NEWCASTLE’S mayor needs to have the integrity of a true independent to avoid the squalid politics involving the major parties and vested interests.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
As mayor I will encourage dialogue between innovative staff and empower action that bypasses the entrenched bureaucracy that I believe is limiting creativity.
Senior management spends large amounts of ratepayer revenue, and this can be freed up for productive investment by rationalising.
I will immediately donate $15,000 from the mayoral allowance to attach solar panels onto council workshops, once elected. The Hamilton North gasworks would be perfect for a networking solar power station.
My vision of Newcastle is as a self-sustaining energy producer, delivering revenues back to the community. At present corporate energy marketers profit by selling us expensive electricity after buying it cheaply. If the council provided this service to the community at a similar commission, rates could be lowered, with the potential for installing local generating capacity.
One of the council’s largest expenditures is machinery, operating at a fraction of its capacity. While 24/7 building and maintenance is unfeasible, shared rostering with neighbouring councils would better utilise equipment.
Coal’s days are numbered and the declining price is largely due to the rest of the world moving away the high costs associated with using old polluting technology.
Globally the focus is towards cheap, clean renewables, which are now providing most of the growth in the energy market. Still our region continues to squander billions on coal speculation that’s becoming unviable.
Oddly, instead of governments leading the transition to new job-creating technologies in 3D printing and biotechnology, financiers and politicians are programming our city and country to fail. As industries close, Australia’s productive capacity is redirected towards developing short-term speculative greed.
The people of the Hunter won’t accept the substandard infrastructure that has been secretly planned.
City revitalisation must be debated in a transparent forum and council’s compliance should not be dictated by developers or by people in Sydney.
Ugly high-rise apartment blocks planned to blight our uniquely beautiful city are a scandal, and vacant buildings all over need occupying now.
The empty BHP site would be a more appropriate place to build the ‘‘Shanghai of the south’’. Anything’s possible.
I believe the council has not been encouraging artists and creative people.
Newcastle Community Arts Centre is threatened with closure, and this is a grim step further, after the art gallery fiasco.
Rail infrastructure needs upgrading, not destroying. In other cities, rail lines are trenched below ground and apartments built above operating lines – these are considered desirable homes for commuters.
Providing internet on trains could lessen working hours, and rail speeds need to be increased by running drones along the rails in front of passenger trains to relay real time data to drivers.
How many bridges were built over the Hunter Expressway without a flyover for Stewart Avenue? The congestion between Parry Street and Honeysuckle Drive traffic lights is ridiculous.
Newcastle’s dilapidation has been made by Sydney’s state government showing nothing but total contempt for the people of Newcastle.
Rod Holding is a removalist who ran for the seat of Newcastle in the 2013 federal election. He will stand as an independent in the lord mayoral byelection in Newcastle this Saturday.
