We’ve been learning a protest song for our choir’s Christmas concert. Actually it is a plea for peace, the musical equivalent of a street march – “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now.” John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Happy Xmas/War is Over starts by asking the universal question so many of us end up asking ourselves: “And so it is Christmas, and what have we done? Another year over, a new…
A developer friend from my days as a business journalist sent me his frank appraisal of the housing affordability crisis, which he described as more of a ‘crisis of expectations’. There are many Brisbane suburbs, Dan wrote, where post-war houses sell for less than $450,000. He named a few – Keperra, Ferny Grove, Grovely, all 12 kms from the CBD with good public transport networks and excellent shopping amenity. Most of these homes are ex-…
To begin this two-part series on residential development and how it became not only unaffordable but also distressingly generic, we ask the universal question – is anything sacred? The example here looks at an unpopular proposal to build luxury houses on the doorstep of Scotland’s famous battlefield, Culloden. Regular readers would be familiar with this image on my website, cheekily captioned ‘Bob’s writer’s cottage’. In truth it is a stone crofter’s cottage within Culloden Battlefield,…
You always have to look for the silver lining; like the Queensland Parliament introducing a Human Rights Act on the same day (31st October) that people were walking the streets dressed as ghouls and zombies, reminding us that Christmas is just 55 days away. Christmas Island is just around the corner too – well, it’s precisely 1,550 kms north-west of Perth. But it is an Australian territory, unlike Nauru and Manus Island. I mention human…