By ERWIN CHLANDA
A stop-work order was imposed on Monday last week and lifted on Thursday on the site south of the Kilgariff suburb where a channel is being built, directing water away from the Stuart Highway and Col Rose Drive and into St Mary’s Creek.
Aaron Blacker, manager of ASPLUM & CIVIL, which is doing the work, says people not known to him had claimed that unapproved subdivision work had started, and that trees had been brought down outside the “limit of works”. There had also been complaints about dust.
He says the work is being done under an exceptional development approval for drainage work, not subdivision, and no work had been done outside the set limits.
Work is progressing again.
“We are not in breach of the contract,” says Mr Blacker. “Our work has been checked stringently, including by the Environment Protection Authority.”
We asked the Department of Planning, Infrastructure and Logistics for a comment at 1:55pm yesterday but have not yet received a reply.
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
The freedom of the press still furnishes that check upon government which no constitution has ever been able to provide – Chicago Tribune.
The original plan for the total subdivision included a housing development extending east from the Highway along Col Rose Drive.
No stretch of the imagination can envisage the development of new houses not being a part of the alleged drainage which amounts to gross environmental vandalism.
What is the proposed drain going to protect if there are no houses there or no plan to build houses there?
Again it needs to be pointed out that the cost of the whole of that plan will be huge in not being able to display to the public what is possible here – mainly in food production, and tourism to attract investment to provide jobs for the people who may need the housing.
It should all have been at Brewer where future industrial development will have to be, and based around an integrated transport and industrial hub.
The shortsightedness is breathtaking. The Indigenous gallery should have been at Yirara where the students can be involved in displaying their own culture and showing to the public the positives of Indigenous education.
The visitors reception area should be associated, directing economic activity to where it is needed, and the museum at ASRI geology headquarters. There is already a great display of mineralogy and knowledge, with the mining industry displaying what is going on here and why.
Then add food production where the houses should never have been, showing what can be done with the emerging bush food and medicine industry.
These are the true costs of Kilgarrif.
Red tape and nepotism?
There have been at least three attempts to start a camel milk industry here, (with the development of native pastures – now being done in Africa with our Acacias!)
All have run up against a wall of small thinking, while one camel milk farm alone in Victoria runs 180 milking animals, supplying a lucrative market.
The Sundrop enterprise at Port Augusta could have been a model to follow but is yet another example of small and inward thinking which is unfortunately the order of the day here.
The north of the Mall is a dead horse and outlived its usefulness. Stop flogging it and look south, not of The Gap but south of the airport.