play. There would be community notice boards and courses and activities. They become places where energy and creativity generate new ideas and friendships and local enthusiasm and spirit.
Several community centres here that come to mind are quite different. Bunya House (Moreton Bay Shire Council) is padlocked and gated. Takes multiple keys to get in. Definitely not a drop-in place. It stunned me when the Council closed off the parking spaces along outside Bunya House to take them over for parking for council workers at the council depot next door. Talk about giving a low priority to ratepayers’ needs. We were left to park on the busy road and clamber across the garden through the spiders’ webs.
Council funding for programs can also bring a lot of requirements to conform to their policies and procedures. For example Piccabeen Community Centre down in Mitchelton got a big grant some years ago and what had been a community house largely working with volunteers took on a heavy bureaucratic overload. All volunteers in the centre were required to do a 2 hour course on the policies and procedures now required to be followed (48 pages of highly bureaucratic stuff). Additionally since young people could use the playground in the centre all the volunteers now needed a Blue Card. This happens across a whole range of community organisations largely staffed by retired volunteers where a person under 18 may occasionally visit. It is a huge bureaucratic complexity.
Even the most apparently simple things can come with Council regulations. For example if a local group wants to have a picnic in a local park the council would like demonstration that you have public liability insurance. Yes you can duck for cover and ignore it but this sort of bureaucratic nonsense is tying up lots of local groups and making local activities very difficult and much more expensive. For example I was told that the annual Hills Community Carols were organised for years as an ecumenical (the local churches getting together) activity here but then they were required to provide a huge amount of insurance cover which they could simply not afford so they had to stop. It was taken over by Golden Valley Keperra Lions Club because Lions nationally has the level of insurance cover that was required. The Lions do a great job but the point is that we urgently need local to be simple to do not dragged down by restrictions imposed by councils and higher.
It would be almost impossible to point to any local benefit from all this bureaucracy and restrictions and liability cover.
It reminds me of the Mafia in New York standing over small businesses demanding ‘protection money’ to operate. It is an outflow from our local community into the pockets of insurance companies and bureaucrats.
I got to see first hand how State government taxes are used the other day in the official opening of the Ferny Grove Station Precinct Upgrade. It involved a small group of people walking into the rail line area down the end past the station. It was all thoroughly closed off to trains but before anyone could step there (we were all well used to crossing the line down that way) hard hats were required and a full safety procedure opera gone through. We are talking the salaries and time of senior politicians and bureaucrats. It is an absolute nonsense.
We need sanity and sense locally. We need to be allowed and encouraged to take responsibility for ourselves not to have to sue if we stub our toe in a local park. If bureaucrats must play games let them do it at the high end but stop tying up local.
What we get for all the bureaucracy and regulation is pretty sterile uncreative and impoverished. We have schools teaching good music programs but where are the rich opportunities in our wider community for musical sharing? Coming from Woodford with poetry slams open mikes musical improvisation and quality performances in rich diversity our school fetes with jumping castles and baby animals are not much of a cultural diet.
Slums in India might be poor in some ways but they are vibrantly alive with activities of a myriad kinds a vast array of businesses generating huge profits and rich culture. They are not tied up with bureaucratic regulation. They are extremely safe and supportive communities for the people who live there across all age groups. Can we say the same? Many of us barely know our neighbours and we look down streets where nothing much happens from one week’s end to the next. Few of our businesses locally are owner-run. Our community business structures are dominated by the big end and most of the business profits flow out of our community rather than circulate in the community. We are utterly dependent on food and energy supplies transported in from a huge distance. Our State Government has targeted our few remaining local farms to dump large numbers of new homes onto but no or few extra local facilities. No we don’t get any say at all in planning decisions like this that affect our local resilience deeply. It takes more expertise at negotiating bureaucratic structures than I’ve so far managed to muster to even obtain details of what the actual planning is for Upper Kedron.