DEAR News Of The Area,

LOCAL issues include a housing shortage, affordability issues and a rental crisis – as well as logging protests.

We have evolved from a generation of individual responsibility, that worked, saved and didn’t waste, to the absolute reverse.

Welfare is now the backbone of society, to the tune of $220 billion a year.

Logging protesters live in timber houses cut from virgin trees on parcels of land that was once virgin forest.

Have they no conscience?

My father, a timber man, was killed at an early age in the bush, leaving a wife and four kids, with welfare a pittance.

My mother, one of many in that era, was amazing.

As kids, a scotch finger or an ice cream remained unknown, but we were free and happy and never missed a meal.

I know how my mother did it, but few to-day could imagine it in a world of indulgence.

I was a logger myself in the sixties and early seventies when conservation was unheard of.

We operated big Cat dozers and blades with no constraints.

The forest was a web of snig tracks, there was no erosion control and the rivers ran red.

It is a different game today, with regrowth and erosion control that would make our local Council blush with shame.

“Cease native forest logging, switch to plantations only.”

Does this include privately owned?

Let’s never forget the Tarkeeth plantation harvesting protest east of Bellingen (total hypocrisy).

The regrowth and regeneration from the above-mentioned logged areas is nothing short of incredible, with most of our new pioneers unable to differentiate between virgin and regrowth.

Try replacing everything that provides with eco-tourism.

Even a clown would recognise that masses of tourists are destroying every attractive destination in the world.

All those extra cars will kill more koalas than logging and as for all those modern softies trekking through the bush, taking on snakes, leeches, stinging trees, thorny vines, ticks, and flies – it won’t happen Dominic.

The old Bellingen is gone, with locals and their kids being displaced by southerners with fat wallets, and rentals replaced by B&Bs to accommodate the interlopers.

That common interest, community relationships, independence and appreciation for what we had is now thin on the ground.

It was a hard physical era, surviving on the basics, but free with less control.

Has our new Council, elected on a conservative vote, turned turtle, swayed by a radical minority, living the dream off the back of those that provide them with all?

Long overdue for the majority to vent their frustration.

Regards,
Darcey BROWNING,
Bellingen Shire.