A community in a suburb, town or city should have the final say on major planning decisions like rezoning land for more housing or approving a new factory.
But the truth is that they don’t have much power at all and I think that is totally wrong.
Worse than that, the trend is for such powers to be getting concentrated at higher levels of government instead of trickling downwards.
So for example the people who live on the east side of the Georges River have made it very clear they do not want a giant intermodal terminal on their backyard.
On top of that, the site would be perfect for a council renewal project where you end up with something that improves the amenity of the area, such as riverside cafes and restaurants, cycleways and walkways and so on.
These are the type of changes which affect most people in a positive way, but they seem to always take second place to projects that do the opposite.
There are a lot of pressures on the south west region, from Liverpool to Wollondilly, and the proposed intermodal is just one of them.
In Campbelltown there are strong hints from the State Government that it should do more on the housing front.
That’s code for approving thousands of new houses on greenfield land such as Gilead.
But what if we don’t want to change what we have?
Why shouldn’t our view prevail?
Isn’t that what democracy is: power of the people.
Over in Camden the council basically has gone along with the State Government and if you drive around the region you can see the results: too much development too quickly.
At least in Campbelltown the council is trying very hard to be strategic in how it approaches the proposed tsunami of new housing, but the pressure from higher up is tremendous.
To go back to my opening proposition, why can’t a local community decide that it does not want to take on more overcrowding, traffic congestion and pollution.
It should be able to and maybe the time has come for some real change in the way our democracy works.
We can start by giving some power back to the people.
And looking at what people are saying on social media, the political insiders can consider themselves on notice to deliver real change.
