Bulldozer Baird has set his mind in concrete now on the issue of sale of the Land and Property Information Service (LPI). One of his own Ministers described him as “flexible” while a policy or proposed Bill is in the discussion stage, but totally inflexible once his mind is 100% made up on that issue. He used the analogy of wet concrete, can be formed easily to any shape before it has set.
Well the community has news for Bulldozer Baird and his concrete-like mind. The community is fed up with his autocratic style of government, pseudo public consultation ignoring the wishes of local communities, in the case of forced amalgamation of local councils.
Concrete can always be attacked and broken up with a jack hammer, or even an explosive charge long after it has set hard. It is a messy, noisy, jarring business to demolish solid reinforced concrete, but it can be done! It will probably happen no later than March 2019, but there is a growing number of people hoping that the rumours are true that he will step down as Premier before the end of 2016, or in the first quarter of 2017. I know there are a lot of nervous NSW Liberal and National Party MPs, following the dramatic events at the recent Orange by-election
Baird’s arrogance and autocratic behaviour is because he fails to take into account anything but the economics of a policy, almost to the total exclusion of social, cultural, historic and environmental considerations.
He may want to be seen as the NSW Premier who re-shaped Sydney as a tool of the Property Council of Australia and Urban Task Force. But does he want his name written into history as the Premier who turned Sydney into the Los Angeles of the 21st century?
Premier Baird, there is no need to privatize every single service offered by the NSW Government, just so that you can afford to build more motorways and duplicate heavy rail suburban lines with your proposed new metro rail lines. Simple economics happen to show that replacing the oldsignalling systems on the current suburban railway lines with modern state of the art electronic signalling would cost far less than building your inappropriate metro rail lines everywhere. These proposed routes are all about maximizing value capture for Property Council of Australia, Urban Task Force and builder/operators of these driverless metro rail services like the Hong Kong based MTC who are rolling out the current Norwest metro rail line, behind schedule and over budget. The political decisions made by Bulldozer Baird and his “kitchen cabinet” is not about providing public transport where the community needs it to foster job creation and reducing the need for privately owned cars where there is no proposed or existing public transport services.
But I suppose Bulldozer Baird’s mates at the “top end of town” would not be able to generate windfall profits on massive “value capture” along his proposed new metro rail routes.
Greater Sydney is more than just an economic opportunity for the private sector to generate large profits. The future planning of Greater Sydney, and the regional and rural parts of NSW, should be about preserving community, respecting our history and heritage, and maintaining a sense of delight for the residents.
The NSW Government is giving away a huge revenue stream when it hands a monopoly service like the Land and Property Information Service to the private sector. It is a lose-lose policy, but Bulldozer Baird will not even listen to the arguments of the legal profession on this issue, as the attached article demonstrates. The conservative UK Government led by Prime Minister Theresa May abandoned its plans to privatize their land title service in the past week. The very same reasons justify abandoning the privatisation of the Land and Property Information Service of NSW
John Young
PO Box 536 | Spit Junction NSW 2088
6-dec-2016
Yindi Systems 