OPINION: Town Hall Follies At Inveresk

Its official, the Silly Season 2015/16 is upon us and Launceston’s general manager, Robert Dobrzynski, is out and about spruiking a grand vision for Launceston, York Park, Inveresk and sports science. 

Council has had its last meeting for the year and all the aldermen are out of the way attending to family business. Hence, the GM can now get to work building his fiefdom with even less aldermanic interference than is usually the case. 

So what about this new component of the ‘Launceston Empire’? And, it has to be asked, why Launceston? And then, where did this all come from? 

Taking the second question first, there seems to be neither rhyme nor reason why such a facility, a "high standards centre of excellence", should be in Launceston or even Tasmania.  It could be but why? Why here and why now?

Of course saying such things is tantamount to Taswegian blasphemy yet the questions do need to be asked and over and over and over again. 

What a lovely bit of tautology "a high standards centre of excellence" is. Nonetheless, like motherhood, its very hard to argue against it yet it’s loaded with insinuations and potential consequences of every kind – intended and unintended. 

Interestingly, Meryl Streep summed up motherhood so very well when she said it had "a very humanising effect [and] everything gets reduced to essentials." Here, here, and indeed where are the essentials here?

The speculative and possibly self-serving rhetoric in this Examiner story [LINK] is laid on so thick that Fulton Sheen’s quote springs to mind, it says that, “baloney is flattery laid on so thick it cannot be true, and blarney is flattery so thin we love it” . What are we looking at here "baloney" or "blarney"?

A little while back Senator David Leyonhjelm coined the phrase “brain fart”, a characterisation that fits the circumstance here so very, very well. 

As per usual this ‘enterprise’ depends upon the resources of others, wishfully here ‘the university’s’ and if all else fails ‘the ratepayers’ – the former by persuasion and the latter by conscription. 

The story here is sprinkled with the ‘royal we’ as is often the case when a general manager speaks out when left to their own devices. It sometimes seems that this is very often the case at Town Hall.

Actually, why isn’t the Mayor doing the spruiking here? Or, why isn’t it the chairman of the York Park Authority? Or indeed, why isn’t it a chorus of aldermen? Is the “we” in this context anything more than hollow rhetoric? Indeed, have the aldermen signed off on the initiative if the aspiration has substance or is a shared idea? 

Indeed, where is the media release, the position paper, the facts sheet? According to council's website there hasn't been a media release out of Town Hall since March 2014.

Likewise the question that really needs to be asked is, outside the GM's office,  has this aspiration any substance at all? Is there in fact a foundation to build upon? Or is all this speculation intended to divert ratepayer's attention away from some uncomfortable proposition or other.

It’s the council, the mayor and aldermen, who are accountable. So what do they, as aldermen, know about all this? Strangely they do not seem to get a mention. Actually what does the York Park ‘governing authority’ know? If there are answers here, who is being held to account, when and how? 

Launceston’s ratepayers, more than likely, would welcome anyone lifting the York Park fiscal burden from their shoulders. The idea is a sentimental winner! However, every time win-winning has looked like a prospect in the past the outcome has been a totally different scenario. 

It seems to work like this. Because Bass is a marginal electorate it has been possible to garner parish-pump political largess. – quite often in the past. What’s wrong with that? Nothing IF the money goes towards something that saves expenditure in an ongoing way or that is otherwise income generative.

However, IF it’s ‘nice-to-have’ infrastructure that requires upkeep and maintenance, most often, the ‘political largess’ can become an awful burden. 

Launceston has quite a bit of the kind of infrastructure that is ‘non-core’ and parish-pump funded. AND it turns out that it costs each and every ratepayer $300 to $400 a year more than might otherwise be the case. 

The disconnects entrenched in the Tasmanian Local Govt. Act 1993 play not a small part in the kind of outcome being discussed here and arguably it has done in Launceston over decades. 

Flat-footed deemed denials just do not wipe away the evidence no matter how often repeated. As we know, Lenin is attributed as saying, “lie repeated often enough passes for the truth” but we are not obliged to believe it even if Lenin thought we might. It seems that ratepayers might be required to! 

Then there is SECTION 65 of the Act that can be boiled down to general managers being able to deem themselves ‘the authority’, the unassailable authority all the time, on the strength of the Act. 

In the so-called launch of this speculative enterprise we have the speculative aspiration of York Park being touted as a "high standards centre of excellence" with "Olympic-type sports" thrown in for good measure. Moreover, all this is spiced  up with Mr Dobrzynski’s belief(?) that it all would “create additional employment and positive social and economic benefits” and more still. 

What’s actually missing is the evidence of the conversations that might have gone before. Where are the ratepayers’ representatives? Where is the business case? Where does all this fit in the city's strategic plan? Where is the social license? 

Where is the community’s inclusion in this conversation? That is the community that’ll be rated for capital requirements and/or to cover any potential loss or fill the gap for grants not won. 

"We also want to work with the Tasmanian Institute of Sport and want to work with increasing commercial and community use of these high-performance facilities to provide those additional services in the precinct," Mr Dobrzynski said. 

Aspirational no doubt but is there any evidence for a real business case here? And who are we?

It is said that if it looks like a duck, waddles and quacks like a duck, then it’s quite probably a duck. If all this looks like an aspirational brain-fart it’s most likely it's just that. 

If this administrative cum operational flatulence gets any traction at all it will be because some compliant consultant or other from far, far away has been handed our watch by ‘council’ and commissioned to tell us the time for a fat fee. 

Actually, and interestingly, what's been proffered here is a 'service' that’s both non-core and surplus to requirement even if SECTION 65 might be made to say otherwise. It’s all happened before, over and over. 

Rather than put our feet up at the beach this promisingly hot Silly Season perhaps we should be watching for the follies being played out at Town Hall until February.

Ray Norman

Trevallyn
December 2015

The Examiner Story

"Aurora sports hub to push performance"

By ANDREW MATHIESON Dec. 17, 2015, 11:18 p.m.

CLICK HERE