Wednesday Forum - memories of holiday's past

Over on Australian Observer, Paul Barratt's The summer holiday drive recalls the summer holiday drives from Armidale to the coast. This was an annual ritual  for many inland New Englanders, something that I have written on.

Those posts attracted a range of nostalgic comments from others with similar experiences. That got me thinking. As part of my work in documenting New England history and life, it might be interesting to further document some of our collective childhood holiday experiences.

Did you have a favourite holiday spot? What are your memories of getting there, what did you do while there? What things are now draped in nostalgia? 

A little more on New England hash tags

I left my last post, Wednesday Forum - what hash tags should we use to promote New England? up front for a while. I have started putting up tags as postscripts the Forum post.

I got some ideas in emails, some from searches. As you might have expected, it all proved more complicated than I had expected. I will keep on adding to the original post and then do a proper update.

Wednesday Forum - what hash tags should we use to promote New England?

In a response to my post, Dobson's Brewery - new New England beers, Denis Wright tweeted " @JimBelshaw You're a corrupting influence, Belshaw.

Mmm! I like the idea!

This got me thinking. I have only just begun to use has tags on Twitter and am really just learning how. I have also been watching others use of the tags.

I spend a far bit of time promoting New England causes or reporting on New England stories. Here I really should use hash tags more, for we can can use them to promote New England causes and life style. But to really have impact, we need some common hash tags.

I say common hash tags because this adds to impact and creates threads that people can follow.

Any ideas on hash tags that might be used?

Locality names is one obvious possibility. However, here we may need a modifier where other places have similar names. For example, #newcastle is dominated by Newcastle in the UK, #newengland by the US. By contrast, #armidale is all armidale. So do we add oz at the end?

And what about life style or attractions?

Ideas?

Update One


Suggested list of initial tags based on suggestions and search:

• For newcastle, #newcastle. Despite the number of newcastle UK tweets, #newcastle well established. Adding oz or Australia likely to fragment
• For Hunter Valley, #huntervalley
• For living history, #livinghistory
• For adventure tourism, #adventuretourism
• For Northern Rivers, #northernrivers

Wednesday Forum: preserving New England's heritage

It is a little while since I ran a Wednesday Forum. I stopped because while they attracted interest and web traffic, they also attracted limited comments. There didn't seem much point in running a forum without comments.

I have decide to try again, if only because the Forums act as another record of current issues. 

To set the scene for this forum, this is a 2007 photo of the Victoria Theatre in Newcastle.

I didn't know until Stu commented on Selling New England to itself that this is the oldest theatre still standing in NSW (and New England). It was  opened 1876 and rebuilt during 1890-91. Stu wrote:

Music and the arts are opportunities for Newcastle to thrive and give Sydney a run for its money.
I'd love to see the Victoria theatre in Perkins St restored and more bands, plays and shows visit Newcastle.

This is NSW's oldest theatre and restored would be on par with any offering in Australia.

Venues like this ad to the cultural fabric of a city and the historical aspect makes the experience more memorable. I would compare this to the Brixton academy in London, giving Newcastle and New England a cultural icon that Sydney would envy.

The next photo comes from Mark's post Wuthering Heights @ Bald Nob. It is in fact a photo of one of the oldest still standing coach stops.

In the days when the horse was king, stations line this were to be found at regular intervals along all of New England's roads.

The coach from Grafton would come to a halt here to allow passengers to have a break and to change horses. Even when I was child, the derelict remains of places like this were to be found everywhere. Now they have largely vanished. Just as with the Victoria Theatre, it would be nice to see

This brings me to the point of this forum. What are the things that you would like to see preserved across the broader New England and why?

Postscript

In comments, Mark nominated railways as a key target. I have written a little on railways (here and also here). Greg referred to Newcastle's rich theatrical tradition.  On the Victoria, he wrote:

The Victoria Theatre is a wonderful building. Unfortunately the image of a decaying old theatre doesn't do it justice. I don't remember it operating as a theatre. I think that it closed when I was still quite young. But it used to house Easthams clothing company and I used to love going there to marvel at the 19th C interior of the building which was still largely intact as a theatre....

Itt would be a tragedy if the Victoria eventually either burnt down or just decayed beyond repair. It is an irreplaceable part of our heritage and would be a great loss.

I have often thought that, if renovated and restored as a theatre, it would be a wonderful venue for live music. The Kings at Lambton has undergone a rennaisance as a live music venue (now Lizottes). Something similar at the Victoria in the heart of Newcastle would be a great asset to the city and a marvellous attraction.

What a pity that such a historic part of our heritage is allowed to fall into neglect and disrepair.

He added:

As an aside - the Victoria is one of a number of old theatres that have been lost to the city in recent decades. The theatre Royal, the Kensington and the Lyric in the CBD are no longer theatres. The Regent in Islington is now a rennovators warehouse and the Strand (CBD) and Century (Broadmeadow) were both demolished after the earthquake.

Newcastle had an extensive and extraordinarily rich theatre heritage, most of which is now gone. It was one of the oldest and most extensive theatre districts in Australia.

The Civic Theatre is now the oldest surviving theatre in Newcastle. If you have never been there, I would thoroughly recommend it. It is an art deco style and the interior is lavishly decorated. It remains as one of Australia's best historic theatres.

You can find a little about the Civic here.

Checking back posts, I realised that while I have done some limited posts, the theatre tag does not properly represent them. I really need to go through and do a better consolidation!

Re-imagining Newcastle - and the North

In Wednesday Forum: Re-imagining Newcastle, I posed this question:

To help you here, assume that there is suddenly a New England state. Newcastle as the biggest city, bigger still if we include the surrounding urban areas, suddenly has an opportunity to carve out a new and independent role free of previous constraints. What would you advise?

I then asked a set of further questions intended to stimulate discussion. In response, Greg said:

Hi Jim,
I have been trying to think of a response to this post, but it is a tough one. Newcastle has all the essential elements of a truly interesting and great city, but is stuck in a 1950's time warp that it can't escape from.

Consider this. In 1950 Brisbane, Perth and Newcastle were similar in size. Brisbane had a metropolitan population of about 440,000 people, Perth 340,000 and Newcastle 300,000. Just 60 years on and Brisbane (1.9m) and Perth (1.6m) have powered ahead in size and relative importance. Newcastle (1/2 m) has languished and been left in their wake - still an "overgrown country town".

Newcastle's relative decline mirrors that of the entire Northern NSW compared to Qld and WA. Newcastle is northern NSW in microcosm.

How do Newcastle and Northern NSW break out of this rut? Short of self-government I really don't know. I believe that self-government would of itself be a catalyst for change in the way others see us and the way we see ourselves. The tangible benefits would inevitably follow.

Greg's comment draws out the scale of the decline in Newcastle's importance. In response, I wrote:

I agree with you re self-government. In the meantime, and as part of our push for self-government, we have to get people to focus on the needs of Northern NSW as a unit and in terms of individual areas. We can use the push for self-government as a way of doing this.

One might argue that this threatens our longer term objective. The more we get, the lower the demand for self-government. I don't see it this way. I just don't believe that Sydney can reconcile the conflicts involved in governing an entity that no longer makes any form of sense.

Re-imagining the North is hard. But in doing so, we achieve a number of things. We get New Englanders to again think of themselves as a unit. We force Sydney responses. And we start to lay down a platform - a set of ideas - that our own Government can implement.

As Greg found, as I have found, it is not easy to imagine what might be when what is imposes seemingly impossible constraints. Yet we need to do this if we are to force change.

In my next post I will risk my hand by painting a vision of Newcastle's future. It is a risk because I do not live there, do not pretend to be an expert on on-ground conditions. 

Wednesday Forum: improving public transport

This Wednesday Forum focuses on public transport in New England, looking for information and suggestions.

In Results from Wednesday's forum on overcoming division, I reported on a comment from Lynne about the costs of Bellingen-Armidale buses and the absence of public transport between Armidale and Tamworth. I suggested that one outcome of the progressive centralisation of services might be forced depopulation of some areas if rising transport costs associated with peak oil stopped people using cars to get to the services.

In  one of my Express columns, Belshaw's World - inner city dwellers put the choke on car ownership, I mentioned the increased costs of getting and maintaining a drivers license, of buying and maintaining a car. I suggested that this most disadvantaged those most dependant on the car and especially those on lower incomes.

In Ancient Thera, I mentioned in passing the extensive bus services on the small Greek island of Santorini.

Three very different posts, but with linked themes.

At present, discussions on public transport in NSW are dominated by Sydney. However, Sydney trains as an example, may be hot, not run on time, but they exist. The great majority of taxpayer funds spent on public transport are spent in Sydney. There is no comparison between Sydney public transport and that existing (non-existing) across much of New England.

We have a NSW election coming up in March. Based on experience, issues associated with public transport are unlikely to get a mention. I would like to change that.

To help thinking, what is public transport like in your area. What would you like to see done to promote better public transport?  

Results from Wednesday's forum on overcoming division

Last Wednesday's Forum on overcoming division in New England (Wednesday Forum: Overcoming division) attracted some interesting comments.

My old consulting colleague Neil Davidson likened the way that towns or areas had fought for things against each other to the mutual disadvantage of all to the old cold war MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) concept. He suggested:     

Instead of 'divide and conquer', what if we actually considered what a working regional system under a peak oil, peak water, climate instability, global financial collapse style but collective regional resilience model might look like? What if people actually got together to discuss what each could bring, not what each would get? What if people deliberately set out to develop collaborative and collective mutual advantage, rather than independent MAD-style 'advantage'?

It strikes me that if there are individuals that are interested (but perhaps can't admit it openly, for fear of showing their less-than-combative colours to their 'comrades'!) perhaps there is an opportunity to look at how to develop the capability and maturity to collaborate and innovate in the face of some pretty mutually assuredly destructive and compounding future threats. Sooner or later it is those within our regions that we will be turning to - not those potential investors to whom we competitively bid for contributions from outside our regional systems.

The vagaries of the existing process should forewarn us that when we need them most it is unlikely that we will receive any assistance from them - my bet would be on building local collaborative and interdependent trust, capacity, capability and maturity.

As consultants, Neil and I have worked together on a variety of regional development issues. However, there are some issues in what Neil says that can be illustrated from other comments.

The idea of regional sustainability is something of a common theme in regional discussions. It features in the Northern Inland Regional Development Plan as an example.

My first problem lies in the way we seem to be going in the opposite direction. Here I want to quote part of what Lynne said:

Having just done the Armidale - Bellingen drive, there is surely need for cooperation.
Bus only 3 times a week at $50 each way and rather hectic as well as odd times. Coming back in son's car we faced the shambles of Dorrigo Mountain.

Old issue I know and it seems in even further decline to me. Even to the matter of public toilets on the way. esp now that Ebor Servo had their doors locked. The three councils involved in this distance plus RTA can surely find some common points.

I can see quite a lot of the problems but, as usual, not the remedies.

Another recent issue for us was an emergency dental situation for one of the little children who was injured at an Armidale School and had to go to Tamworth for treatment. No dentist available at Armidale that day or for follow-ups. Public transport was not available either.

To achieve immediate economies in service delivery in areas such as health, we are reducing services in certain locations, centralising in others. All this depends for its success upon the motor vehicle.

As Lynne indicates, we already have a problem with public transport that can make access difficult for those without cars. But what happens when, as Neil suggests, peak oil hits us and private transport costs rise sharply? Are we, in fact, deliberately creating non-sustainable systems? Is the only solution then re-location of people?

Clearly, improved public transport is important, a broader issue. However, we also need to look again at the structure of services.

I have argued previously that one problem with current approaches to service delivery is that it saves costs on one side by shifting costs into consumers. The first is measurable, the second less so. The money saved in the delivery of a specialist service can be calculated, the extra time and travel costs imposed on patients is ignored.

Lynne also raises a smaller point, the need for agencies, councils, to cooperate. The three councils Lynne refers to are Guyra, Armidale-Dumaresq, Bellingen. Why must one council pay the costs if benefits are shared?

In a different comment, Mark wrote:

On a bureaucratic government level, there are government departments that are broken up into regions that include the "Northern/New England/Norhern Tablelands-coast" such as NSW Police and Hunter-New England Health. These bureaucracies have many workers who see Macquarie St as an enemy. Also, these workers, represented by unions, may start a campaign against Macquarie St. Unions are quite hostile towards the current govt.

There is also the common issue of coal seam gas extraction and the wholesale coal exploration on the Liverpool Plains. This is an easy unifying issue.

Transport, health, education and law enforcement are other common issues.

The newly introduced Metropolitan Transport tax grab on every NSW resident who owns a car is directly subsidising Sydney projects. An easy unifying issue.

Yes, divide and rule can be exploited with the examples above however, if we were to petition each LGA and each state member with similar demands irrespective of their political allegiances, this would at the very least show that the region, as a whole is united in their stand for a better deal collectively.

Mark is obviously putting together different things, but his comments do illustrate a number of issues 

I know from my own experience that many regionally based public servants do get very frustrated at the way they perceive head office as ignoring their regional needs.

Part of the problem lies in the way that any any integrated, centralised system has to make judgements about priorities across the larger whole. Inevitably, this means ignoring or over-riding local or regional interests. Part of the problem lies in the concentration of resources in head office. Part of the problem lies in the absence of any effective mechanisms for integrating across administrative divisions.

If you map all the agency boundaries onto a single map, New England emerges as an entity simply because New England or Northern NSW is a geographic entity. But with differing boundaries for each agency, with no recognition of the broader entity, with an absence of integration, the broader identity is lost.

One of the reasons that I argue that we need a broader New England or Northern focus is simply to force fragmented agencies to respond.

My support for New England self-government will be clear to anyone who reads this blog. Equally, it won't be surprising that my focus attracts others who support the same cause. However, this is a longer term objective. We are stuck with what we have for the moment, we have to try to do what we can to force existing systems to respond.

In another comment, Rob Cannon wrote:

The most common way to unite the people of this region is MONEY. Show them what is gathered by both levels of Govt. and how and where it is (not) being spent and they will gather around to change things. To see the grabs for money by the state govt. so that they can fix up the mess in Sydney is harming this area a lot.

Rob is right. Similar arguments have been advanced by Ian Mott, among others. The growth of new state support in the Hunter is directly related to the way that the area's mining royalties support Sydney. Yet there is also a problem.

Because so many of the head office jobs are in Sydney, because New England now has so many poor areas (fourteen of the poorest localities in Australia are now located in New England), the raw data will show that at least some areas of New England are being subsidised by tax payers elsewhere.

This is comparative static analysis. It ignores, among other things, the dynamic effects that can come from shifting jobs. Yet the reality is that the stats will be quoted and used against us. Again, this illustrates the need for us to develop a common position, to force others to respond.

I think that last Wednesday's forum generated some useful results. I will pick up some of the issues raised in later forums.

Wednesday Forum: Overcoming division

I spend a fair bit of time researching New England's history. Division is one constant theme, division between towns and regions.

The Northern Tablelands' towns fought each other over the best location of the railway to the coast. The end result was no railway.

Towns fought each other over the location of facilities. The end result was poorer facilities.

Regions such as the Tablelands or Northern Rivers regarded each other's problems as separate even where particular activities or facilities actually depended on achieving a greater mass, one that could only be achieved through combined action.

Politicians and political parties have played off these divisions. In a world where power depends upon enough individual seats to gain a majority, they gave something here, took something there, all driven by the need to be in power. Today it is called the marginal seats approach, but it's not new.

Charting New England's relative and in some cases absolute decline over the last fifty years, I keep seeing things that could have been addressed by cooperative action, but failed in the absence of that action.

What do you think might be done to encourage unity on common problems? I have my own ideas, but would like to hear your views before putting pen to paper. 

Wednesday Forum: Leveraging Newcastle's inclusion in the Lonely Planet global top ten cities

In Newcastle makes Lonely Planet top ten global cities, 2011, I said of Newcastle's inclusion in the Lonely Planet 2011 top ten global cities from a visitor perspective:

I really was pleased, although the gains will be affected by the NSW Government's response. The biggest risk is that it will simply build the decision into its Brand Sydney strategy, essentially promoting Newcastle as a place to visit from Sydney rather than an end destination in its own right.

If it does this, benefits to Newcastle will be reduced because more people will come on short trips, fewer to stay. Just as bad, it will further increase the fragmentation in tourism promotion further north, splitting Newcastle from its hinterland.

What do you think that Newcastle might do to gain maximum benefits from its inclusion in the Lonely Planet top ten list? 

A final note on the NBN

I have been holding of posting to allow comments on  Wednesday Forum: the NBN and New England. I think that this one is quite important.

From my experience, too many of of us react in a reactive, sometimes passive, usually localised way to the problems facing our own broad region. We do fight on issues, but rarely set the agenda. We get a win here, a win there, but too often we fall divided.

I have now bought David Carse's comments up into the main post, and have added some of my own. I don't want to fight or focus on the broad generalities of the NBN. Rather, I have been trying to get us focused on what it might actually mean in a practical sense.

Normal posting will resume tomorrow. 

Wednesday Forum: the NBN and New England

Today's post on my personal blog, Frustrations over the NBN discussion, deals with the National Broadband Network, using Armidale as an example. If you look at my post, UNE's strategic positioning, you will get a further background feel as to why I think that this is such a make or break issue for parts of New England.

What is your view on the NBN? Do you see it as helpful for your area? How might we use it to pursue New England development?

Postcript One

In a comment, David Carse from Waterfall Way Designs put up a pretty good summary of the benefits as he saw them.  He also provided a link through to a post, What does NBN mean for your business?, explaining the benefits to his clients.

Postscript two: Issues Summary

While this post will remain open for comment, I now want to draw together some threads, adding from my own experience in running a business out of Armidale and as a consultant. As I did in the first post,  Frustrations over the NBN discussion, I am using Armidale as an example because I know it quite well and because the city itself already has better than average internet connections.

As a starting comment, if you listen to the discussions on NBN, you will generally find:

1. A focus on the ordinary consumer. In fact, from a New England perspective, it is the business applications that are most critical since these provide jobs.
2. An often implicit assumption or myopia that regional areas don't actually need fast connections because the type of business that demands them is not to be found there.

If you look at discussion to this point from David and in my original post:

1. As a consultant, David finds existing connections mean that both video conferencing and VOIP (voice over internet protocol) are patchy and somewhat unreliable. This would fit with my recent experience with in-house video conferencing linking a Sydney head office with regional branches in Dubbo, Coffs and Tamworth. The links were jerky and kept falling over. 
2. Both UNE and its students say that the existing system does not allow the University to provide the type of interactive teaching experience that distance students need.

Both of these are current examples where demands have out-run capacity.

We live in a distributed, data intense world. From my own experience, the types of applications that are constrained even in a place like Armidale include:

1. Collaborative software development in a distributed environment.
2. Bandwith intensive visual applications - games, development of other entertainment, certain types of courseware.
3. Bandwith intensive data process and distributing applications.
4. Collaborative distributed team working involving combined forms of media. 
5. Use of cloud computing. 
6. E-commerce or retailing activities requiring certain real time delivery, again where the traffic volume and speed passes a certain point. 

Many things come into play in considering this type of application. Scale is one. You start okay, but then run up against capacity constraints as you grow. As a consequence, you then move.

Armidale has lost a fair number of start-up businesses over the last twenty years because of locational issues. Had they not moved, or survived and stayed in Armidale, the city would have been a lot larger. Poor communications was only one factor, but an important one. In one year, my own business spent $46,000 on domestic air travel.

I will leave this post here, although comments are still open.   

Wednesday Forum: the regional development deal

You will find the deal struck between the two New England independents here: Agreement between the Australian Labor Party and the Independent Members. The PDF version in the Australian may be easier to read.

I set out my initial reactions in Country independents, regional development and spin. I wasn't being negative in a general sense, simply expressing my concern about the way the regional development numbers were presented. I don't think $10 billion is in fact $10 billion in the way it has been written up.

In an earlier post, I said in part:

Finally, we would like both Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott to apply a key test to any specific initiatives that might be considered:

Will the proposal have any real longer term impact on New England development, or is it just a band-aid? We have seen too many of the second, too few of the first.

In asking this question, we would also like both MPs consider broader New England needs.

There are many shared problems across the North that would benefit from being addressed in an integrated way, instead of the fragmented and itsy approach that has applied.

Taking the regional development proposals in the agreement (annex B) and looking at it just from a New England perspective, do you thing it meets these tests? What do you like/dislike about the proposals? 

Wednesday Forum: reforming the Federation

The last Wednesday Forum, Wednesday Forum: New England's greatest needs, generated some very good ideas, including a remarkably good comment from Greg from Newcastle. I will pick up some of the other ideas in later posts. Here I just want to focus on Greg. He wrote:

I think that we all recognize that our federal system of government is not working well. Some even believe that it is in the emergency ward on life support. We all want change in the way that government in Australia is delivered but we have no clear idea of what it should look like. We are too blinkered by the paradigms of the 20th Century.

Although it is my region that I am primarily concerned with, my wish list is not just relevant to, Newcastle, New England or even NSW, but for the whole of Australia, regional Australia especially.

To a large extent our problems are rooted in the same cause. That cause is a dominant central government which is now, to all intents and purposes, more a unitary rather than a federal government. It has total fiscal hegemony over lower levels of government raising more than 80% of all taxes. Yet it is the states and local councils which are the primary providers of government services, but without the independent means to deliver. They are financially coupled to the chariot wheels of Canberra which has formed an expensive double bureaucracy.

How can Canberra make and implement good policy decisions for Newcastle, Armidale, Port Macquarie or any of the other cities and towns of New England? Of course it cannot because it's policies are, of necessity one size fits all. Australia is too vast and it's communities too diverse and widely spread. Only states, regions and communities can best make those policy decisions at a local or regional level.

So my wish list is not specific to New England, but it is essential for New England to prosper and achieve it's potential. REAL power must be devolved back to lower levels of government (both state and local). The Commonwealth must observe it's proper powers under sec 51 of the constitution instead of forever making incursions into areas which were never intended to be part of it's domain.

In practice this means that the Commonwealth must reduce it's fiscal dominance and thereby it's undue influence over states, regions and communities to allow local people to make policy decisions as appropriate for them and their communities. In other words, it must pass a great deal of it's taxing powers back to lower tiers of government and exit policy making for regional domestic matters.

We need a new constitutional convention where we can debate and decide what our federation should look like, the number of states, their boundaries and the responsibilities and taxing powers of each tier of government. At the moment our federation is moving ever closer to a unitary system and the results are obvious - choking capitals and failing regions. Our way of life is under threat.

The independents find themselves in a unique position in Australian political history. It is within their power to force a constitutional convention where we can renew and reshape our federation to breath new life into it for the challenges of the 21st Century.

This is what I would like to see from the New England independents. It would be the greatest of tragedies if they squandered this opportunity to help shape New England and indeed Australia for the better.

Will history remember them as visionaries with great purpose? Or simply as political grand standers who had 15 minutes of fame? The ball is in their court.

Wow! You don't have to agree with all Greg's points to recognise that he has mounted a powerful argument, so powerful that I have picked it up in my Armidale Express column to be published today.  You see, even if you disagree with him, Greg has captured something that many Australians' feel: our Federation is not working properly, nor are current approaches likely to fix this.

Do you support the idea, as I do, of a new constitutional convention focused on our Federation? What do you believe should be included to ensure that the Federation properly represents all parts of Australia?

Wednesday Forum: New England's greatest needs

You are advising the New England independents. What are the three most things that you would like them to argue for?

I ask this question because I have just completed a post on my personal blog, New media, independents and change, looking at the new climate created by Australia's hung parliament. We have a chance to do new things, but we have to give them guidance.

So what are the three things you consider most important?