Beautiful Bathurst - 3 June 2010
It seems that the word is getting out that Bathurst is a great place to work, get an education and generally enjoy life. We have a relatively secure water supply, a university, relatively cheap (compared to Sydney) house prices and a proximity to Sydney enhanced by improved roads over the mountains. We also have bucket loads of that less tangible quality, charm.
I’ve found that one of the first things new visitors say is that they had no idea how lovely Bathurst was. They’d heard about the car race, but they had no idea about the court house, Stannies, the old street lights or the fact that you can lift your eyes from William Street and see gently rolling hills all around.
With Bathurst Regional Council hosting a major economic development forum this week, it’s a good opportunity for all of us to reflect on the shape of future growth. Will that growth preserve the unique character of Bathurst, or will it turn us into one big bulky goods and fast food paradise? How will we ensure that our growth is truly sustainable in the physical environment that Bathurst inhabits? How will we ensure that we have growth that will take account of predicted climate change and the rising cost of fossil fuel-based energy?
Our assets (especially our water) make us very attractive. They should surely give us bargaining power, allowing us to develop intelligently rather than welcoming every applicant entirely on the applicant’s terms.
Unfortunately, the state government has hijacked a strategic element in the decision-making process. Instead of being scrutinised at a local level, large-scale developments are now shunted off to a regional planning panel for speedy approval. As Cr Tracey Carpenter has pointed out, this is a significant erosion in democracy. We appear to have taken it lying down.
But it’s not too late to wake up and start talking about the sort of future we’d like to see. An economic future that does not hold, right at its heart, a commitment to the environment is unlikely to be sustainable, in any sense of that word. We need to express this concern at a political level, because that’s where key decisions are made. If we don’t, we could be looking around one day and saying to ourselves, “We could have done better than this.”