Reproduced with permission from Nicholson cartoons

And to finish the joke:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ju5OnAOq58

My volunteers and I have been generating quite a lot of activity around Launceston with the Tamar silt petition.  It calls on the Labor-Green Government to keep it’s promises including more than $6m in funding to perform ongoing dredging and silt removal from the choked-up river. 

Did you know that it has now been more than 210 days since a dredge was last operating on the river?  The river was bad enough then, but the passage of time has caused additional deposition of silt in the yacht basin at the heart of our beautiful city.

So it’s time to up the ante – my petition has now gone online to make it even easier to add your voice to the growing community call for the government to keep its promises and to pass word around to your friends and family.  The only condition is that you be a Tasmanian citizen.

Please join me in speaking up for our Tamar River and human enjoyment of our river.    Click here to sign the petition online, right now

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDfrdsVVNSw

Download the printable version of the petition (PDF file 81K) and get your friends, family and colleagues to sign it

Read other blog updates on this important Northern issue

Entally House

The homestead was built in 1819 and the impressive front section of rooms added during the 1820s. I kept wondering what kind of place Northern Tasmania was back then. By this time the colony was settled with an estimated population of about 5,500.

What I love about Entally is the open landscape dotted with unique buildings surrounding the central, grand, house. The chapel, conservatory, stables and massive trees will instantly take you back to another time. Almost another country.

As I look back I realise that for me, Entally is an important part of my political journey. Though I certainly didn’t know it at the time, my leading of a community campaign to stop the Government and the National Trust selling a 99-year private lease became an important step in what turned out to be a political career at local, federal and now state government levels. We won that campaign, and forced a significant political backdown from the Labor Government which resulted in a much better solution to protect the home for the long haul and finding a much more satisfactory way for the private sector to bring entrepreneurship to the challenge of financing conservation and restoration costs. In this respect I want to thank Gunns Limited who have injected much needed funds and a genuine commitment to this project over recent years. The results speak for themselves.

While Parks and Wildlife will be taking over the property again in early November, we must all do what we can to continue to protect and celebrate our colonial built heritage.

We don’t owe it to a past generation of pioneers – but let’s honour them by all means – in fact we owe it to ourselves and generations to come.

Entally House website

From my speech in Parliament of October 14:

Mr Deputy Speaker, it is Show Day tomorrow on Flinders Island and I am looking forward tomorrow morning to travelling across Banks Strait and spending the day with some of the most hardworking, decent, community-minded and family-oriented people that I have ever known. Flinders Island is a very beautiful, special and magical place to me and I love it.

Flinders is a much bigger island than most who have not been there would imagine it to be. It is 62 kilometres from north to south, 37 kilometres from east to west, and the total land area of the island is 1 300 square kilometres. That makes it one-third larger than King Island, for my Braddon colleagues to hear, and for my Franklin colleagues, it is four times larger than Bruny Island. It has a population of around 800 people, and I am sorry tonight to report that the population of Flinders Island has fallen over recent years, despite the arrival of sea-changers from the mainland States, some of whom are only seasonal residents. With years of a hard-hitting drought, which has truly hit the core economic activity of the island’s agricultural sector, especially the lamb and wool-growers, the rest of the island’s economy has also suffered severe strain as a result, and that has put pressure on the small and fragile meat-processing and export sector, its rural merchandising and retail sector, the various trades and, of course, the local council itself.

Tonight, in the few minutes available to me, I want to raise a few issues where I am calling on the Government to play a greater leadership role in supporting the island community. One essential institution and certainly one of the beating hearts of Flinders Island is the Flinders Island District School and, frankly, this fantastic school is under some specific stresses for two reasons. First, the school cannot ever be allowed to lose its viability, as it is the sole school on the island to provide an essential service to all families, current and future; and second, with the falling population, the school has an even more pronounced fall in its student enrolment figures. Perception of a falling enrolment leads to a continued drop in enrolments because some parents feel that the school is less able to meet the needs of their children, and so a dangerous self-perpetuating cycle continues.

Tonight I want to pay tribute to a person whom I, as a newcomer to Flinders Island, recognise as an outstanding educator, and of course I am referring to the principal, Jan Schibrowski, who has come to Flinders this year from the mainland. I know that her vision for the school is a very positive one and I want to certainly support and pay tribute to her efforts tonight, and indeed the whole school community. Last year the Flinders school lost seven of its already small student enrolment of 100, so it has lost 7 per cent of its students. It is a great school, but we must keep it great, and this Government needs to work with the local school community to create an enrolment strategy for Flinders Island District School.

While I am on the school, I want to just also add my voice to the appeal that the Mayor of Flinders Island, Carol Cox, has made to the Premier, and I understand he has referred to the Education minister, for continuation of the transition program. For just $10 000 the pilot program last year has been working with young people transitioning from grade 10 who go to college off the island from a very specific and special, almost cocoon-like environment of Flinders Island to the big world of the Tasmanian mainland, and supports them in finding their feet at college, familiarising them with the city environment, and helping to prevent any dropouts. I can report tonight that that program to date in just its first year has had a 100 per cent success rate. What a great result for just $10 000. Students who leave Flinders Island for a Launceston or mainland Tasmanian private school get from the Government I think around six return flights a year, and of course there is no equal provision for government students, so there is an equity issue here. I call on the Government to continue that program, not for one year but for at least four years, to give that program some certainty.

With regard to the port on Flinders Island, the community is telling me that the port funding provided in the Budget for this year and next, some $1.6 million, has seen TasPorts, DIER and the council finally starting to work together. The island shipping committee is involved in developing a schedule of priority works, which has now been combined with TasPorts’ own list. Frankly, it is a poorer promise than the $5 million opportunity that we Liberals were prepared to allocated but it is nonetheless a positive start, so I give the Government a tick for that but I will also be asking the it to keep a very close eye on this because we need the Government to be ready to provide the additional support at a time in the future when priority works are identified and shovel-ready.

The renewable energy issue for the Bass Strait islands has been a trump card for the Premier, but unfortunately it has been oversold on Flinders Island because, of the something like $56 million which has nominally been referred to for the Bass Strait islands, apparently only around $100 000 will be made available to Flinders Island. I am advised by Councillor Margaret Wheatley that the community there is very disappointed to learn that of the $56 million in renewable energy infrastructure support Flinders will get just $100 000, and that is only for a subsidy of about $1 000 per household for those who want to switch from electric hot water systems to solar hot water systems. That in itself is not a bad thing, but she tells me that a large number of householders already have solar hot water but they are no longer efficient, so they do not qualify for a subsidy if they want to replace and convert to a newer one. With the Minister for Alternative Energy coming and going, I hope I can call on him to review the criteria for those applications because, frankly, at the moment it is just not good enough.

In closing, on the broader issue, this Government has an obligation to do something very special and dramatic for Flinders Island to support this island community, to grow its economy, to deal with the cost-of-living issues and to enhance the offerings of the local school.