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Digging ourselves out of political neglect
20 June 2009
Anyone who lives and breathes the Sunshine Coast could not avoid being dismayed, even shattered, by a close analysis of the State Budget and its treatment of our high growth region last Tuesday.
The serial neglect of major expenditure on the Coast must be a cause for increasing concern by an increasingly disillusioned public who are often told that governments are for all of the people, regardless of their political colour.
The State help is minimalist, yet, even local governments like ours, it seems, are going to have less financial capacity to develop major infrastructure once the current subsidies are terminated.
As a region we still have little consensus on the main strategic issues that will fundamentally affect the quality of life, and there remains at least a conservative element or even a ‘cultural cringe’ in some of our reactions to dealing with future challenges, and fed by populist media.
We seem to get excited more about a $5M grant for a stadium rather than the structure of the economy that will sustain our quality of life or even our capacity to manage environmental issues and provide critical infrastructure.
The Coast across my 15 years here, has always been bedevilled by committees or agencies with competing agendas, operating with scant complementarity. And now, we are again seeing a proliferation of interest groups addressing the economy for example, when there should really be one peak group for the whole region.
I couldn’t help contrast our relative regional confusion against a comment on the Danish economic success during the week: “Out of the necessity that we don’t have a lot of natural resources, we have had to concentrate on human resources”. From this concentration has come innovation, creativity, and quality businesses and a successful nation.
To get ourselves out of this cycle of serial neglect on the Coast, we ought to start organising ourselves better and establish regionally significant economic priorities, and how we lobby to gain support for them in this bleak economic environment.
That’s going to take a great deal more commitment to genuine collaboration than is happening now. The risks associated with not organising ourselves regionally, are higher than ever before.
Professor Paul Thomas AM is Vice-Chancellor and President at the University of the Sunshine Coast.