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After
months of newspaper and television interviews, meetings with
senior politicians and expert group meetings, the M.P.A. was
broke.
The engineering committee, set up
by Russ Hinze, was representative of all parties with a vested
interest, but, as is usually the case, state government and
council engineers had the majority vote - and the report, by
majority vote, was that, after studying the plans of Donaldson
Road sewage plant, the proposal was safe from accidents that could
pour raw sewage into our area of the river.
Two weeks later,
Donaldson Road had an untimely accident and masses of sewage
spilled into the river through two valves that did not appear on
the plans submitted to the engineering committee. The plans had
been "doctored".
Our legal advisers
said that we would win in court and prevent the tunnel from being
completed (it was by now well under way since council work
continued while all of the decisions were being made).
Human nature makes
it essential for any protest action that is "high
profile" to be won quickly. Time is always on the side of the
authorities because it is their job, not their grievance, and they
are not emotionally involved.
The M.P.A. was
broke, and although resident's support was still strong, the
thought of a lengthy court battle against the City Council and
State Government with the costs involved was too daunting for the
majority of the committee.
With hindsight, the
decision was correct, but I certainly didn't agree with it at the
time and because of it resigned from the chair at the next A.G.M.
We did, however,
have enough facts and figures and media contacts to force a
compromise costing. one million dollars for fail-safe systems.
To date, those
fail-safe systems have worked and we have not had to endure the
stink of such areas as Carindale where fail-safe systems have not
been implemented.
Perhaps we won, but
I know most of the story behind the proposal to move the outlet.
Similar to the stuff that was intended to continually flow into
our section of the river, it stinks.
A couple of years
later, cheap housing again became an issue when the council
decided to cut up the area now used by the pony club and
Montessori school for small block homes.
As luck would have it, I was again
in the chair when this one came to the boil.
Our actions against
river noise in earlier years had been noted, and prior to the
proposed subdivision of this land, a rather nasty act of
parliament was passed.
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