After reading here this morning Mr Hackett's announcement that he is banning public access, I could not get to sleep tonight. I just kept thinking, "they've stolen part of my back yard!". And this was before I read Nuts/O'Conner's comments above which echoed similar sentiments. This story came into my head... apologies for the length or to anyone who thinks it is sentimental rubbish...One morning at the breakfast table, I was browsing through the morning newspaper and was half way through turning the last page before the sports section and was about to flick through to the comics when a headline of a small news article caught my attention.
THEY STOLE MY BACK YARDIt intrigued me, so I released the half-turned page, letting it return to obscuring details of Australia's first test cricket series loss to India on home soil, and and read on.
The article explained that there was a small apartment block in my town which had an extraordinarily beautiful garden. All the residents of the apartments were very proud of their garden and loved it very much. Not all of them visited the garden regularly, but even those who only looked out on it from their windows appreciated that it was very special.
However, an entrepreneur who lived in one of those apartments had managed to persuade the government to give him exclusive rights over the garden so that he could rent it out to people from all over town, and even from other towns, for their weddings or parties. He had already got some of the permissions required to build a car park in part of the garden, because there was not enough on-street parking.
Some of the residents of the apartment block were furious that part of their garden was going to be destroyed just for the sake of increasing the wealth of an already successful businessman. I was feeling just a little sympathy for the residents when suddenly I noticed that the address of the apartment block was MY OWN HOME!
I sprang out of my chair and knocked on the doors of some of the neighbours who I vaguely knew in our apartment block and showed them the newspaper article. Most of them had not heard of this before and were utterly shocked beyond belief that such a thing could happen without their knowledge. A few had heard of it, and some had even been interviewed for the newspaper article. Now, while a few of us residents were meeting together in the corridor, some of them mentioned that we should investigate what actions we could take to stop this development, including court actions and public protests.
One kindly old gentleman told me that our land had already been sold. It was gone. It no longer belonged to him - to me - to us. We never sold it. The government never asked us what we thought about rezoning our residential property for commercial business. The government just compulsorily acquired it and gave it to the entrepreneurial resident holus bolus on the grounds that more money changing hands in our society is better than the peace and tranquillity of a perfect garden.
I was so upset by this news about my own back yard, that I immediately went out to my back yard to stroll through my perfect garden exploring every corner of it. I had never appreciated it more than in that moment.
This was soon spoilt when I returned to the apartment block and another neighbour showed me a similar article about the proposed development in our back yard from a different newspaper. It said that the entrepreneur had announced that he would continue to allow public access to the garden. However, his idea of "public access" was that if one of the residents of the apartment block wanted to stroll through their own back yard, they would first have to make a formal application to his office several weeks ahead of time, or months to be on the safe side. If there were not already a handful of apartment residents booked in to visit their garden that during that year, and if the applicant had never complained about the development and never said a bad word about the developer, then their application for a stroll in their back yard would be considered in due course.
I told my neighbour that if he considers allowing occasional access to the garden for a handful of his friends who submit to a formal application process is "public access" then an exclusive gentlemen's club in London had full "public access". After all, each of those club members are also members of the public.
Then I went back to my apartment and wept for the loss of my beautiful perfect garden.
