What price free enterprise?

     So now the signs were reading: “PEDESTRIANS GIVE WAY TO DESPAIR” and you can see an angry despair written on all our faces. A town full of good people who just want to throttle someone. Have our elected representatives ever fallen lower in our estimation than they have now? Not just locally in Palerang, but also in Macquarie St. and Canberra.

     The lies, the ineptitude, the lies, the apathy, the lies, the dull-eyed brutishness, the lies, the corruption, the lies and the shameless spin, the hot air and the tedious obfuscation. Sat beside war and famine and disease and torture and refugee-abuse and the mangling of a once great health and education system, Zebra Stripes seem lightweight and parochial.

     But, the infuriating incompetence and the plodding dolly-steps that have led us to this junk may well result in injury or death on Braidwood’s main street. Yes, it’s stupid and dangerous and embarrassing, but, it’s also very UGLY – myopic, insensitive and creatively bankrupt. 

     Just what do the most scintillating, problem-solving brains of Palerang Council and the R.M.S. understand by the term “heritage”? Where is the discernment, the skill, the energy, the intellectual rigor that should have stood firm and shouted: 

     “What? You want to pour vast expanses of white concrete over our superb, hand-laid granite kerbstones? You’ll strangle Braidwood’s beautiful wide main street with a scabby sprawl of cement? That’s not a “traffic blister”, that’s a boil on Braidwood’s face! This place is  special. It has a 175 year history, a unique beauty. There’s the door, you clowns – don’t slam it on the way out!” 

     Would Beechworth have allowed rubbish like this? Take a good look at the way THAT glorious old, granite, gold mining town treasures its magnificent heritage assets and ask yourself: “What the hell did we do to deserve this insult to our rare and lovely town?” 

     As for gold mining...Think of the corporate entities for which you currently have the very least regard and respect...Coal miners with their sticky, back-room deals? Iron ore miners and their over-inflated C.E.O.s? Coal seam gas miners with their tender bedside manners? Uranium miners and their sub-continental fallout? Gold miners with a halo of arsenic and lead fumes around their sainted heads and a bucket of cyanide in each hand? 

     For a growing proportion of the Australian community, this lot just might have sunken below the level of the brown thing stuck to the sole of a used car salesman’s white shoe. 

     IF our elected representatives are ever insane enough to allow cyanide processing at the Major’s Creek mine, then WHEN (not if) the spills and leakages occur and our streams become toxic from here to the coast, those unwise representatives will come crashing down in flames. The company will be fined YET AGAIN and cry more crocodile tears.  

     But that won’t help the Macquarie Perch and the Platypus floating belly-up in Major’s Creek, Araluen Creek, the Deua River, and the Moruya River. A few sacked local members, disgraced ministers and remorseful ex-premiers won’t help us de-contaminate the drinking water, the orchards or the oyster beds. 

     If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from Braidwood’s pedestrian crossing cock-up, it’s that our elected officials will NOT hear us unless we scream in their faces. They just WON’T understand us, or what our precious region means to us unless we poke them hard in the chest.

Perhaps we are to blame. Perhaps we should have shown up at every planning meeting. 

     Never forget the community’s smashing of the Silicon Charcoal Factory fiasco (another ill-conceived Project of State Significance) or the saving of Monga Forest or our demolition of the lunatic Timber Industrial Park proposal – the people of the Braidwood region can be fabulously formidable when roused. Free enterprise need not cost us the earth.

Michael Gill, Christine Payne and the ghost of Robyn Steller, 

Sheep Station Creek Landcare Group, Upper Deua Catchment.