Dear Minister Vincent,
I write as a Launcestonian maker and researcher, not as a craftsperson albeit that I am often described as that, not as an artist albeit that I’m known as that at times. The nomenclatures that makers, craftspeople, and artists come to be known by is sometimes contested ground, but all of us are who we are because we make what we make, and do what we do. That said, most of us are makers in one context or another but we are all placemakers.
I am a Launcestonian who has lived in Launceston for half of my life Launceston and the city has been my social laboratory for about 30 years. My research in the area of cultural geography and my research has been largely focused on the cultural realities that the city’s placedness depends upon and increasingly that has become the foundation for my own placedness.
Researchers are often understood as those who go out in the world to discover what might be done and what has been done before so it can be repeated or implemented in some way. That is not the purpose of research albeit such things are discovered. Researchers’ purposefulness is about developing better understandings in order to put them to work until even better understandings evolve. Part of its purpose is to help avoid the mistakes made in the past. If we are not making mistakes we are not attempting to achieve anything significant. Mistake making is an incremental, purposeful and ongoing process.
Likewise, in ‘governance', its purposefulness is also ongoing and to do with the ‘making’ of places, not to maintain them as they are but ‘make’ them as they need to be– not as they should for could be. The assertion that this is not the case in Local Govt., in Tasmania and Launceston is evidence based but it is just the case that the first and second tiers of governance are disinclined to garner that evidence. Politically such an exercise in evidence gathering threatens the status quo and politicians have heavily invested in keeping things as they are given the stipends and livelihoods that are at risk.
Our ‘heritage places’ are as riddled with mistakes as they may be filled with assets and treasures worth cherishing. Understanding ‘placemaking’ and ‘placemarking’ is the task that governance shares with the governed. In order to govern effectively, 'the governors’ and ’the governed’ need to collaborate towards achieving the effective outcomes that are being aspired towards and purposefully.
A common quote attributed to the 20th C philosopher, Bertrand Russell, – the Ban The Bomb Advocate – relates to collaboration: "The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.” Russell emphasizes the importance of working together to solve problems and achieve progress. He also said the "Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet been able to make cooperation possible. …and … Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.” He wasn’t saying that cooperation in placemaking wasn’t possible, it just the case that it is a human endeavour that is yet to be realised in governance – albeit aspired towards in some instances.
We are all cultural producers – makers not heroes. Moreover, what makers make matters because together we ‘make' cultural landscapes, and together we collaborate to build our cultural realities – and our legacies are invested in those landscapes. Governance is all about this and around the time of the Industrial Revolution – 1760 - 1900 – communities needed elected representatives to deliver governance in a world that was being disrupted enormously. The world was changing at a pace that up to then was unprecedented. It was this ‘revolution’ that made colonisation a necessity and a possibility. As a consequence, Launceston Tasmania exists albeit that currently almost every imperative that gave THEplace its ‘placedness’ is currently either redundant or contestable. Ships no longer rely upon the weather, they are self-propelled, and messages can travel from one place to another at the speed of light. Things have changed.
Tasmania’s Local Govt Act was framed in 1993 and interestingly the first ever website was created in 1990. In June 1993, there were about 130 websites on the World Wide Web and by June 1994, this number grew to 2,738. The number has grown exponentially by the minute since and the number is incalculable. The point being that in a 21st C context the Act’s relevance is invested in a largely redundant paradigm and especially so in regard to elected representation. Democracy does not depend upon elected representation and did not in its foundation. Participatory democracy is currently more possible, an even so within an Act framed in 1993.
Launceston, like places with shared histories, has exceeded its colonial use-by-date albeit that there may well be elements of the ‘place’ and its ‘placedness’ that has value and where their purposefulness is enriching. Nonetheless, ‘Launceston’ occupies a geography where its colonially oriented 19th cum 20th C CULTURALlandscaping is no longer fit-for-purpose. In fact, by-and-large the planning processes and current regulations are extraneous and ‘irrelevant’. Moreover, as for the expert placemakers, well they are to be found outside the city’s Town Hall albeit that they have been rendered voiceless in deference to the status quo.
The planning concept that says that CULTURALlandscaping is noun, something that is, something that is enshrined in regulation and by-laws, something that exists in say benchmarking, is an exemplar of redundant thinking. Moreover, it is something that no longer has relevance 25 years into the 21st C. It is/was a mindset and a 'colonial idea" imposed from far away in an Imperial context– the MOTHERland or FATHERland for instance.
CULTURALlandscaping is about doing and making ... ask Australia’s Aboriginal people, Pacific Islands' peoples, indeed ask indigenous people anywhere. Consider Thailand for a moment, a sovereign nation with very long histories and with no colonisation within them.
Australia has in its layered histories cultural landscapers who together have been significant in their participating in the creation of ‘places’ to belong to. We belong to our landscapes, our geographies indeed, and we belong in them as much as to them. Albeit often born elsewhere, many/most of Australia’s extraordinary placemakers and cultural landscapers have contributed to a vernacular Australian placedness – some of it is laudable, some of is exploitative and less than pretty. Many of our ‘placemakers’ have created cultural institutions that have contributed – in reality and subliminally – enormously to the Australian cultural reality. Australia’s governance is what it is and within it there is much to celebrate. Nonetheless, there is within it a great deal that requires fundamental change to fit current circumstances and current realities.
In Local Government’s case, and in Tasmania, under its auspices extraordinary things have been achieved albeit that the place for self-nominated ‘representatives’, arguably, has passed given the rise of 21st C technologies.
Importantly in ‘Participatory Democracy’ decision making matters to more and to more people. In that, sadly those to who have invested their lives and homemaking in places and who are expected to trust Local Govt. are being poorly served by the Representative Democracy that has become the status quo in many places. All too often it seems that Local Govt is hell bent on plundering assets in communities' inheritance and for purposes unintended. To call what is currently in process via their elected Councillors, directed by their administrators, ‘asset stripping’, it would not be drawing too long a bow. The benefits are flowing to developers et al who are often developing assets and infrastructure to benefit (enrich?!) cashed-up developers.
In the corporate world the kind of opaqueness and the subterranean goings-on in the ‘Council enterprises’ would no doubt enrage investors, and the prime movers would be called upon to account for themselves – and there would be consequences! In Local Govt, given the presumed purposefulness ratepayers, residents, businesspeople, et al are less inclined for whatever reason, to cause a political fuss due to the fiscal risks involved – that is to themselves and fellow citizens.
All too often untoward behaviours fly under the radar given the paradigm of “operational confidentiality” that Council administrations cocoon themselves within. Religious institutions are increasingly being scrutinised as they should be, and it turns out that there is quite a bit of 'dust under the carpet’ . Arguably, Local Govt needs the class of scrutiny that exposes untoward behaviours. In every way, accountability and transparency needs to be tested across the corporate landscape and in its entirety. Good governance depends upon it!
It was Mao Zedong who said “investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it.” While Mao’s ‘wisdom’ might not win political accolades around all that many dinner tables in Launceston there is wisdom in these words. Also, when and if we muse upon Naomi Klein’s words … "If enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one” … there’re messages in all these words for our grandchildren’s grandchildren if not for our Councillors and the helpers they hire.
Somehow all this escapes the attention of all those who have entrusted so, so much in a set of ideas and ideals to our 'governors'. Ratepayers, residents and businesspeople might well ask you as the Minister of Local Govt. to ‘pause’ the Launceston City Council given that it is:
Evident that there are serial failures; and
- Given that Council’s apparent, perhaps imminent demise at its own hand; and
- The enormous costs that the city’s ratepayers are being expected to bear.
For those who have invested their trust through their time, their energy, their skills, their earning, their everything, in HOMEmaking in the city it would be a gesture of acknowledgement of the trust they have invested in CULTURALlandscaping and that it is at risk. Largely, citizen’s donations and bequests to cultural institutions in the city are currently being dismissed as being, irrelevant, dismissible, disposable, and surplus to requirement, but the losses to opportunity are, in the end, what is so devastating .
For instance, over time Launcestonians’, and the first and second tiers of governance, et al have invested enormously in the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery (QVMAG) and notionally it has no governance, and certainly no Board of Trustees, but it is a Council Cost Centre. Apparently, its recurrent budget now exceeds $7Million or possibly reading towards $9Million but the QVMQAG fails to report its financial progress to Council in Open Council. Here there is an institution that generates but a tiny element of its recurrent budget and by-and-large depends upon the ‘public purse’ for its infrastructure and its recurrent budget for its sustenance and that is unsustainable.The QVMAG aught to be a purposeful community social enterprise that delivers dividends – social, cultural & financial dividends – to its Commuity of Ownership & Interest given their investment in the operation.
Currently that is not the case and the failure is there for all to see. Despite there being options available to change the circumstance, the failures to be found in the Council's governance appear in the operation of the QVMAG.
As it turns out, despite the community’s ‘good will’ , the QVMAG is an institution is ‘exemplary’ in its ongoing drain on the public purse and the opacity of its financial circumstances. It is an extraordinary circumstance and all the more so as Council’s administration further distances itself from expert community advice and is actively disbanding community oriented advisory mechanisms. Concerningly, all this in the QVMAG’s case means that a community asset apparently functions without accountable and transparent governance or even without any form of operational and purposeful governance at all.
After that there is the Burchalls Debacle where ratepayers and residents have been, and are likely to be yet, loosing $Millions. Plus, and concerningly, there is every prospect that Council will GIFT the Burchalls Building to a developer – See links [1]– [2] – in an attempt to pull the fat out of the fire. In regard to this failed enterprise ratepayers and residents could hardly be served any worse than currently. Over the life of this ill-conceived excursion into property development it has been extraordinarily expensive for Launcestonians and there is promise of there being more to come. It must never be forgotten that while there have been fiscal loses the ‘opportunity loses’ arguable eclipse the dollars lost.
It seems that the ideas and ideals communities invested in their cultural ‘institutions’, and the placemaking they foster, these values are at seriously at risk and in a worst case senario they become bureaucratic bolt holes committed to self-service. Indeed, mediocrity may well take hold where it need not.
When the corporate raiders descend from wherever and swoop upon a community’s assets and the things they treasure, and have taken their fill , they’ll scurry off into some dark corner and wonder about what they have actually gained, and to them it’ll be but crumbs. The citizen’s loss will forever be unfathomable for them. Sadly, what Local Govt. is embezzling its constituency’s funds and squandering opportunities. First and second tiers of ‘governance’ is looking away and that is outrageous.
Moreover, at its worst, the blight that infects Local Govt. infects elements of every machination of ‘Western Govt’ and the looking away is palpable. It might yet be a malady that might be found everywhere all the time. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren might not ever exist to curse us for letting it happen. However, as David Suzuki tells us ‘life on earth’ will no doubt persist despite us.
All this said, there are Aldermen and Councillors who have lived lives dedicated to creating opportunities not wealth. It is a sad prospect for those who shared in the opportunities to need to find a time and an opportunity to quietly remember them and do something in remembrance sometime. Somewhere a wise soul said that our actions can honour our unspoken words and that we will finish our unfinished work today, tomorrow or for as long as it might take.
The late Bishop Desmond Tutu, a South African theologian, prominent anti-apartheid activist and human rights advocate in his life achieved big things. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end apartheid, serving as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and being a voice for the voiceless in South Africa. He likened all this as being something like eating an elephant. Paraphrased, he pointed out that big things can be done but one bite at a time and in agreement with him there is a proverb that says that stepping stones can be make out of stumble stones. Likewise, it is said that winners are losers who got up and gave something another try.
IN CONCLUSION:
Placemaking is something humanity must do in order that families, communities, tribes, and nations can secure, safe, and life sustaining home places to live in. Placemaking is the primary purpose of any group of people charged with the governance of a place and it is an ongoing endeavour.
Minister, I submit that Launceston City Council, on the available evidence is dysfunctional and recalcitrant. Council at the very least needs to be paused and put under administration until such time as a purposeful, functional, transparent, and accountable body can be established by whatever means available. Laucestonians need there to be appropriate 21st C governance to serve 30,000 people who are currently at risk of loosing far too much at the hands of their underperforming elected representatives.
Again, concerningly ‘the elected12’ have in turn appointed an executive team and have delegated authorities to people to deliver the services that citizens need and pay for. In doing so, the ‘representatives' have by-and-large abdicated their representational role. In the short term the need for transparency and accountability should be self-evident. In the longer term what a competent administration may garners from the information it gathers will no doubt put the municipality on a more viable foundation. Likewise, strategically Council’s purposefulness can only be better informed and Launceston’s citizens better served.
Yours sincerely,
Ray Norman
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