Why do I read the SMH? Is it because I want to tear all my hair out in frustration? Or get my blood pressure raised to new heights? Perhaps I have masochistic Mosley-like fantasies about being whipped by Nazis?
I think I read it because when I sit down at a cafe for breakfast, it's usually sitting there on the table in front of me. I can't remember ever paying for a copy. I'd prefer to light my BBQ with fifty dollar notes than give those wankers money.
Today was a case in point. The silly ran a story on developers which was more one eyed than a pub full of cyclops's.
Get a load of this paragraph:
Mr Brown was most concerned about a proposal by the land speculator Hardie Holdings to build a new town called Sweetwater, at Branxton. In a 2006 assessment, planners rated it last out of 91 potential development sites for the Lower Hunter. It was not well served by transport and was 20 kilometres from the nearest urban centre, Maitland.
What's the deal with using the word "speculator"? Why not call Mr Hardie a property developer, which is what he is after all. "Speculator" of course has all sorts of nasty connotations, especially for the kind of people that read the Green Lefty. Speculators are people that make money by doing nothing in their world. Fucking tools. Where do they think all our houses and apartments come from? Built by pixies perhaps in the middle of the night? If it wasn't for property developers, we'd all be living in tents.
Speculators my red, blistered arse.
It gets worse.
Mr Brown said 700 new dwellings to be built at Crangan Bay, on Lake Macquarie, were "excessive in scale and inappropriately located" and Rose Group's 60-hectare proposal at Catherine Hill Bay would "overwhelm the heritage and other unique qualities of this tiny village". More than 900 houses were proposed for Catherine Hill Bay, of which 600 belonged to the Rose Group development.
Mr Brown can kiss my toot. This sounds to me like a pack of NIMBYs trying to keep other people out of their precious little enclave. Sorry, but get fucked. If you want to have no neighbours around you, buy up all the surrounding property and keep it empty. But don't go crying when the legal owner of the land next to you decides to chop it up and plant houses on it. It's not your fucking land, so fuck off.
The Silly then goes on to report this:
As early as March 2005 the Minister for the Hunter, Michael Costa, told a meeting of town planners that strategic planning was a waste of time. According to those attending, he said he favoured the Government putting in infrastructure and letting the market decide where to develop.
As if that's a bad thing! I think I am starting to like Costa. We might be better off if he gives Iemma a shove and takes over as Premier.
I could go on all night, but this related article is even worse.
Let me paraphrase why the "journalists" that wrote these articles are a pack of useless bastards.
To start with, they think that sprawl is a bad thing. Yet these are the same people that complain about rents going up and house prices being unaffordable. Fuck, maybe rents and house prices are rising because stupid fucking wankers are getting in the way of new housing being built! And when a development finally grinds its way through the planning system, it's cost a bomb to get it processed and that cost of course has to be loaded into the price that the homebuyers have to pay. On top of that, the enormous cost of even simple developments helps to drive out small developers, who don't have deep enough pockets to put up with all the NIMBY bullshit put in their way.
Paragraphs like this shit me to tears:
YOU only have to look at Duncan Hardie's sprawling faux Spanish villa in the Hunter's wine district to know this is a man who thinks big. Sweetwater Ridge is the realisation of the ultimate dream home for the chairman and founder of Hardie Holdings. Sweetwater was also the name the 57-year-old New Zealand-born speculator gave to another unlikely dream, a new city of 28,000 homes for 59,000 people, with a university and commercial centre thrown in.
"Sprawling faux Spanish villa" - a phrase that just screams "pleb with bad taste" and "greedy bastard with too much money". Fucking jealous little twats, these journalists.
"New Zealand-born speculator" - how about calling him a "succesful immigrant entrepreneur". If he was a woman from Somalia who was opening an organic hemp weaving mill, they'd never dare to use a phrase like that. But I guess you can slag off at kiwis, since they are white people who speak English.
It gets worse.
Michael Costa, addressed a meeting of planners at a pub in Merewether and told the head of the Newcastle planning office, Steve Brown, just what he thought of his policies. In a bare-knuckle speech, he said Mr Brown with his pro-planning attitude would not last long in his job, that strategic planning was a waste of time, that planners were "obsessed with urban villages" and planners were too fixated on public transport because people liked to drive.
"Urban villages" - a lovely theory bandied about my academics, and the current buzz-phrase in planning circles. But it's a crock of shit. I've been to a number of urban villages around the world, and they have one thing in common. They are all unplanned. You can't centrally plan a village - they either spring up organically or they don't. Planners have a nerve to think that they can mould human actions and change human nature by painting a few coloured blotches on a map. Wankers, the lot of them.
Costa of course is talking common sense - "people like to drive". Well, duh. If planners have to be told that, they should all be taken out and shot.
There is a line somewhere in one of these articles about the horror of building a housing development of 7000 dwellings in an area "some distance from shops". Well, smack me over the head with a frying pan, but last time I looked, if someone smacked 20,000 consumers down in a paddock, it would not be long before the market did its thing and a whole host of shops sprang up nearby to cater to them. The idea that a development like this would fail to attract a newsagent, chemist, GP surgery, petrol station, cafe, baker, butcher etc etc etc is just too daft for words.
Think about it - next time you are out in the country, pull into a country town like Junee or Orange or Dubbo and have a look at all the businesses that have been drawn in by the population. Last time I was in Dubbo, I found that it had even attracted an excellent Thai restaurant.
Aaaaaarrgggggh! These fucking people shit me! They have no brains at all.
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