I invite all other ratepayers and residents who value independence and accountability in their representatives to join me in my endorsement of Ald. Danny Gibson as a candidate for Mayor of the City of Launceston.
Basil Fitch
Saturday, 30 September 2017
Friday, 29 September 2017
Robert Dobrzynski News Alert
Copied from Colac Herald
http://www.colacherald.com.au/2017/08/acting-chief-appointed/
Acting chief appointed
Robert Dobrzynski will be acting chief of Colac Otway Shire Council.
Colac Otway Shire Council will have a temporary chief executive after next week, with councillors appointing : to the role. CLICK HERE
Sue Wilkinson resigned as the council’s chief executive officer last month and councillors voted this week to appoint Mr Dobrzynski as the acting CEO.
Mr Dobrzynski will start as the acting CEO on September 4 with Ms Wilkinson’s last day on September 1.
The acting CEO has three decades of experience working in local government and has most recently worked as the CEO of Launceston City Council.
Mayor Chris Potter said Mr Dobrzynski had also previously served as CEO of the Moorabool Shire Council, Delatite Shire Council and West Wimmera Shire Council.
“The recruitment of a new permanent CEO is one of the most important tasks our council will undertake during our term,” Cr Potter said.
SEE http://www.colacherald.com.au/2014/06/colac-otway-councillors-appoint-new-ceo/
LETTER TO LAUNCESTONIANS ALL
Dea All,
FYI. On the agenda for the Launceston City Council meeting on Monday 2 October is an item to give UTAS 5 more parcels of land at Inveresk.
This includes land currently used for car parking in front of the QV museum and other nearby tenants of the precinct. At this stage it appears that Danny Gibson is the only alderman who is opposed to this handover.
There is likely to be a community reaction to this agenda item possibly with members of the public attending the meeting.
Our information is that it requires all aldermen to vote in favour of this type of motion.
If only one alderman votes against it, the motion fails. Given the intimidation he was subjected to by the mayor after the renaming of York Park stadium last year, Alderman Gibson will need lots of support to withstand the pressure he will be under.
Meanwhile, on the same day at 4 pm, UTAS is holding a meeting at Newnham campus for staff, ostensibly for staff to be informed and give feedback on the so-called community consultation they claim to have carried out a few weeks ago.
Monday, 25 September 2017
IN THE PRESS TasWater
GREG BARNS, Mercury
September 18, 2017 12:00am
TASMANIA'S Treasurer Peter Gutwein has shown an appalling lack of judgment when it comes to TasWater.
What's more, Mr Gutwein has shown that he simply wants the state's water company to be a political plaything where tame directors and management prioritise government pet projects over what is rationally required.
The Legislative Council is conducting hearings into Mr Gutwein's desire to take over TasWater. No doubt, while this is happening, Mr Gutwein will be seeking to "buy" the votes of some Legislative Council MPs by making promises that TasWater in his hands will be told to spend funds on projects in their electorates.
Mr Gutwein showed in May this year that he has a glass jaw and like anyone with that affliction, he turns nasty when someone — in this case TasWater chairman Miles Hampton — stands up to him.
Mr Hampton was subjected to a disgraceful attack by Mr Gutwein, who naturally used the shield of parliamentary privilege.
Mr Hampton took the unusual step of using what is termed a Citizen's Reply to hit back at Mr Gutwein and lodged this with the Speaker of the House of Assembly in early July.
But according to Mr Hampton last week he "only received acknowledgment that it has been received from the Clerk of the House and no other advice in more than two months", he said. It appears the Hodgman Government is blocking Mr Hampton's right of reply to the attack by Mr Gutwein which was a vicious personal attack on the professional integrity of Mr Hampton.
As Mr Hampton rightly said: "Under Parliamentary Standing Orders, I am entitled to a Citizens' Right of Reply and after detailed consideration, I submitted this in early July. This is an important tenet of democracy when a person is wronged under parliamentary privilege and by any measure, this delay is unreasonable. You can only question the Government's motives and its commitment to fairness and the democratic process."
Mr Gutwein's glass jaw seems more important than fairness to Mr Hampton.
On the matter of Mr Gutwein's ego, one should also be very alarmed at his hostile reaction to TasWater's board obtaining its own legal advice as to the lawfulness of the takeover bid.
How dare they spend money on this, fumed the Treasurer recently.
This shows Mr Gutwein knows nothing about the duties and obligations of company directors. A director, and the board of which he or she is a member, has a legal obligation to ensure that any change in ownership is lawful. … [This applies also to Aldermen/Councillors too but ratepayers and residents are not seeing much of that!!]
If these directors simply sat back and rolled over they would be grossly derelict in their obligations as directors. … [ Sadly it seems Aldermen & Councillors have been succumbing to the self-serving and less than ept assertions of their managements albeit afforded the under SECTIONS 62 & 65 of Mt Gutweinds 1993 Local Got Act.]
And the fact is TasWater has solid legal advice that says the takeover by the Hodgman Government is clearly unlawful.
The Legislative Council, which in recent times has shown it is prepared to stand up to the populist nonsense of the Hodgman Government, must reject Gutwein's folly. Under the proposed law Mr Gutwein puts forward that he can seize the assets of the shareholders — local councils — without having to pay just compensation. Welcome to the Venezuela of the South. … [We might also consider, and think of, the ratepayers as shareholders and again this Govt. is careless of their 'actual ownership']
The proposed law also removes the requirement for TasWater to operate in a commercial and financially sustainable manner. This suits Mr Gutwein, who simply wants TasWater to spend taxpayer funds on his pet political projects rather than investing and operating commercially. Mr Gutwein wants to do to TasWater what he does to other GBEs — raid them to prop up his Budget. Raiding bank accounts of government businesses is the order of the day.
What Mr Gutwein wants to do is play cynical politics with the water quality of Tasmania. … [Water is Tasmania's most precious resource and this Govt wants to play silly games with it even if amounts to mismanagement!]
He proposes in his draft law being able to order spending on projects such as removing a facility at Macquarie Point, fixing a similar issue for Mona and indulging some in Launceston with other second order projects. …[ AND presumably with quick-fix technology that belongs to yesterday]
If he has to run up huge amounts of debt to do it, then so be it. … [!!!!!]
Oh and one last thing. Mr Gutwein should stop insulting the billions of people who live in the developing world and endure every day with poor water quality or no potable water at all.
Mr Gutwein is wrong when he says Tasmania's water infrastructure and supply is in crisis. A crisis does not exist here and to say it does is to erroneously compare it to the developing world.
The Legislative Council should not reward Mr Gutwein's questionable conduct and his irresponsible fiscal follies.
It should keep Mr Hampton and his team in charge. [ IF the govetnance of Tasmaia's water infrastructure is to shift it might be worth considering a 'Community Cooperative' given that eventually council will need to amalgamate OR be abolished!!]
They have proven courageous in the face of the criticism flung by Mr Gutwein and his cronies and they have performed admirably in fixing Tasmanian water supply.
Barrister Greg Barns is a Hobart-based human rights lawyer. He was previously an adviser to state and federal Liberal governments.
TO SEE THE FULL STORY AS IT'S BEEN PUBLISHED CLICK ON THE LINKS BELOW
- MORE: LEGISLATION FOR TASWATER TAKEOVER IS MADE PUBLIC
- MORE: TASWATER CHIEF LABELS GOVERNMENT A 'SCHOOLYARD BULLY'
- MORE: GUTWEIN ACCUSES TASWATER CHIEF OF SELF-INTEREST
- MORE: HODGMAN DEFENDS GUTWEIN'S ATTACK ON MILES HAMPTON
- MORE: HAMPTON HITS BACK AT TREASURER'S 'MALICIOUS ALLEGATIONS'
- MORE: QUESTIONS ON GOVERNMENT'S PROPOSED TASWATER TAKEOVER
- MORE: GUTWEIN 'APPALLED' AT TASWATER TAKING LEGAL ADVICE
Monday, 18 September 2017
Has UTas turned into "aimless, money-grubbing exploiter of students"??
SOURCE
"The first of the budget-relieving measures was
the least objectionable: introducing the Higher Education Contribution Scheme,
requiring students – who gain significant private benefits from their degrees –
to bear just some of the cost of those degrees, under a deferred loan-repayment
scheme carefully designed to ensure it did nothing to deter students from poor
families.
Likewise, allowing unis to admit suitably
qualified overseas students provided they paid full freight was unobjectionable
in principle. [Does this ring any bells in Launceston?]
John Howard continued the Hawke-Keating push on universities.
The Howard government's scheme allowing less
qualified local students to be admitted provided they paid a premium was
"problematic", as the academics say, and soon abandoned.
The problem is that continuing cuts in
government grants to unis have kept a protracted squeeze on uni finances,
prompting vice-chancellors to become obsessed with money-raising.
They pressure teaching staff to go easy on
fee-paying overseas students who don't reach accepted standards of learning,
form unhealthy relationships with business interests, and accept "soft
power" grants from foreign governments and their nationals without asking
awkward questions.
They pressure academics not so much to do more
research as to win more research funding from the government. Interesting to
compare the hours spent preparing grant applications with the hours actually
doing research. [Does this ring any bells in Launceston?]
A total of eight Australian universities have been listed among
the top 100 in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings.
To motivate the researchers, those who bring
in the big bucks are rewarded by being allowed to pay casuals to do their
teaching for them. (This after the vice-chancellors have argued straight-faced
what a crime it would be for students to be taught by someone who wasn't at the
forefront of their sub-sub research speciality.)
The unis' second greatest crime is the
appalling way they treat those of their brightest students foolish enough to
aspire to an academic career. Those who aren't part-timers are kept on serial
short-term contracts, leaving them open to exploitation by ambitious
professors.
However much the unis save by making
themselves case studies in precarious employment, it's surely not worth it. If
they're not driving away the most able of their future star performers it's a
tribute to the "treat 'em mean to keep 'em keen" school of
management.
But the greatest crime of our funding-obsessed
unis is the way they've descended to short-changing their students, so as to
cross-subsidise their research. At first they did this mainly by herding
students into overcrowded lecture theatres and tutorials.
Lately they're exploiting new technology to
achieve the introverted academic's greatest dream: minimal "face
time" with those annoying pimply students who keep asking questions.
PowerPoint is just about compulsory. Lectures
are recorded and put on the website – or, failing that, those barely
comprehensible "presentation" slides – together with other material
sufficient to discourage many students – most of whom have part-time jobs –
from bothering to attend lectures. Good thinking. [Does this ring any bells in Launceston?]
To be fair, an oddball minority of academics
takes a pride in lecturing well. They get a lot of love back from their
students, but little respect or gratitude from their peers. Vice-chancellors
make a great show of awarding them tin medals, but it counts zilch towards
their next promotion.
The one great exception to the 30-year quest
to drive uni funding off the budget was Julia Gillard's ill-considered
introduction of "demand-driven" funding of undergraduate places, part
of a crazy plan to get almost all school-leavers going on to uni, when many
would be better served going to TAFE.
The uni money-grubbers slashed their entrance
standards, thinking of every excuse to let older people in, admitting as many
students as possible so as to exploit the feds' fiscal loophole.
The result's been a marked lowering of the
quality of uni degrees, and unis being quite unconscionable in their
willingness to offer occupational degrees to far more people than could
conceivably be employed in those occupations.
I suspect those vice-chancellors who've
suggested that winding back the demand-determined system would be preferable to
the proposed across-the-board cuts (and all those to follow) are right."
Ross Gittins is the Herald's economics editor.
COMMENT:
If this is so and anywhere near being on the money why is that Launceston City Council is thinking that it's justifiable to give away public land to a 'money grabbing exploitative business'?
There might well be a case to go into business with the university but think about it. You get to give the land away and the community takes on extra debt for more infrastructure and the university is EXEMPT from paying rates. How does that work
The aldermen didn't see the university coming, for whatever reason it seems that council management (the GM?) didn't look AND the ratepayer get the bill because the council can levy ratepayers. How does that work??
The university here is shaping up as being the 'enterprise-from-hell' – the one that takes and does not give – and time is running out if there is a need to clip its wings!!
Saturday, 16 September 2017
Launceston's Dirty Tamar
"Separating Launceston's combined sewerage network at a 'cost of hundreds of millions of dollars' is not likely to significantly improve the health of the Tamar River, a TasWater senior engineer believes.
The river is subject to about 1000 sewerage outflows each year thanks to the city's unique combined sewer system – the second oldest in Australia to Sydney.
Consisting of one pipe for sewerage and stormwater, some of Launceston's brick-barrelled network dates back to the 1870s.
It works [??] by catching stormwater and sewerage in one pipe before pumping it to a treatment plant.
In heavy rainfall the pipe can overflow, discharging raw sewage and stormwater into the river to prevent localised flooding.
Separating the system has long been mooted as a fix to faeces flowing into the river.
But TasWater treatment asset performance senior engineer Cameron Jessup said the entity's modelling showed splitting the network might not provide a value for money.
"Work done to date doesn't suggest separation will give the best environmental outcomes," he said.
"The issues with separation was it was going to be very costly compared to the other upgrade options."
TasWater studies found the combined system contributed about 5 per cent of sediment load in the river, about 1 per cent of its nutrient load and 30 per cent of its pathogen.
"The work we've done to date doesn't suggest a separated system is going to be a silver bullet," Mr Jessup said.
"You weren't going to see a marked reduction in solids load, you will see some reduction in that pathogen load – it's not going to be as significant as people expect."
The catchment area of the Tamar's tributary, South Esk, makes up about one-sixth of Tasmania's land mass.
Forestry, farms and industrial pollution contributes to the quality of flow into the river.
"It's very difficult to put our hopes on one activity to significantly alter what's going on in the receiving environment," Mr Jessup said.
"Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on separation doesn't seem to represent great value to our customers."
Mr Jessup said Launceston's combined system was able to capture and treat the first rainfall flush, which pushes road contaminants and sediment into drains.
Under a separated system the stormwater would flow untreated into the river."
COMMENT
Well, well, I'm no engineer but I have watched the pointless separation of Trevallyn's stormwater from the sewer. The result is just as Hayden Johnson reports in The Examiner, Trevallyn's stormwater is sent speedily to the river gathering up all kinds of crap on its journey.
A lot of money, a lot of money, was spent by ratepayers "getting ready to hand it over to TASwater" and absolutely pointlessly. It remains an expensive and unfunny joke that nobody wants to talk about.
However, there were contractors who did very nicely out of the project and at the time more than the odd resident made that observation. Likewise, more recently on Bald Hill Rd – see http://baldhillroad7250.blogspot.com.au/ – spurious, and expensive, stormwater mismanagement has been undertaken by Launceston City Council and no amount of pleading with Mayor van Zetten and Robert Dobrzynski could influence the inept decision making.
You see under SECTION 65 the GM could determine anyone he liked to be an "expert" and delegate authority to whoever he liked under SECTION 62 of the Act.
As for Mayor van Zetten he was quite simply disinclined to intervene in the ratepayers' interest albeit that there were indications that West Tamar Council was prepared to entertain cost sharing. Along with his disinclination to amalgamate on terms suitable to adjoining jurisdictions, if his calls for 'resource sharing' seem hollow there seems to be quite a bit of evidence about that might lead you to think such things.
If The Tamar is to ever be dealt with in the way it needs to be Launceston's overblown council operation needs to be removed from the equation.
However, handing ownership of TASwater to the State Govt. is no way to go either!!
Rather TASwater needs to be corporatised as a Community Cooperative with the State's ratepayer directly holding shares. Tasmanian Govt. and Launceston's Councils over hundreds of years have looked the other way as The Tamar degraded!
It's time for a new approach!!
Ray Norman
Red tape, Richard Colbeck and Launceston's City Council
 |
| Contributions: How the short term rental market's two biggest players, Airbnb and Stayz, impacted Tasmania's economy in the last year. |
This agenda item for next Monday's Council meeting raises questions and quite probably more than are likely to be answered in the meeting. It is indeed "bemusing" that it might be Ald. Alexander who is making the running on this proposal. He is reportedly easily distracted from 'council business' when he is at the table and, apparently, as likely as not he can be found dashing off on more important business or 'twitering' during discussions he finds unimportant.
If Launceston's future can be seen as being more to do with tourism, and Airbnb accommodation is a part of that, and regulating this as a 'business activity' is in fact a State Govt. matter, it is unsurprising that questions about Ald. Alexander's 'interests' in the matter might arise.
Launceston's council operation has become charactorised by its blurring of its policymaking role and the council management's purpose. It is about time that the growing trend that's been especially in evidence over past few years was dealt with, and with some urgency. This blurring for whatever reason seems to suit management well enough and particularly so given that increasingly the Act virtually renders the elected representatives 'surplus to requirement'.
Ald. Alexander's intervention in the light of all this and his intervention in regard to 'Food Street' gets curiouser and curiouser. SEE: https://www.examiner.com.au/story/4896832/call-for-food-van-policy-at-city-council/?cs=95 Can these issues be linked – that is Airbnb and Food Street – and if there are links what are they?
Where are the broad scale and strategic policy determinations here? If this looks like a 'shot from the hip', is it just that, or is there something else going on here?
If there was a register of pecuniary interests such question might be more easily resolved. That is, other than under the protocol of declaring an interest in a matter. So, Richard Colbeck's bemusement is understandable as will be the constituency's bewilderment once these matters are given more scrutiny!
Because of the blurring of the roles of management and the elected representatives, planning issues in Launceston all too easily become clouded in secrecy. In the end the wider community pays for the excesses of, and the aspirations of, developers.
Former federal tourism minister Richard Colbeck says he is "bemused" by a motion put forward at City of Launceston council to investigate its ability to regulate Airbnb, Stayz and other short-term accommodation facilities.
Mr Colbeck has been consulting privately with Stayz on both a state and national level.
He said attempting to regulate the innovation of the short-term accommodation industry was unnecessary and risked stifling innovation, as well as discouraging tourism in the region.
City of Launceston Alderman Darren Alexander put forward the notice of motion, to be considered in Monday's council meeting, asking the council to investigate its ability to administer regulation of Airbnb, Stayz and similar accommodation places.
Ald Alexander questioned whether the short-term rental market might discourage the larger traditional hotel sector from investing in the region.
Ald Alexander was contacted for comment on Friday.
New state regulations came into effect in July to regulate the short-term rental sector, reducing the amount of red tape people seeking to share their homes have to work through.
"Why is the instinct always to regulate up, when there is an opportunity to actually de-regulate some of the traditional sector?" Mr Colbeck said.
"What you're effectively doing is stifling innovation."
Mr Colbeck said the impact of the short-term rental accommodation sector on the traditional accommodation sector generated positive growth. He pointed to the rise of cheap airfares growing the airline economy and encouraging more people to fly as an example of a similar innovation growing the tourism economy.
A Deloitte report showed Airbnb brought in a contribution of $55 million to Tasmania's gross state product, and almost 600 jobs in 2015-2016.
Across the state nearly 125,000 people stayed at Airbnbs through the year, spending $86 million during their visits.
Stayz visitors contributed nearly $22.1 million to the economy.
Rather than adding extra regulation at a local government level to the Airbnb sector, Mr Colbeck said it would be smarter for the large traditional sector, such as hotels and motels, to push for a red tape reduction to be in line with the state's short-term accommodation regulation.
"I was a bit bemused that here we have from Launceston – only a matter of weeks really since new regulatory framework came into place here in Tassie – that both the STR sector and local government participated in, there's proposals to add yet another layer of red tape," he said.
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