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Council takes action against this website

In the interests of informing the public and our members, this website previously provided links to the council's website, and to copies of documents necessary to fully understand the issues.

However in July 2004, several members of our group received a letter from solicitors acting on behalf of the council, demanding that council documents and links to the council's website be removed from this website.

Lacking the financial resources to defend any action brought by the council, 5 Acres Now had no choice but to comply.

This is an extraordinary misuse of both ratepayers' funds and copyright law, in a misguided attempt to stifle free and open discussion about an important issue.

Such a recommendation is clearly un-democratic, as it denies choice and further erodes ownership rights, to say nothing of the additional congestion and infrastructure overload it would create inside the boundary. It should also be remembered that a similar protection zone was tried 50 years ago in parts of what was then the fringe of the city - e.g. North Ryde, West Pymble & Turramurra - but was abandoned as soon as developers had acquired the devalued land at fire sale prices.

Pleasingly, all councillors who spoke to the item acknowledged there were problems with the study, and all raised their hands to vote against the recommendations. The final motion was that the report be received, but that at a further Mayoral Meeting, the Mayor convey on behalf of Council that the Rural Resource Lands Study should not be considered by the Department of Planning in their development of a definitive policy statement for the future of rural lands in the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area.

The mood at the meeting was that planning has become too restrictive, and should be loosened up to better cater for an expanding population. Councillors pointed out that those living in the urban areas would be detrimentally affected by congestion if growth in the city fringe was prohibited; that it should be recognised that farming is no longer viable; and that a moderate level of development such as large-lot residential and village expansion is a sensible solution which most would support.

"Madam Mayor, what on earth were the authors of this Study thinking when they wrote it? Did they think that 130 pages of bureaucratic spin would be enough to hide their real agenda? Or were they hoping that no-one would manage to finish reading it?

Madam Mayor, this Study goes too far. It has implications much worse than the Rural Land Study, which was unanimously rejected by yourself and all other councillors at the council meeting of 16^th September 2004.

What it seeks to do is prepare the way for stopping all growth and development outside a yet-to-be-defined boundary – a boundary which will be determined by bureaucrats and those powerful enough to influence them.

The way it is argued goes like this:

“Rural land has a special value. Because it has a special value, it must be protected. The way to protect it is to prohibit subdivision and encourage farming.”

This argument has a fatal flaw, and that is the premise that rural land has a value which can be conjured up by bureaucrats. It fails to recognise that value is one thing in life which is entirely and exclusively a subjective judgment made by individuals. It is different from person to person, and even different at different times for the same person.

It is not something which can be imposed on us by governments, councils, or anyone else, and therefore cannot legitimately be used as a basis to argue for protection, especially when the land they are talking about is not their land. If I tried to do the same thing, I would most likely end up in jail.

The other major flaw is the proposed strategy, Strategy 1.

It’s to:

“Protect rural resource lands from urban development, subdivision, land speculation and other incompatible land uses”;

Now to claim that land needs to be protected from urban development is ridiculous. Surely housing damages land far less than agriculture and mining, yet those are the things the Study wants to encourage!

And what about ownership – doesn’t this sort of talk undermine the whole concept of ownership, which exists for the sole purpose of defining who does, and who doesn’t, have the right to control and manage resources?

Then it sets out to ban that dreaded blight, subdivision.

Well given that we have an expanding population, where do they expect people to live – on top of each other in a country with one of the world’s lowest population densities?

Finally there’s that most insidious of all evils, land speculation, which the authors claim causes high land prices.

Well that is just plain wrong. It isn’t speculation that drives up land prices, but simply demand exceeding supply.

Madam Mayor, it’s time to see through this, and get the strategy right in the first place.

If ratified, this will become the master-excuse trotted out by bureaucrats every time we get upset about the details in the LEP & DCP. Bureaucrats will innocently tell us that all they are doing is following the agreed strategy.

Well it’s the wrong strategy, and it must be rejected immediately.

If the population is expanding, and if that is creating pressure to expand the urban area, that means there are people demanding it, and bureaucrats have a duty to respond to this demand by facilitating it, not by hindering it. They most certainly should not be concluding that a viable strategy is to cut off the supply of building lots in areas where people would freely choose to live, if only the government would stop meddling in the market.

If they were serious about protecting land from speculation, they would never make recommendations that acted to reduce supply. They would advocate greater supply and less control. They would recommend that rural land which cannot be used for agriculture be developed for housing.

This brings me to the final point I wish to make – to me the most disturbing element of the entire study – and that is the way it has been written as if rural land is either un-owned, or owned by the government or the council.

Not once could I find any acknowledgement that these proposals would override property ownership rights. Apart from discussing the viability of farming, there were almost no references to landholders, and certainly no discussion of the wider effects of imposing these restrictions.

Not once did it acknowledge that its recommendations would deny choice to those who seek relief from urban congestion, nor did it acknowledge any negative effects of intervening in the property market.

So for all those reasons, Madam Mayor, I think this report should be treated with the respect it deserves, and set aside.

It is more restrictive than the Rural Land Study, which you rejected in 2004, so I’m hoping it won’t take too much persuading to convince you to vote against this one as well.

In its place the council should recognise that the land in question is privately-owned, and that rightfully, unless there are extremely compelling reasons, no-one apart from owners should be making decisions about what happens to it."