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Whether it be those trying to ward off the ill-conceived Traveston Crossing Dam, those in the path of Powerlink’s one-track energy delivery system, those awaiting the rollout of the northern pipeline to the proposed dam or the drive of rail duplication from the south, all are learning the vulnerability of dreams.

We seem to be always making way for a future about which we have no say and whose impact is delivered at the stroke of a pen wielded by someone over whom we have no influence.

There seems little commitment to the present. Community consultation is an expensive farce not driven by any genuine desire to solicit and consider the views of those impacted.

People in the process of fulfilling long-held dreams through the commitment to long-term loans are too easily dismissed by the process as NIMBYs.

The regulatory provisions allow the illusion that predetermined outcomes can be affected by the weight of a community or individual’s argument and resolve, but the reality is something quite different.

Over the past few months, community organisations and individuals have been analysing the draft South East Queensland Regional Plan and making considered submissions about how the people they represent see the future.

All are connected by a common theme, that the future should be planned through a measurement of the land’s capacity to absorb growth while keeping in balance all the elements that deliver our quality of life.

They recognise that all our needs can’t be bought at a shop, that air-conditioned retail complexes should not be the centre of community life and that everything has a limit.

All recognise that change will occur but rather than accept that as meaning the continuing erosion of present lifestyle values, see it as an opportunity to improve on the past.

Yet the arguments they face are from the past, based on flawed mathematical models the consequences of which the state government has shown an ongoing incapacity to service.

Last week at a UDIA breakfast in Maroochydore, a department of infrastructure and planning demographer explained she was not going to address the SEQ regional plan review and just deliver the hard data that informed it.

However, what followed was a precis of an argument that you will hear repeatedly in the immediate future as the sectional interests of the development industry and the state combine to justify why the democratic process does not entail listening to the desires of the 300,000 people who live here now.

No, our best interests are to be served by a few accessing the opportunities to be afforded through the encouragement and servicing of growth at the expense of all else.

The demographer, Dr Alison Taylor, made it clear that growth was good; that slower growth had negative consequences and that regions had a responsibility to carry their share of it.

Whatever the qualifications offered to soothe those being trod on in the process, it remains a one-track argument that suggests we lack the capacity to build an economy and function as a society by any other means than destroying the world around us.

As a model for a resilient financial and environmental future, it is the equivalent of extending a credit card’s limit to balance the budget.

Feeding more people into the equation allows an illusion of prosperity, until the bills begin to mount up.

The ageing of our population and the fact that within 20 years nearly one in three of us will be over 65 is a consequence of earlier policies that also thought the magic formula just required more people.

The question that has not been addressed, but which should be asked at every opportunity, is: if exponential growth during the past 30 years has not built a diverse, robust and resilient economy while protecting the region’s once rich biodiversity, how will exponential growth during the next 20 years achieve that outcome?

Bill Hoffman

Source with thanks:  http://www.thedaily.com.au/blogs/bill-hoffman/2009/may/06/more-same/