Wyong Shire Cultural Centre

I’d like to make a few comments about the proposed cultural centre for Wyong Shire and as a current user of Wyong Memorial Hall can speak specifically as to the needs and requirements it will need to address.


Wyong Memorial Hall was built in 1964 to be a major venue for events in the Wyong Shire. It was built at Wyong for a reason: it is the administrative hub of the Tuggerah Lakes area. After all, Wyong Council itself is firmly entrenched in Wyong township and has resisted the many temptations to move over the years.

The hall has reached the end of its useful life and needs replacing. It needs replacing IN WYONG. The same reasons for its initial construction still apply today.

The history of various theatrical groups on the coast needing a cultural centre venue is chequered. There have been quite a few other theatre groups over the years, but only three major ones REMAIN: Wyong Drama Group, Woy Woy Little Theatre and Gosford Musical Society. There are quite a few other groups around, but most cannot point to a history greater than ten years, and many have simply fallen by the wayside. Wyong Drama Group was founded in 1952. Woy Woy was the mid 1960s and Gosford Musical Society also from the mid 1950s.

The main factor contributing to these groups' longevity has been the existence of a venue (now provided by the local councils), for the groups. Woy Woy has the Peninsula Theate, Goford Musical Society has Laycock Street, and Wyong Drama Group has the Wyong Memorial Hall. When compared to the other two, it is immediately apparent that we are the poor cousins of the other two groups. The other theatres are worlds away from what we've been provided for some time in regard to standards and facilities offered.

The contention that a theatre should be provided closer to the southern boundaries of the shire would be okay if there were only one major venue on the Central Coast. Unfortunately that is NOT the case. Along with the Peninsula Theatre at Woy Woy, and Laycock Street Theatre at Wyoming, Gosford City also has a couple of other major venues, such as the Conservatorium in Georgiana Terrace Gosford, and Gosford High School Auditorium (GMS's former venue before Laycock). In addition, a 1,000-seat theatre is being planned on premises now occupied by the Central Coast Leagues Club.

It means that Gosford City has a preponderance of concert venues already, with an additional major one on the way. Wyong Shire, which has a population almost as large as Gosford City, has but one - the (decaying) Wyong Memorial Hall. This hall is the focus for people from as far away as Summerland Point, Wyee, The Entrance and Ourimbah. They centre on Wyong. To build a Wyong Shire cultural centre in the shire’s south at (say) Ourimbah or Tumbi Umbi means it actually competes with and does not complement the facilities in Gosford City. It also makes it harder for people living around the upper Tuggerah Lakes to get to the venue.

One element the new cultural centre is aiming to attract is touring shows and theatre companies. This is well and good, however if you are wanting to attract touring shows to a venue, you really need to have it FURTHER away from Laycock Street otherwise you'll find that a touring group will simply play at Laycock Street and then book their next show in Newcastle. To think they will play at both Laycock Street and then 15 kilometres to the north at Ourimbah on adjacent days is hopelessly optimistic.

A new cultural centre for Wyong Shire needs to be in Wyong, or indeed, thinking it through, even further north, (maybe the new Warnervale Town Centre). This is where the hub of the people will gravitate towards. Wyong itself is very much a transport hub of the coast, with a number of Bus Routes and the Railways Station all centring on Wyong itself.

It's quite simple - the Wyong Memorial Hall basically needs replacing. If you understand the audiences we get, where they live and how they are frequently restricted in their travel, you'd immediately recognise that Wyong is the ideal location.

I do have self-interest in mind, as a member of Wyong Drama Group, but I also can relate to the history of events. Obviously the question of where to site the venue arises validly, but note that our group has been doing shows in the hall at Wyong for 45 years. No other group on the coast has such a long association with a venue. And the reason for the long history is that Wyong is an ideal location to have a group based.

Personally, I live at Wyoming (and for ten years prior to that at Narara), and if I only had to commute as far as Ourimbah to a venue, it'd be a lot more convenient for ME. But for Wyong Shire Residents in general, I can instantly see the benefits of siting a new venue at Wyong itself. (Not to mention the need to breathe a bit of life back into Wyong post-Westfield days). Wyong Drama Group itself does not necessarily need to be favoured in the provision of a hall. It's just that if you site a hall where a group with a 50-odd year history is located, then SOMETHING must be right, and other groups will benefit from what's provided to us. IE what's good for a group with a 50-year history is going to be good for other users of the hall and other residents of the shire.

Incidentally, don't be too optimistic about touring groups hiring COUNCIL venues. A lot of touring groups will hire venues already existing in local clubs, and thus not provide much business for a council venue anyway. The council venue should be concentrating on servicing local non-profit groups in preference to touring professional companies from Sydney and Melbourne. Otherwise the council will be competing with existing local clubs raising their ire as well as forgetting the community it needs to serve.

Hopefully we can see reasoned sense and ensure the new Cultural Centre is located at Wyong. It would no doubt be beneficial to ask a few of our audience members with limited resources and travel options. Wyong Drama Group plays to well over 3,000 people per year, so we do have a bit of an affinity with the people using our venue. When we hear misguided conclusions about who will use the venue and where it should be it really gets us upset.

We can give good advice if people want to listen to it. Other conclusions may not be based on putting on shows (in my case since 1987) for local audiences, rather an optimistic prediction of what you'd like to happen rather than what will or indeed does happen.

Thanks for your time.

Vision for the country

The independents have all had their call for measures to improve the country.  I agree with most of them.  However they've missed a couple of very important measures which I think is a wasted opportunity.

These measures would be extremely popular amongst the community, yet constantly are put in the too-hard basket every time they come up.

I've already blogged about making voting not compulsory (see below).  This is one I reckon MOST people in the electorate would be in favour of, yet we hear nothing about it from the pollies, even the independents.  Let's put that to one side, however.

The other one is something everyone seems to agree upon and yet nothing is done.  It's something Bob Hawke and John Howard share a consensus with, and that is, if we were putting the country together again now, then we'd probably do it without having state governments.  Bob wants us to keep the state boundaries for the purposes of Sheffield Shield cricket and State of Origin football, but otherwise let's get rid of them.  It was Don Chipp who said they were "useless appendages that hang on to body politics - they should be cut off" (ref) (mind you, in that same interview he reckoned Mark Latham was a shoe-in to be Prime Minister).

So yeah, how about it Rob & Tony?  We're already going to have a referendum on recognising native Australians in the constitution next election thanks to the Greens.  How about we add in a "let's abolish State Government" clause as well?

And Steve:  yes I still maintain Labor lost the election.  Julia is going to remain as Prime Minister, but no longer with a majority in parliament, which is what she did lose.  Note my prophecies from August 24, however.  IE a Labor/Green/Independent coalition with Bob Katter being the loose canon.  Got that one right, I wonder now about the next bit how we're going to be back at the polls within a year thanks to an external event.  Nostradamus eat your heart out.

Stop the Waste

In a recent report it has been revealed that the cost to Australia of alcohol misuse is $36 BILLION per year.  This includes a lot of indirect costs, obviously, but is said to be a realistic figure.

So the Liberal Party wants us to "stop the waste"!  I say let's start looking at this problem of alcohol misuse.  It's sobering to think that if we all stopped misusing alcohol for just a year and a half, we could actually pay for the National Broadband Network, INCLUDING budget over-runs!

This puts a lot of things into perspective.  The coalition has long claimed that the NBN is a waste.  On this basis, it is, in reality, excellent value for money.  Why don't we see people appealing for the reduction in alcohol abuse with the same sort of vehemence they are opposing the NBN?

Barnaby

Who's that jolly dumb-fuck you've got in your cabinet?

Thanks to Andrew Hansen for absolutely cracking me up tonight on "Yes, we Canberra" !!

Why Labor didn't win

I can tell you why Labor didn't win if you'd like to know.  The answer is easy.  Labor gave up on itself, and therefore the electorate gave up on Labor.  Consider these points:

(a) Climate change was the greatest moral challenge of all time up until early 2010.  Labor gave up on its policy despite a clear mandate to do something about it at the 2007 election.

(b) The Home Insulation Scheme had problems.  Hell yeah, but most government schemes do have problems.  What happens?  The problems are identified and steps are taken to fix them.  Instead Labor gave up on the insulation scheme.

(c) The Henry Report, which was the most important review of the taxation system was written and released to the government and it was given up on.  It wasn't published for over six months, and when it was partially released the government gave up completely on explaining it.  We still haven't had the figures and statistics underlying the conclusions released to this day.  The government implemented about 8 of the 138 recommendations.  So can I say that the government 94% gave up on it.  And the bit that it did decide to go with (Mining Tax) was unpopular and pilloried by the miners and their mates in the Liberal party.

(d) The promise of fixing the health system by midway through 2009 was given up on.  Okay Kruddy got around to doing something about it, but they certainly gave up on the deadline.

(e) after a cumulative effect, of the above bad policies, the government did the ultimate capitulation, and gave up on its leader, resulting in Julia Gillard coming to power.

(f) In the campaign, the government gave up on announcing significant policies, gave up promoting itself, gave up countering ludicrous arguments from the other side, gave up pointing to its fine record in the GFC, and simply reverted to the line that Tony Abbot was a real risk and you should not vote for him.

After all this (and a lot more besides) the electorate gave up on the government.  And fair enough too.

Granted, the opposition gave us a bland and negative campaign consisting of the line that the government was incompetent and we should not vote for them (if there were any other policies used I must have missed them).  Their "action contract" said they'd repay the debt (what debt?  I know the dollar amounts sound impressive, but borrowing 6% of GDP is not a significant level of debt); stop waste (a party wanting to give $75,000 to a couple earning $450,000 a year for paid parental leave cannot lecture us about waste); stop new taxes (see the previous point resulting in a 1.5% tax levy on all big companies that sell us groceries, banking services and petrol and filtering through the economy); bring the budget back to surplus by 2013 (weren't we all going to do that anyway) stop the mining tax (might be a problem with the former unless huge cuts to government services are going to result) and stop the boats (thus ending a whopping 3.4% of the asylum seeker problem).

And yet, with this campaign, Tony Abbott emasculated the ALP, made them lose 15 seats and their majority on the floor of the parliament.

It's no coincidence that most seat losses for the ALP occurred in Queensland.  Kevin Rudd is a Queenslander.

How the ALP can say Gillard ran a great campaign and that if Kruddy was still PM they would have lost another ten seats is beyond me.  It is a case of believing your own spin.  It was Shakespeare that said "and this above all, to thine own self be true".  The ALP needs to take a page out of the folio, learn from the debacle and move forward in the real sense of the term, not the spinning sense.

Election Fever!

The federal election has brought me out of hibernation.  Firstly I must state that at the moment I am an ALP member, and have been for about fifteen years now.  Back in the mid 1980s I was in fact a Liberal party member, God knows what possesed me to do that.  (Actually it was Mum & Dad, but let's not go into that now).

I need to make quite a few comments on the election.  Firstly re the political process itself.  I absolutely hate it when people say they can't be bothered with politics, you can't trust politicians and they couldn't care less who gets in.  Probably the middle point is true, but we get the politicians we deserve.  They come from us.  They come from people who care enough to care.  If no-one cares any more, then obviously the standard of political candidate decreases and any old so and so can get in.  But whose fault is that, really?  All politics is local, and if you care enough about it, then there IS something you can do (ask me how - I won't go on about it here).

Secondly, consider the electoral process of "compulsory" voting.  As Mark Latham pointedly reminded us, we don't HAVE to make a mark on the ballot paper, we only have to turn up and get our names crossed off the roll.  However I think if you've bothered to turn up, get a paper issued to you and are in a polling place anyway, it'd be crazy not to vote.

That's not the crazy point.  The thing that drives me mad is that half the nation simply couldn't care less about politics.  They don't understand the processes, they aren't interested in the game at all, and they regard voting as an inconvenience.  In some countries, people have died (literally died) over the right to vote, yet half of us couldn't give a toss.  Just do a quick street poll and see if you can find out what proportion of people can actually name their local member.  I reckon you may be in for a big disappointment.  When Kruddy was toppled that fateful day a couple of months ago and Gillard was made Prime Minister, I actually spoke to people who had never even heard of Julia Gillard.  It says it all, really.

But in Australia we force them to vote and influence the outcome of the elections, yet their decisions as to who to vote for might be based solely on such factors as the colour of the candidate's hair, or the fact that their second cousin has the same surname as their local candidate.  These criteria, for some people, are the main basis of their decision.  More fool us for forcing them to vote.

Accordingly, the election campaign has to be pitched at a level that the dumbest Australian can understand.  Don't worry about giving them facts about economics, don't worry about giving them aspirations, don't worry about giving them foreign affairs and defence policies, it's a waste of time.  What you do instead is give them a sound bite with a juicy quote, or a picture, such as buying a pie from a shop, or chucking around a football.  This is what Australian politics has been reduced to, and it's not something that gives us a good government.  The sad thing is that instead of basing a political choice on the outcome of a debate, a lot of Australians might prefer to base their decision on the result of a bare-knuckle fight between a couple of political leaders.

So I say this: make it optional.  If you don't care, don't vote.  If you don't understand, don't vote.  If you hate having to interrupt your Saturday footy or fishing trip, or visit to the pub, don't bother, we're all right without you.  This way those who care enough to vote will be the ones making the decisions and the rest of the nation can just acept what those who did vote actually said.  This is the way it works in most countries in the world.  According to Wikiedia, only 32 countries have compulsory voting.  Notably USA, UK, New Zealand, etc, etc do not, yet people do not tend to argue these nations are undemocratic.

Thirdly, and I need to probably end this post on a positive note, isn't the outcome of this election great on the same basis as the second point?  To form a government, the independents and Green will need to be courted by someone aiming to form a government.  On this basis they need to convince not a dumb electorate, but some of the most wily and canny political thinkers in Australa.  I've been listening closely to what the non-aligned members have been saying (okay, ONE of them is a little disappointing with his parochialism - sorry Bob) and I am encouraged.  They WILL be making a government based on policies, aspirations and abilities, and not the colour of the hair, or the relative's names.  Won't this be a welcome breath of fresh air into the mix.

As a prediction, I cannot see either Tony Windsor or Rob Oakeshott coalescing with the Liberals.  Adam Bandt has actually come out and stated that he wouldn't.  I have no idea how Bob Katter will go (nor does anyone else, I'd say - even including Bob Katter, I'd reckon).

But the upshot of all this is I can't see Tony Abbott as Prime Minister this parliamentary term.  The numbers are so close, however, that I also don't think the parliament is going to be workable.  If a minister needs to go overseas, if an opposition member gets sick, if someone dies, or (more likely) someone has to resign due to either retirement or corruption, the parliamentary dynamic can change.  The fact that the governing side would probably need to give up a speaker who doesn't have a normal vote also makes it difficult.  So my prediction is a Labor/Green/Independent coalition for now, but it'll become unworkable due to an external factor and we'll be out at the polling booths again within a year.

Try to Remember (that kind of September)

The singer is Tamara Abbott, as part of Wyong Drama Group's show "Harp on the Willow" on Saturday 21 August 2010 at Wyong Memorial Hall.  The video speaks completely for itself.  One of the nicest renditions of the song you'll ever hear.