Has conservative & bigoted Launceston struck again?????
The most ultra-conservative of Launceston institutions, the Launceston City Council, appears to have sent a message to public housing tenants that they are not welcome in their town, by refusing a planning application for public housing units in Newstead against their own Planning Officer's advice.The motion to refuse the application was dressed up as concern about traffic flows, sewerage capacity, housing density and resident amenity, but each of these issues was addressed by the Council's own planning and infrastructure experts and found not to be valid reasons to refuse discretionary use. Both the Planner's recommendations and the resident's objections are on the public record in the Agenda for the Council Meeting of 24 August 2009 on the LCC website, so you can be the judge.
If you're a public housing tenant perhaps you'll perceive comments about property values falling and similar "the sky's falling in " hysteria from objectors as code for you're not welcome in my neighbourhood.
If you do, you're probably more disturbed by the Aldermen's reaction to the fear campaign, by apparently giving it life and contributing to the vilification of public housing tenants? Perhaps you'd now be very wary of giving any sitting Alderman your vote (which is as good as the next person's) in October?
The Aldermen may believe this was about planning, but the potential neighbours at Newstead (and the perceptive journalist who reported it)knew better. Consider this quote from The Examiner of Wednesday 26 August - "(we) bought property in the area because there was no low cost housing and (we) fear that our standard of living would be impacted on."
Remember this when some of these same Aldermen come knocking on your door in October and ask them to go on the public record by issuing a media release confirming that they support public housing tenants and welcome planning applications from social housing providers such as Housing Tasmania, anytime and anywhere in the Municipality. If they're not prepared to make this statement on the public record then you'd be entitled to seriously question their motives in the Newstead matter and vote accordingly.
posted by Alan Melton @ 3:07 pm
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