There are significant problems with the recent City of Greater Geelong (CoGG) endorsement of the Stockland proposal. The problems I want to identify concern the way corporations like Stockland fail to reckon with their political impact upon local communities. I also want to draw attention to the way local government planning decisions can ignore states of affairs that are staring it in the face.

The City of Greater Geelong’s justification for endorsing the Stockland proposal seems to ignore the fact that this decision about a housing development within the CoGG area means a large-scale change to a significant small coastal township whose centre of gravity lies beyond the Fellows Road boundary of the CoGG.

To Point Lonsdale residents east of Fellows Road, the CoGG decision may well be viewed as preposterous. Whether it is or not needs to be debated and resolved. And that debate needs to find a way to listen to the community of Point Lonsdale that does not live in the CoGG. The CoGG presumes to be able to give its approval for a 40% increase (660 housing blocks) in the number of housing blocks located within Point Lonsdale which as a postal code area spans the boundary between the two local authorities. The CoGG decision is endorsement, by a neighbouring local Government authority, to bring about the transformation of a small township most of which lies outsides its area.

The failure of the CoGG Council in this matter, can be easily pin-pointed: when did it, as part of its decision-making, seek advice from all of Point Lonsdale’s residents about the proposed development? This brings us to the question of taking advice and listening to the people who will be affected by the proposed development. The CoGG Council will have erred seriously if it thinks that views generated from the Stockland office in Point Lonsdale constitutes valid advice from the Point Lonsdale community. But that is precisely the spin that is present in the published views of the Stockland Victorian General Manager. Stockland claims to have undertaken “more than two years of research and consultation” but, despite giving itself “presence” at the top of the Point Lonsdale shopping strip, it never actually took the step of commissioning “open and transparent” community research to find out how the local Point Lonsdale community felt about its plans. And that failure speaks enormously because in fact it shows a lack of respect for the views of the Point Lonsdale community.

So what can we conclude? The CoGG decision to approve the Stockland plans for public display, and the Stockland plans for development, demonstrates two important things:

Here, I’ve not really been concerned with whether the decision can be justified in environmental terms. The letters to the editor in the most recent Rip Rumour (April 2006) give well-reasoned arguments why this decision is very unwise. Nor do I discuss whether Cr Farrell should have resigned when she realised she couldn’t keep her election promise to ‘Stop Stockland’. Questions about how elected representatives should keep to their electoral promises will be discussed on another occasion. The problem I have flagged here is not about those contentious matters. They do need to be vigorously debated and resolved.

But what I have raised here are problems in the way local government decision-makers view ‘development’ and the way developers are seemingly blind to the way their proposals can have a significant impact upon the structure of citizenship at local government level, a key element within the very communities they are claim to be building.

Henrietta Dubb, Christian citizen of the 21^st century.

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