When they say there’s nothing more certain than death and taxes, I think they had our Council in mind.

I’ve had quite a few calls from punters cheesed off that their lower property valuation notices from the State Government aren’t likely to translate into lower rates come the June Council budget. They rightly can’t understand why rates fire up when values rise and don’t fall in turn when they sink.

Some areas will find their properties worth 30% less yet will still receives higher rates bills. That’s because our Council is too lazy to cut its cloth to fit the hard times we’re facing. The cost of doing everything they want to do keeps going up, regardless of how much our properties are worth.

Let’s hope Eddy Sarroff and the crew fight hard to cut rates rises back to the bone as promised.

The Gold Coast could solve a lot of venue problems if it simply built (with State support) a Major Events precinct on The Spit, north of Sea World.

It could host the new Super Carnivale, leaving the streets of Surfers free for the best light rail route possible. It could house the Big Day Out and Good Vibrations festivals, instead of kicking them out of the showgrounds over to the new AFL Stadium at Carrara.

It could also feature a range of Commonwealth Games events.

Yes, the Save our Spitters will say over our dead bodies. But come on, let’s do something innovative for a change.

Read more in today's Bulletin

The one move that Surfers needs to get its reputation and mojo back is ironically the one item left out of the government report into alcohol-fuelled violence on the glitter strip.

What Surfers needs is zero tolerance policing...not more nanny-state laws that limit the rights of those who already do the right thing.

The solution to crime and anti-social behaviour is more wallopers on the beat, with new rules of engagement...like anything goes! Only better policing will return the Surfers of old to families, locals and visitors.

The tragic death of a young champion ironman at the Aussie champs should not result in the coast losing the event.

Why it's even in question I don’t know. But surely the accident could have occurred on any beach in the nation given a repeat of the horrific sea conditions.

I don't think its fair that the Gold Coast be dumped when there’s little argument it's the best location and the spiritual home of lifesaving.

Yes it was heartbreaking. Yes, someone's head should roll for letting the race go ahead. But come on..let's not overreact.

Only a bunch of out-of-touch, out-of-town State MPs could have come up with the foolish plan to turn Broadie into another Surfers.

A parliamentary committee has told the Premier that Broadie should be transformed into an entertainment precinct. This hair-brained idea has already copped the ire of local councillor Eddy Sarroff who has said “over his dead body”.

He’s right on the money. Broadbeach is all about families, restaurants and shopping. Let’s leave it that way. And leave the crime, bashings and drugs to Surfers.

It is not panic so to speak but there is a definite air of desperation in the voices of major developers on our beloved Goldie. You know...the guys that built the place because governments of all colours couldn’t be bothered! They are that important love them or loathe them!

I’m not going to name them cause they’re so concerned and paranoid about getting brushed at City Hall as a consequence. They actually demand anonymity so that they don’t get marked down the next time they lodge a development application. (Author’s note: This should no way be the case as all stakeholders within our City should be able to speak their mind without worrying about their next project.)

What the real property guys (as opposed to the fly-by-nighters) want is a Council that understands the market; understands the pressure that business is under; understands the attitude of banks to debt funding; understands the banks’ strike on lending to the customers of developers; and understands the implausible lack of affordable stock required to provide housing to the thousands and thousands of new residents that are growing this beautiful and vibrant city of ours!

The reason they want to remain nameless is really because the message they bring is a harsh one. It is: “Council, you are killing the golden goose that built the GC of old”.

They believe that Council needs to urgently start pushing through heaps of smaller projects – the ones that the Banks will still fund priced between the $10 and $20 million mark – in order to keep catering for the almost 100,000 new residences we will need by 2031 to cater for a population growth rate that we can never, ever stop – and, to create and protect jobs from migrating elsewhere.

Instead of relying on the big signature projects that will disappear soon after the Soul, Hilton and Oracle highrise projects are completed, the property industry believes the Council should be meeting its density target by streamlining approvals to encourage a multitude of small to medium density projects across the Coast from Coolie to Coomera – the ones that will keep our “tradies” employed here... instead of Emerald!

They want our Council to start realising that the boom is dead and that developers are the employment “good guys”. Property believes that a misguided Council administration is making things harder instead of easier and therefore is defeating its long term objective of housing more families in existing areas instead of cutting up new bushland areas on the fringe for the same purpose.

Moreover, the property community is sick of being characterised as blood-suckers without a civic heart. It wants the public to know that it also has our housing future at heart.

It is unequivocal in its belief that Council has lost its way in providing affordable housing to meet growth demand  - to help meet the population explosion of the next decade. As two thirds of that mooted growth is planned to feature in old or new infill projects, it thinks Council has failed to let residents in on what’s planned and risks a massive outpouring of local grief as a result. It also has not adjusted its fees and charges accordingly.

I predicted the same result many months ago. It takes very careful expectation and perception management to convince the punters that more people in their street is a good idea.

In the absence of Council selling its density ‘vision”, that developers are going about their normal business within the Gold Coast council area will remain problematic. They’ll get the blame for sure!

Overall, developers believe our Council has gone from the easiest to deal with to the worst by a long shot...and they can’t cope with the breathtaking change of look!

They now long for a Council like Jim Soorley’s Brisbane City Council -  a council that clearly continues to understand their needs under the “can-do” Campbell Newman administration. They want to be heard. They want reform. And they want it now.

 

Don't forget you can tell me what gives you the shits and I’ll help tell everyone else. Leave a comment on this blog or send me a note at Staerk Reality on Facebook and Twitter.

Yesterday’s clearance of Councillors and Council staff in the Tipplers purchase bruhaha misses the point.

The point was never whether anyone had done anything underhanded or not. The CMC investigates wrong-doing in a criminal sense and I for one never thought there was anything like that involved at all. Others might have smelled a rat...I didn’t!

For mine, the issue is about misplaced spending and flawed priorities.

I personally don’t support people running off to the crime body any time they disagree with a decision.

The Tipplers saga is simply bad policy and a waste of public money...but it’s legal. The CMC clearance should not let Council off the hook politically. It should not allow the Mayor to crow about it being proven right.

There are many valid questions as to process that was followed that the CEO is now answering and this should provide the information the public needs to make a judgement as to the correctness of the decision-making.

In my mind, the Tipplers example highlights poor consultation and the misapplication of scare rates dollars to a non-core activity.

The populous will now make its judgement of the Councillors involved and move on to the next issue.

 

Don't forget you can tell me what gives you the shits and I’ll help tell everyone else. Leave a comment on this blog or send me a note at Staerk Reality on Facebook and Twitter.

Last week in the Gold Coast Bulletin I predicted that the Council bureaucracy would scaremonger over service cuts rather than deliver the funding cuts proposed by the courageous finance boss.

Ron Clarke has pathetically beaten them to the punch with the shrill claim in the Gold Coast Sun that the “Gold Coast will become a down-at-heel city...littered with potholes”...overgrown parks and fewer rubbish collections if it were to restrain the rates rise to inflation.

This is fanciful political rubbish from the Mayor. In my view there’s well over $100 million worth of cuts to current operational expenditure that could be made without the sky falling in as the Mayor falsely predicts.

I find it extraordinary that this is the same man who won election in 2004 and re-election in 2008 on the back of promising to freeze rates. He now says...”when I first started as Mayor I supported a zero rates rise, but I have learnt it is not possible”.

Mr Clarke, it is possible. It takes hard work and hard-nosed decisions but it is possible when you have the will.

If a Premier or Prime Minister broke such a key commitment, they would be hounded from office. If all this makes you furious, don’t cop it sweet. Email your local Councillor - find the details at Say No to Rates Rises on Facebook.

One of my pet hates, that’s becoming an complete obsession, is bureaucracy in all its forms.

When I was a young socialist I used to think that government was the answer. Now I’m an old small “c” conservative I realise it is the problem...stupid! I finally understand why the Americans have enshrined their distrust of government in their constitution and why a b-grade actor in Ronald Reagan won two terms as President on an anti-government ticket.

The worst excesses of bureaucracy also exist in all large companies and lately, in my personal case, in the bowels of Energex.

As I write this post the rain has stopped and the conditions have dried. But yesterday, when it was going cats and dogs, Energex decided to cancel its connection of power to our soon-to-be-finished new home in Southport. After a year’s planning and building, with every trade finishing on time and on budget, it was only trade not to meet the mark and unfortunately it was potentially the most important.

Correctly from a policy point of view, an officious, twenty-something customer “service” person told me it was for safety reasons but when I pointed out that Energex fixed broken lines all the time in cyclones, she became all policy-speak, telling me that the firm simply could not perform the task in the weather in this street at this time. I asked whether the whole company had shut down then, but of course I got nowhere.

I proceeded to point out that the electricity firm had simply moved their risk to me, as my 32-week pregnant wife and 21 month year old daughter could not be expected to move into a home without power for security and safety reasons.

But what really got me going though was Energex’s insistence that it could not return to the job to connect us up until either the 8th of 10th of March – meaning at best four days without power that could drag out to six.

I strongly told them that this smacked of being shunted down the queue and seemed to have nothing at all to do with the inclement conditions. I asked what if the rains stops Wednesday or Thursday? Why wouldn’t you come straight back to do it?

But the more I punched holes in their arguments, the less customer service-oriented the prison guard (I mean officer) became. I gave up and tried to call Energex’s media centre to confirm what their actual policies were in regard to connections in the rain. Guess what? The twenty-something intercepted the call ( I dunno how). In the end she said I had to accept the situation and had to stop going around in circles trying to talk them out of it. She then advised she was terminating the call, refused to let me speak with anyone higher up the chain, and hung up. Phew!

As it turns out they’re not all that bad. I was later able to make a formal, detailed complaint and this morning was told the power would be connected tomorrow weather permitting.

Notwithstanding the resolution, none of us should have to cop that crap. If you’ve got a bureaucrat from hell yarn, let me know!

 

Don't forget you can tell me what gives you the shits and I’ll help tell everyone else. Leave a comment on this blog or send me a note at Staerk Reality on Facebook and Twitter.

I know they were called fools for sitting by the beach on tsunami watch, but isn’t so Australian that we take such warnings with healthy grain of salt?

We’re a cynical, disbelieving mob and that trait has served us well.

It’s why we have a built-in BS detector when it comes to our politicians at all levels and ideologies.

It’s why we haven’t completely swallowed all the chicken-little, man-made catastrophic climate change stuff.

We’re prepared as a culture to see for ourselves if something is true rather than be told it.

I put it down to the Irishness in us. We don’t have much chop for authority and don’t suffer the fools well at all.

So when we heard there was a Tsunami coming, maybe we thought “aw yeah I’ll believe that when I see it. It’s got the whole Pacific to travel before it gets here. It’ll run out of puff for sure.”

That’s why the authorities really have to make sure they don’t cry wolf too often on this stuff.

Did you go to the beach to see tsunami? Let me know.

 

Don't forget you can tell me what gives you the shits and I’ll help tell everyone else. Leave a comment on this blog or send me a note at Staerk Reality on Facebook and Twitter.

If the Senate’s inquiry into Garrett’s home insulation debacle wants to find more wrong-doers, look no further than the Gold Coast...as usual!

It is an unfortunate fact of our business culture and track record  - and one that adds considerably to our poor brand image – that if there’s scam going down you’ll find it first on the coast.

I’m not going to mention any names of course in order to protect the innocent, but it goes something like this...

A leading businessman who has successfully worked the system previously - - taking advantage of the rainwater tank subsidy – decides there’s a killing to be made by accessing the Federal Government’s home insulation scheme.

His company didn’t have to have a track record in the business, so he starts a new one.  No-one has to be experienced in installing and inspecting. You just get a couple of eager guys to pull their newly unemployed or underemployed mates out of the pub (who may have lost their jobs due to the GFC) and tell them to get started. You grab all the product you can find to install.

You hire a sales and marketing dude who knows how to get us to buy the “story” and then the pink batts orders follow like hot cakes.

The sales guru even trains his guys and girls not to knock but to walk right into our houses pretending, in not so many words, to be from the government.

The government scheme changes throughout the year and the businessman deftly moves to stay ahead of the game. When two quotes are required, he simply starts another company to bid against.

No matter whether the work has been done shoddily, has been inspected for safety or uses substandard products, it doesn’t matter. So long as he bills the government appropriately, he gets paid and paid a lot.

Ah, only on the GC! The good news is that the specifics of this example will soon be outed in the Senate.

If you have any examples that mirror the above, please let me know and I’ll pass it on.

 

Don't forget you can tell me what gives you the shits and I’ll help tell everyone else. Leave a comment on this blog or send me a note at Staerk Reality on Facebook and Twitter.

The bid by Finance boss Cr Eddy Sarroff to limit the general rates rise to CPI and strip $100 million from the budget is off and running.

By nailing his colours to the mast so publicly and strongly with his 14 colleagues, he’s not left any room whatsoever for failure or compromise.

His challenge to Councillors to back him or sack him had the impact he sought. No one took him on at Monday’s Council meeting. Maybe they knew better than to publicly oppose lower rates and spending or worse still wanted to deprive his campaign of oxygen.

|Sarroff believes he now has the quiet support of most Councillors to win this battle. He also believes that the administration will ultimately be forced to do the bidding of Councillors.  In terms of cutting the fat, Sarroff wants the Council bosses to offer up the savings in recurrent operational expenditure without resorting to cuts in priority projects and service levels. This is where it will get interesting.

I know from my experiences on Jim Soorley’s staff that nothing gets between a bureaucrats and their budget funding.

They’re already counting on getting the same increase they won last year before Councillors even get a say in it. Then they will fight tooth and nail to keep it, with dire, “chicken-little” warnings that cuts will hurt the public and slash services.

CEO Dale Dickson will have battle on his hands to deliver cuts deeper than he may have expected or wanted.
Sarroff knows the biggest hurdle will be weaning Councillors off their pet projects.  The last thing that Councillors want - some looking down the barrel of defeat in 2012 - is to delay or ditch their new library or swimming pool and so on. Used together with their outrageous divisional slush funds, Councillors see such projects as their passport back into office. So Sarroff perhaps should not hold his breath.

The one thing Sarroff has on his side, and that Councillors and the administration will find hard to ignore, is the public. I’ve never encountered such universal opposition to a Council’s direction. It will be a very brave Councillor that opposes Sarroff’s spending jihad.

 

Don't forget you can tell me what gives you the shits and I’ll help tell everyone else. Leave a comment on this blog or send me a note at Staerk Reality on Facebook and Twitter.

You know this Council knows it’s in trouble when its CEO decides to take matters into his own hands.

Dale Dickson’s reasoned letter to the editor describing his Council as the state’s most efficient, and his launch of a Q&A column in the Gold Coast Sun, tells me he’s fighting hard to quarantine the permanent administration from the public disquiet with its temporary politicians.

Mr Dickson, with a freshly minted five-year contract in his jeans, will outlast most of the current Councillors, so who can blame him for deciding to run some defence. I don’t.

 

Don't forget you can tell me what gives you the shits and I’ll help tell everyone else. Leave a comment on this blog or send me a note at Staerk Reality on Facebook and Twitter.

The Mayor really has a political glass jaw. Upset of the Bulle’s write-in poll that saw him score a 12% rating, he tried to get Councillors to support a motion to have the CEO “appeal to the Press Council”; get the issue on Media Watch; and have the State Government ban “pretend polls”.

The problem for the Mayor though is that his own Bold Futures planning document, upon which he’s now basing the city’s new direction, was...you guessed it...a write-in poll of sorts. The Bold Futures process tapped about 12,000 people for their feedback out of population of 600,000 bodies and now the Council is off implementing their views. Mr Mayor I don’t call that scientific, do you?

He’s accused the Bulle of being “cynical and possibly fraudulent...”. Not a very smart way of getting along with your local media.

Don't forget you can tell me what gives you the shits and I’ll help tell everyone else. Leave a comment here or send me a note at Staerk Reality on Facebook and Twitter.

I won’t bore you with the details, but Council charges developers heaps in things called PIP charges, despite the impact they have on building anything affordably in the city. I’m told by a local expert that about 95% of the bills issued by Council are also wrong. Anyways, the charges are so great that developers are hightailing to Melbourne to take advantage of its low tax advantage. The PIP costs mean that the GC is becoming less and less affordable, with a basic house/land package price tag well above nearly all capital cities.

Affordability was one of the main reasons for the GC’s growth. Destroying it over time will make the city a home that only the rich can afford. That’s why PIP charges must be cut dramatically and soon. But I’m told the Council’s new PIP plan is even worse than the current one.

Once again, why not tell your Councillor to fix it.

Don't forget you can tell me what gives you the shits and I’ll help tell everyone else. Leave a comment here or send me a note at Staerk Reality on Facebook and Twitter.

Councillor Eddy Sarroff needs our help in more ways than one. If you’re happy to cop another 10% plus annual rates rise in the neck, tell him to go jump. If, like me, you’ve had a gutful of paying more and yet believe we’re getting less and less for it, start writing or ringing your local Councillor. Tell them to back Eddy’s knife job on the next budget. Tell them to forget the luxury projects and the pork-barreling. Tell them to keep rises to the inflation rate. Tell them to find $100 million in savings.

Go to Say “NO” to rates rises on Facebook and check out how to speak your mind.

Folks, the only way to stop rates rises is to campaign against them NOW. Only people power will change Council’s direction. We might even need a 30,000 rally outside Evandale to make our point. So come on, get off your couch and help make it happen.

Don't forget you can tell me what gives you the shits and I’ll help tell everyone else. Leave a comment here or send me a note at Staerk Reality on Facebook and Twitter.

Welcome to my first spray for Hot Tomato. For the past two years I’ve been a regular columnist at the Bulle with my Staerk Reality appraisal each Saturday. Reality has primarily focused on our wonderfully dysfunctional Council and Councillors and I hope to keep giving them a going over for many more moons.

This gig with Hot Tomato will probably have a bigger bag of tricks – I’ll be blogging about anything and everything that comes to mind as it impacts the GC.

I’ve been a local since moving here with Mum and Dad in 1972, attending Benowa Primary and Keebra Park High. I’ve lived here for all but three years at QUT in Brisbane and so kind of know the place really well. I also pretty much know Councils having worked for Lord Jim Soorley.

The reason I started foisting my opinions on Bulle readers was my past involvement with Mayor Ron Clarke’s winning campaign in 2004. The former Editor of the Bulle said “you helped make him son”, so write me a free column to make up for it.” Lol.

The real reason is that I love the joint so much, I can’t bear to see it continue down its current path. The city has lost the plot in so many ways. Only by exposing its flaws can we hope to reform them.

So welcome to Staerk Reality – Hot Tomato style. Unlike the Bulle, I’ll keep short, sharp and to the point!

I also want your feedback. Tell me what’s gives you the shits and I’ll help tell everyone else. You can respond to this blog or send me a note at Staerk Reality on Facebook and Twitter.