More questions than answers
I WOULD like to, through the pages of The Guardian, ask for some clarification of the letter written to your paper (July 24, pg 4, Relevance and facts).
1. Can you please explain to us who the stakeholders are in the Our Place project and are ratepayers not classed as stakeholders, as at the extensive consultation meetings, in which myself as a member of the Pioneer Settlement Scrap Our Place Plan committee, I attended every meeting and did not see any overwhelming support for option one of this project.
2. The Our Place issue, as you remarked it as being, is about saving and ensuring the future of the settlement and not destroying it and is your opinion and that of five other councillors and not the opinion of the signatures on the petition that we collected which you so conveniently like to ignore.
3. If times have changed so much, why is it that the settlement was a profitable establishment until the 1990s when it was taken over by council and with the employment of an unnecessarily amount of staff it has began to lose money.
4. In the confirmed meeting minutes of September 19, 2019, it was stated that the combination of the art gallery and information centre would be of no saving to the ratepayers.
5. You commented that present and past councillors and mayors have questioned the fairness of this situation and asked for it to be rectified/improved. So then why have Margaret Schintler, David Quayle, Nicole McKay, and John Ward the last chairman of PS and the ratepayer association all written letter to the editor of The Guardian and are all strongly against the proposal.
6. Facts as you wrote that at this point the train and the windmill will remain at the settlement which:
A. What does this point mean, as are you saying that at some point this could change?
B. If it had not been for our committee, the train would have been donated from the settlement which is how our committee was formed due to the removal of the train which has led us to find out more and more wrongs of the council.
7. The development of the Old Wharf and the bridge onto the Pental Island has only been proposed in the last meeting on July 7, 2020 and where is the money for this development proposal to come from or will this be added to the $5.9 million that the ratepayers are already expected to pay.
8. In the facts, as you state, Spoons will remain where it is with the community preferred layout and views, but you then state that new future accommodation development opportunities could include changes to lodges, Spoons, art gallery site and car park.
9. It has also been stated “to refuse the available funding should not be considered and would jeopardise future funding opportunities” and has been stated at meetings, in which I have attended, “we will not be losing this money” and “let’s just get the building built”, so it seems that the grant is the most important factor of this development and more important than getting this project done properly.
10. You state that the land near the toilet block at the south entrance is not river frontage therefore ineligible for the Murray River masterplan funding and is leased by the racing precinct off a government department. Isn’t the council a government department that could look into this possibility? Doesn’t our June racing carnival bring in more money to our region than any other event? Why not have art gallery, new restaurant, and information centre looking over our racecourse with plenty of parking available on the entrance to our town?
11. There were five other options that where looked at, but we have not been told where these were. That is a wonderful example of community consultation.
You ask us to communicate with you and consult with you and I have emailed five councillors with only two replying to my email and three councillors not bothering to reply or make contact at all.
So, I say that this letter has not cleared up any misconceptions but has only raised more and more questions that we will never receive answers to.
Colleen Crossfield,
Woorinen South
Scrap VCAT application
I WAS disappointed to read The Guardian article on July 31 regarding a VCAT appeal against Our Place.
I have been a volunteer at the Pioneer Settlement for almost 10 years and like many others did not approve the suggested building design we saw last year.
In the recent online survey, my suggestions were a single storey building (probably at option two); extend the present art gallery; ensure the Gem stays within
the settlement grounds; provide ample caravan parking, and; the info centre should have been on the Murray Valley Highway/Wattie Street corner.
However, most of these will not happen.
The Swan Hill Rural City councillors are democratically elected by us, the ratepayers. After months of community consultation, they have made their decision.
That is their job. Let’s get on with it — perhaps fine tune some aspects, but support the Pioneer Settlement for the future.
Some comments in The Guardian article are ridiculous and indicate a lack of knowledge and no recent visits to the settlement.
The new building will not be a disaster, nor will it be the end of the Pioneer Settlement. It will not detract from the heritage value within the settlement grounds.
We should not forget or criticise what previous committees and administrations have done for the Pioneer Settlement. They have all been there for the same purpose, similar to the current Friends of the Pioneer Settlement committee.
This group has raised more than $1.5 million in the past 10 years, mostly through the Paragon Cafe and tea rooms and Photography Parlour.
Other activities include drapery shop, tractor display and activation, rope making, vintage car driving, musical entertainment, weaving in Keats Cottage, veg garden and chook house, and others at various times.
The Scrap Our Place group raised some valid points such as keeping the locomotive on site. After all this settles down, I hope some from this group will consider becoming a volunteer and helping to save and improve the heritage features about which they have been so passionate.
So, I urge whoever is behind the VCAT application to scrap it now.
It is divisive, a complete waste of time and resources for our councillors and council staff, using ratepayers’ money.
Ross Cox,
Swan Hill
Aircrafts still buzzing around
I WANT some answers please.
Also to be tabled at your next council meeting.
After our council supposedly suspending negotiations with the AAA flying school not to go ahead, why are there so many training in our skies over Swan Hill, still?
I have been unwell for some time now, also re-couperating from an operation, you get told from your surgeon to rest at home.
I would like to know how a person can do this when the aircrafts are circling around constantly?
Honestly you rest your head on the pillow and just doze off, only to have the aircrafts buzzing around.
It does not help when you cannot get sleep at night due to pain or illness, so you try and rest and sleep when you can, including during the day.
Yes, our property is in the direct flight path of the aerodrome.
We pay our higher rates, for peace and serenity.
Why have we got Ballarat-based students coming here for training and still have Mildura-based students touching down and training in our skies?
Is it only the dollar signs that our council are looking at now? Touch and go?
I do believe that the people of Swan Hill will want to look as to who they vote into council in the October elections, as we as Swan Hill residents have not seen the last of this pilot training school, AAA, being introduced once again.
I want to know what your intentions, as our councillors, are for this flying school?
Our community spoke up against this flying school, but I believe that our council put there motion forward as a suspension to try and keep us as citizens quiet because of the pressure/backlash they received.
Kim Stapleton
Edit: This letter was originally sent to councillors of Swan Hill Rural City
Still more work to be done
BORDER closures continue to have a massive impact on families, businesses and communities.
As a resident of a Murray River community, I understand well how much we rely on our interstate neighbours – and them us.
Victorian Nationals MPs have been working constructively with our interstate counterparts to help individuals and businesses through the closures.
We’re all prepared to do our bit to stop the spread of this deadly virus, but in some cases there’s a safe, workable solution to help border communities go about daily life.
This includes securing agreement to reopen bridges at Tooleybuc, Gonn, Nyah, Murrabit and Barmah.
Ovens Valley MP Tim McCurdy worked on behalf of his community to get doctors and nurses back to work at North East Health in Wangaratta after changed restrictions stopped 80 staff from crossing the border.
We’ve also delivered certainty for families with a daily bus service for children in NSW to get to class in Victoria and ensured NSW restrictions don’t stop Victorian residents fishing from the banks of the Murray River.
There’s still more work to be done.
Victoria’s freight sector is grinding to a halt as a result of confusing advice on testing and isolation that’s seeing some trucks turned back at the border.
And although we’ve made progress on seasonal worker bans, we’ll keep working to find a solution that will protect public health while ensuring our farmers can get the workers they need for this year’s harvest.
The Nationals will keep standing up for our regional communities on the issues that matter as we work together through this crisis.
Peter Walsh,
Leader of The Nationals
Shadow Minister for Agriculture
Shadow Minister for Regional Victoria and Decentralisation
Screaming and kicking
RECENT media reports indicate the SA Government has handed out $15 million in penalties for over extraction at the end of the Murray system.
As a former irrigator from the Murray Valley in the nation’s food bowl, I am totally disheartened by the lack of compliance in various parts of the Murray Darling Basin.
Those left trying to farm in southern NSW and northern Victoria have the most modern and well-metered irrigation systems in the world, and as a consequence cannot take a cupful of water without an alarm going off in a building somewhere.
In the northern basin (at the top of the system), we have compliance, metering and licencing issues which urgently need to be addressed.
Likewise at the end of the system, though the SA Government should be commended for its efforts to curb some of this over-extraction.
The key issue, of course, is that in parts of the system, governments have failed to put checks and balances in place leaving irrigators to self manage. When they do either deliberately or inadvertently take more than they should, all irrigators get tarred with the same brush of irresponsibility.
The obvious solution is far more rigour around compliance for everyone, including environmental water, across the entire basin.
This needs total support, including peak farming bodies who have been fairly silent on the lack of compliance, licencing and metering issues in northern basin which make the volumes taken from bottom of the system look like a drop in the ocean.
Is it any wonder those of us in the middle are screaming and kicking?
We do the right thing, using the world’s most efficient irrigation system, while those either end don’t.
Yet we have been accused of being divisive for trying to protect our farms and communities, which are suffering through poor policy and compliance efforts.
And where is the independent umpire, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), which should be there to support us?
They treat us with utter contempt and have left us to shrivel and die while the mismanagement and political games continue.
All we want is a fair go, and since the start of basin plan implementation eight years ago that has not happened.
There is enough water for everyone, thanks to our forefathers who had the insight to build the Hume and Dartmouth storages.
What we don’t have is an MDBA with the ability to effectively manage it, or governments who are prepared to demand the it be managed to maximum efficiency.
Compliance issues, like we have just seen in SA, are just one part of this systemic problem.
Shelley Scoullar,
Albury
