What we have in Australia today is NIMBY-ism on steroids: Terry Ryder
Someone was foolhardy enough to propose a petrol station in my home town.
As the Maleny region is growing strongly and has only one petrol provider, it could certainly use another, more modern facility.
But the avalanche of opposition to the proposal was stunning. People claimed the traffic and petrol fumes would put their kids at risk. Abuse and threats were directed at the proponents and their business (not by everyone opposed to the project, but by plenty of them).
The plan was dropped and the local weekly rag called it a victory for “parent power”. It was nothing of the sort. It was a loss from which this community may never fully recover.
I refer not to the loss of a petrol station but to the loss of decency and proper process. It is now established that, in Maleny, it’s okay to use threats and intimidation if you disagree with other people’s ideas. The end justifies the means. Maleny is changed forever.
Some claim they were not opposed to the concept of a petrol station, but were against the location. They’re kidding themselves. People would oppose it no matter where it was planned.
I’m quite sure that if someone announced plans to build a children’s playground, hordes of citizens would rise up and form a group with a silly acronym, claiming their kids would be at risk because it would attract drug dealers and paedophiles.
And the fuzzy feeling of victory some Maleny people are feeling will be short-lived. Woolworths, another unpopular presence in the town, plans to build a service station in the town and the retailing giant won’t let something as trivial as public opinion stop them.
This, sadly, is a national trend. Nothing can be proposed without attracting feverish opposition from noisy minorities, dominated by people who use concern for their kids to justify bad behaviour. What we have in Australia today is NIMBY-ism on steroids. There are no winners.
Here’s one of the more absurd examples. McDonald’s plans to build a store in Tecoma, a small town in Victoria. Townsfolk have mounted strenuous opposition.
According to the local paper, their reasons include “crime will increase in Tecoma” and “it’s going to attract a hoon element”. It will also prevent Tecoma from “shutting down after 9pm”, something locals apparently like about their town.
One who opposes this travesty went to the trouble of researching crime at McDonald’s stores across Australia. She found that, over a three-year period, there were 94 instances of criminal activity (including assaults and robberies) at McDonald’s stores. She obviously doesn’t realise it, but she has accidentally supported the case for the development.
There are 958 McDonald’s stores in Australia. The statistics gathered by the Tecoma woman with too much time on her hands indicates criminal activity happens at a rate of 31 incidents per year. That means that only one in 30 stores has any kind of criminal incident in a typical year - and that 927 of the 958 stores have no crime events at all.
How this supports the statement that “crime will increase in Tecoma should the McDonald’s go ahead” is beyond me. I can think of many reasons to oppose McDonald’s but a projected crime wave is not one of them. People in Tecoma need to get a life.
I have written previously on the bizarre fixation some people have with wind farms and the fanatical opposition that mosques generate (while mainstream WASP-type religions can build places of worship without unleashing opposition campaigns from Pauline Hanson clones).
The greatest shame in all this is that the kneejerk anti-anything zealots do a great disservice to people with genuine grievances. The outcry from neighbours of resources companies who routinely breach the environmental provisions of their approvals gets lost in the maelstrom of static from those who see construction of a roundabout or a six-pack unit building as a life-or-death issue.
Terry Ryder is the founder of hotspotting.com.au