Go back, you are going the wrong way! One Yamba-ite tells McDonald's Australia

It is always nice to feel wanted as you begin to implement plans to enter a small coastal town business community.

The text of an email sent by one Yamba resident to the McDonald's licensee who will operate the new McDonald's eat-in and drive-through fast food outlet in Yamba at the mouth of the Clarence River on the NSW North Coast:

Hello Mr. Campbell,

I'm writing to you as I wonder why you would be PRing yourself saying you have had a great response from the Yamba people. The only ones you would get 'great response' from would be:

* Those who believe they will get full time work and be able to get off the dole. I've crunched your numbers and very few would have the benefit of full time work from your Yamba store.

* The sports groups who believe they will get all sorts of financial assistance from you.

* Those who think that they all will move up the ladder in your store - I guess all 75-100 people you say you'll employ think they'll do that.

As for the majority of us in Yamba (population around 6,000 as opposed to 40,000 in Ballina) - no amount of PR fools us into thinking you are actually wanted in town. Go on the highway - tell your bosses to enlarge their world-wide property portfolio in another town.

You based your Yamba store numbers on your Ballina store! You admitted it!

You PR yourself in the papers now saying you are 'considering' moving here. Would that be in response to the fact we publicised you live in Byron (a place that doesn't want your type of business) and operate a Ballina store?

We are not fooled by the 'saviour' complex you and MacDonalds blab at each opportunity in regard to you moving into townships. Yamba doesn't need you nor want you. A small percentage are fooled and if you find that a 'great response' wait till you get here!

Stay where you are. I guess you haven't wanted a MacDonalds in the town you live in. It does cheapen the place doesn't it!

McDonald's at Ballina finds itself with negative reviews

Menu Mates is a website which assists in the search for somewhere to eat and allows its readers to review restaurants of their choice.

McDonald's at Ballina is not faring well now that Yamba residents have found the site:

Posted by Yamba-ite on 24/04/2010
No to McDonald's in Yamba!
McDonald's Australia, the Westlawn Group and Scott Campbell all want a McDonald's store in Yamba. The Yamba community says NO to that. Tell Scott so at: scampbell@licensee.mcdonalds.com.au

Posted by YambaProud on 15/04/2010
No thanks!

Mr Scott Campbell, please do not open a McDonalds restaurant in Yamba, our community does not want it.

THE MOUSE THAT ROARED: est. 80% of Yamba says no to McDonald's Australia

Yamba chamber vice-president Tania Williams, Janet Purcell and others present petitions to council general manager Stuart McPherson. "Eighty per cent of Yamba's population and a majority of the chamber of commerce members are saying no to McDonald's," Ms Williams said.

Yamba residents have posted on Facebook, blogged, written letters to editor, taken out newspaper ads, worn their opposition on T-shirts, signed petitions in their thousands and made submissions to Clarence Valley Council by the 23 April 2010 deadline, in order to oppose the McDonald's Australia development application for a 24 hour eat-in and drive-through fast food outlet in Treelands Drive, Yamba.

There is at least one site inspection, planning committee meeting and a monthly council meeting to go and, as yet it is still not clear that those shire councillors who have been quietly supporting McDonald's (and its politically connected backers) have even paused to think what around 80 per cent community resistance means for the future of local government in the Lower Clarence.

With only eight of the nine shire councillors eligible to consider this application, Mayor Richie Williamson will also be risking his reputation and possibly any political future he may hope for if the ballot is so tight that he must use his casting vote.

As more than one former shire councillor would be able to recall - Yamba never forgets.

Photograph from The Daily Examiner

Internet activism against mandatory filtering according to Ben Grubb

Not a bad idea for a young bloke:

"Today the costs of running a blacklist were made clear, showing that the filter could be a very expensive operation.
When a URL is submitted to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) it will cost between $173 and $685 per item to investigate, regardless of whether it is "refused classification" or not.
The dollar value was revealed in answer to Greens communications spokesperson Scott Ludlam who had asked ACMA how much it cost to action URLs submitted for the Classification Board to classify.
"In 2008-09, the average cost to ACMA of investigating an item of online content that was not referred to the Classification Board was approximately $173 per item. For items that were referred to the Classification Board this was $685 per item, which included the cost of the ACMA preparing and administering the referrals," ACMA said.
If I wanted to stymie the filter, I'd just keep bombarding ACMA's online complaint form with questionable URLs. If lots of people did this — and we know there are lots of people who feel strongly about the filter — it would only be a matter of time before the costs blew out to completely unmanageable levels." {Ben Grubb, ZDNet.com.au}

The little town that doesn't....

Doesn't want McDonald's plastic hambugers and wall-to-wall litter that is.

Pic found on Facebook

Land use in Australia and the 2010 federal election campaign

Certain rural landholders are trying to make land tenure an issue in the 2010 federal election.
These landowners are upset at state restrictions on their ability to clear land of native vegetation and hold an erroneous belief that the Australian Government has 'stolen' their ability to take advantage of any carbon credits this land might produce.
This drive to roll back state law by making the Federal Government politically uncomfortable in an election year may not be as easily undertaken as it first appeared, when the initial reaction to their announcement of a lead-off campaign rally was rather underwhelming in a regional area which has an established rural component in direct competition with a growing residential sector for occupation and use of coastal lands.

On 2 February 2010 The Daily Examiner published this editorial:

Farmers and land use

THE notion that farmers should be allowed to do whatever they like with 'their' land needs to be debunked.

The issue was highlighted during the past two months by Peter Spencer, who went on a hunger strike trying to get a Royal Commission into government policies preventing him from clearing vegetation from his land.

Without going into the rights and wrongs of his case, there are broader issues at play.

Forget vegetation for a moment and look at water.

If a water course runs through a farmer's land, does that give him or her the right to take whatever they like and leave other landholders downstream with nothing? Of course not. Water is considered a community resource and does not belong to any individual.

If a farmer or landholder proposed a toxic industry on their land, should no-one have the right to question that industry? Again, of course not.

All landholders, urban and rural, have to abide by local, state and federal government decisions that affect what they can do on 'their' land because what they do on 'their' land has an impact on others.

It is the same with land clearing.

No landholder should be able to clear swathes of vegetation from their land without first determining what effect that has on others around them.

That said, if a farmer buys land and the guidelines for the use of that land change, the community via its government should adequately compensate them for any commercial losses they suffer as a result of those changes.

But to suggest the community has no interest or right to determine what happens on private property is erroneous.

What farmers do on their land affects others.

And this letter to the editor in the same edition:

Giving credit to switched on farmers

A RECENT letter to the editor (January 23) asserted that Australian farmers don't receive any compensation for carbon credits sold here or overseas.

Now, I don't know what the writer had been told but this is not correct. Here is a simple explanation of the issue at hand.

"Carbon credits are a financial reward for activities that reduce the levels of carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere. There are a large number of different carbon trading schemes in the world, some of which date back to as early as 1995. A carbon trade can simply be an agreement between two parties. For the term 'carbon credits' to be used, the emission reduction or biosequestration to which the credits apply must be subject to verification by an accredited certificate provider." [Dr Christine Jones, March 2007]

There are many registered Australian companies offering carbon credits for sale and some farmers on freehold land are participating in creating these credits and getting paid for their efforts. The farmers who are taking advantage of emerging markets in relation to national and international greenhouse gas abatement targets are those who have done their research and decided to involve themselves - not just sit back and whinge about how bad things are.

When it comes to any carbon sequestration total which is credited to the national ledger by the United Nations under the Kyoto Protocol, neither the Commonwealth nor Australian states receive any saleable credits from this at all because this particular total is a simple inventory accounting device to measure the nation's adherence to its international undertakings, however, government entities can buy existing carbon credits on the open market to offset their own activities.

As for the NSW Native Vegetation Act also mentioned in that same letter, a little diligent research will show that the matter is not as straightforward as any speakers at the Lismore Cooee Meeting might have suggested.

This year is an election year and it behoves us all to be careful of the political aims and aspirations of vested interests.

Judith M. Melville, Yamba

It's conspiracy theories and dubious 'facts' galore over at Agmates, as it falls under the spell of an articulate fantasist

But surely part of Mr Spencer's problem is the land he owns.
It's hilly, rocky marginal land that would be of little use for anything outside a few goats and rampant bushfires.
Bigpond News on 11 January 2010

When members of the Spencer family went public on 8 & 9 JJanuary 2010, with their concerns that the media, certain websites and fora had lost the plot when discussing Peter Spencer's hungerstrike protest, I wondered how one of the principal offenders Agmates Community Site would react.

On January 8 contributors at this site did indeed begin to react - just not to the criticism of the part they are playing in the silly little drama being played out at "Saarhanlee".

At one thread the Spencer family is attacked for going public, but the issue of the accuracy of what Agmates itself was publishing is not addressed.

For good measure one contributor also suggested that the police are monitoring Agmates - though why and what for is never fully revealed.

A call to blockade local government administrative centres across the country brought a smile to my face, as did the claim that the Peter Spencer issue will bring the Rudd Government down.

However, what I enjoyed most was watching the idea form amid the chatter that the somewhat anti-Labor newspaper, The Australian, was either slanting its coverage at the request of the Rudd Government or because it had been threatened by that same government.
I'm sure that the newspaper would be rather puzzled as to why some thought this might actually have happened in this instance and, perhaps even been a mite indignant that it was also thought to have completely ignored reporting on Peter Spencer for 47 days straight until the family spoke out.
It seems that the Agmates family never let facts get in the way of a good story, so casually brushed aside The Australian's articles published on 18 December 2009 and 5 January 2010.

Less amusing was the assertion that Kevin Rudd's "dirt squad put them [Spencer family] up to it" and the very strange X Files-style whisper that there is something extremely valuable on or under Peter Spencer's land which the government seeks to obtain by actively forcing him off it.

There was only one thread which advised caution when it came to some conspiracy theories, however this warning was from a representative of a lobby group/website which freely indulges in these theories itself at times. To its credit, as of 13 January this particular group continues (on another thread) to advise Agmates against going down the weird road.

Yet another Agmates thread has this audio statement by Peter Spencer. If you listen, particularly enjoy the fact that near the end he attempts to draw the Petrov Affair into the 1970 gun incident and, the crew on this particular discussion thread did not bat an eyelid when he implied this 1954 event actually occurred close to the time he threatened to self-harm.

On 12 January 2010 Agmates congratulated itself on the number of visitors to these discussion threads - I of course was one of these and I have to say that, although my jaw dropped on occasion and I laughed aloud at other times, little that was posted on this website was of any real value in looking at the issue of compensation for farmers who may be negatively affected by native vegetation legislation. As a lobbying effort it was going nowhere fast and, following Mr. Spencer's directions meant credibility became hopelessly lost somewhere in the back paddock many days ago.

Perhaps the final word should go to Geoff Cockfield quoted in The Australian yesterday:

SUPPORTERS of hunger-striking farmer Peter Spencer risk derailing debate on vital issues of property rights with their fringe views, a leading agri-politics expert has warned.
Heated online debate over Mr Spencer's 50-day protest atop a tower is continuing, often lurching into conspiracy theories.
Geoff Cockfield, a specialist in agri-environment policy from the University of Southern Queensland, said it was not helping the NSW farmer's cause that he should be compensated for not being allowed to clear his land near Cooma.
"You always have fringe populists in rural areas thriving around particular issues, whatever they might be," he said.
"They start plausibly enough, just picking on minor irritations people have about governments, but as you get more information we start to get into the worldwide conspiracy.
"There's quite a few mainstream agri-politicians and economists and public policy people who would be sympathetic to the argument that if we are actually preventing full use of property rights in the interests of some sort of supra-national agreement on carbon sequestration, then what's the case for everyone bearing the cost of that?
"I think it's a strong case," he said, "but it creates a problem for the various farm organisations who have been working away on the issue.
"Who do you associate with?"

UPDATE:
Peter Spencer reportedly ended his hungerstrike on 13 January 2010.

Bat war continues and Nationals Hartsuyker and Cansdell are in the first round of 'enemy' casualties

Bat fall-out

WELL done Steve Cansdell and Luke Hartsuyker. Just the week after all the relevant stakeholders held possibly the first ever truly positive meeting about the Maclean flying fox colony, you help whip up a frenzy and involve schoolchildren in an illegal disturbance of the animals, many carrying recently born young, using a starter pistol and general loud noise.

One tentative step forward had finally been made in this ongoing saga, with all parties agreeing to form a proper long-term management plan, and you go in there and destroy that whole democratic process and regress the whole community.

And all for your own political gain. You are shaming the community and standing in the way of progress. Don't you get it? Disturbance does not work and never has as a long, or even short, term solution, and is currently illegal in Maclean.

LINDA WRIGHT,

Lawrence.

[The Daily Examiner, letter to the editor, 14 November 2009]

Mary Valley celebrates Garrett's decision to veto Traveston Dam proposal

It has been a long fight against the proposed Traveston Dam for Mary River catchment communities in Queensland, and they now have what is hopefully a long respite from any talk of new dams with Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett's announcement rejecting the dam on solid environmental grounds.

Everyone who took part in this marathon lobbying deserves congratulations - from the Save the Mary River co-ordinating committee and those who turned out at protest rallies right down to anti-dam letter writers and tweeters. Collectively they have been a pattern card of perseverance in the face of tremendous political pressure.

NSW Northern Rivers residents will remember that the 2006-07 proposal to dam the Clarence River was at one time linked to Queensland Government plans for water security in the south-east of that state.

The Courier Mail said it all early today:

THEY screamed, they hugged, they danced and tears of joy rolled down their cheeks.

After an eerie few moments of silence as more than 100 protesters and supporters put down their glasses and held their breath to watch federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett deliver his verdict on the Kandanga Hotel's bar television, complete pandemonium erupted as soon as he said the word "no".

Nobody heard any more of his speech. The cheers almost lifted the roof off the pub as farmers, business folk, mums, dads and kids were swept up in the moment of joy after 3½ years of fighting the proposed $1.8 billion Traveston Crossing Dam.

The overwhelming feeling was one of relief – and disbelief.

Hard-core protesters who had spent the morning grimly putting more "no dam" information into mail-outs and arranging protest signs for tourists passing by on the Mary Valley Rattler steam train had to pinch themselves.....

Most had expected the dam would get the green light, with even more conditions added to the 1200 already imposed by the Queensland Co-ordinator General. Secretly they had prayed for the best but expected the worst.

Column 8 is back online - finally, Fairfax sees sense

Fairfax has restored online access to The Sydney Morning Herald's Column 8.

Read it online at the Herald's site here.

Fairfax's archived copies of the column are here. However, the Wednesday 18 September 2009 column is not there. North Coast Voice's presentation of it is here.

Column 8's email address is column8@smh.com.au

Thursday's Column 8 - you'd reckon Fairfax could afford to put this online

Kevin Ryan, of Wahroonga, was in Penrith South a few days ago, and reports driving past a car wrecker's yard. The name of the business? "Khartoum."

"Koel alert! Koel alert!" we are warned by Anne Moore, of Waverley. "Heard on Monday at 6.45am. I think this is even earlier than my reported first koel in Column 8 a couple of years back, Soon there will be no first report we'll have koels permanently in residence."

More on affect/effect, from Anton Crouch, of Glebe (Column 8, Tuesday): "A simple rule is to use 'affect' as a verb and 'effect' as a noun. Then you'll be right 99 per cent of the time in conversation and 90 per cent of the time in writing. If you want real pedantry (as opposed to Keith Binns's partial attempt), both 'affect' and 'effect' can be used as a verb and a noun. There's also a use of 'affect' where it means something like 'to pretend to'. But all this gets too hard - the simple rule given above will suit for most of us." Yes indeed, Anton. Most effective.

"Tuesday's headline 'Vet on receiving end as whipping becomes frenzied', writes Duccio Cocquio, of Hunters Hill, "reminds me of an old one from the Wellington Dominion that read 'Drive to ban horse whipping mushrooms'. Very evocative: was it a mad horse whipping the poor mushrooms or a cluster of cruel fungi hitting the innocent horse?" Hard to say but wouldn't the second interpretation require a hyphen?

"I did particularly enjoy the back page of the Sport section in Tuesday's Herald," writes Allan Roberts, of Marrickville, "where the article on Kim Clijsters wining the US Open stated that 'She scrambled with the agility of a gymnast to her players' box to find her husband, Brian Lynch, a professional basketball'." What does a professional basketball earn, we wonder? It'd be hard work.

Richard Sewell theorises that the birds circling pylons of the Anzac Bridge at night are attracted to insects, which in turn are attracted by the bright lights. We now recall that we raised this subject two or three years back, when birds were going crazy around the Harbour Bridge during a bogong moth plague. And lo and behold, a bogong flew out of our wardrobe this morning. What are we in for?

"I was brought up in Blackburn, Lancashire, UK," writes Robert Heathcote, of Newcastle, "a cotton- weaving town. All the older members of my family were weavers and used the term 'cotton on' a lot to mean 'Do you get the idea?'. (Column 8, Saturday). "But they all acknowledged that it derived from the process in weaving where a thread breaks, and they had to 'cotton on' to resume the job. I think also it could mean to start work, or a new job, but it definitely comes from cotton weaving."

"My wife bought a litre of orange juice from Harris Farm Markets at Bridgepoint, Spit Junction," reports Peter Schramko, of Artarmon. "The label reads '100% SQUIZEED ORANGE JUICE'. Does that mean that someone has had a good look at it?"

Column8@smh.com.au(no attachments please).Phone 9282 2207 fax 9282 2772. (include name, suburb, daytime phone)

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, 17/9/09

Wednesday's Column 8 - ask Fairfax why this is not online at smh.com.au

Wednesday September 16, 2009

"I don't know about the mnemonic for accommodation," confesses Nancy Dickman (Column 8, last week), but when I was in 6th class at Como Public School in 1954 our teacher, a large man with a big voice, would boom 'There is no Como in accommodation!' and I have never forgotten it."

It could have been a lot uglier, Nancy. "When I was young," writes Joanna Davison of Haberfield, "long before spellcheck, my father tested our spelling with the following sentence: 'Accommodated near a cemetery, an embarrassed cobbler met a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of a desiccated lady's ankle with unparalleled ecstasy', which contains most of the hardest words to spell."

"The rubbish bins behind the dispensary of a pharmacy must be full at the end of each day with other pharmacies' prescription folders," suggests Annette Minter of Avalon. "This practice drives me crazy when I take in a prescription to a pharmacy that was previously dispensed by a different pharmacy, why do they have to remove the folder and replace it with their own? It is such a waste of paper and doesn't serve any purpose does it?" You wouldn't think so. I'm sure we'll be told if it does probably by a pharmacist, of all people.

Chris Flynn, at the time a temporary resident of the transit lounge at the airport in Singapore, has sent us a page torn from the September 1 edition of The Jakarta Post. He has scrawled at the bottom "What a name!" and encircled the following paragraph:

"The team from the Trade Ministry, made up of five members, was led by Verry Angri Djono, head of Metal, Machine and Electronics Supervision at the Ministry". Crikey, you wouldn't want to be late for a meeting with that bloke, would you?

"For the past four or five nights," reports Neil Godfrey, "I have watched what appear to be flocks of birds swirling around in the lights of the pylons of the Anzac Bridge. What are they up to?" We have no idea, but have also observed this remarkable ornithological ritual recently, and it's quite a sight. The white birds flicker in and out of view as they bank and swerve in and out of the light beams illuminating the flags mesmerising.

Well, someone did it (numerically freakish golf games, and tortuous disputes, Column 8, since Friday). "Like Terrey Hills golf course, the ninth at Coolangatta/Tweed Heads West course is a par five," writes Grahame Marr of Kingscliff. "After going into the water with my tee shot last Wednesday I had a 9, giving me a 9 on the 9th on the 9th of the 9th, 09."

"While looking for the green shoots of economic recovery," writes a cautiously optimistic Will Owens of Clovelly, "my work colleagues and I talked about what the opposite of 'alert but not alarmed' would be, in this context. I thought 'comforted but not jubilant' would be suitable, given the current economic numbers. I won't order the fridge magnets just yet, however."

Column8@smh.com.au(no attachments please).Phone 9282 2207 fax 9282 2772. (include name, suburb, daytime phone)

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, 16/9/09

Here is Monday's Column 8 - a reader's protest against Fairfax continues

Fairfax continues to ignore a very large section of its readership by not making this column available online at smh.com.au.

To make your feelings known about this
email Fairfax at readerlink@smh.com.au
phone 02 9282
or fax 02 9282 3253

"Your colleague who found remarkable names for nail polish," writes Adrian Briscoe of Rozelle (Column 8, last week), "might be interested to know that a friend of mine once had one called 'I Am Not a Waitress.' I'm sure many of your readers could come up with even more outrageous names." As it turns out, the company in question has already set the pace. OPI's nail polish website is a treat it's hard to work out whether it's utterly tongue-in-cheek or simply astute, counterintuitive marketing. We assume that there was a very long lunch involved in the concept development of these: "Charged Up Cherries, Dominant Jeans," and our favourite: "part of our Australian collection 'Fair Dinkum Pinkum'." And no, we are not making this up, make-up though she be.

"While I admire Vic Deebles' skill to have a hole-in-one on 9/9/9," writes Chris Lawrenson, of golf courses various, (Column 8, Friday), "the last time I played Terrey Hills, the ninth was a long par five, so unless they have changed the layout substantially, it's a very impressive score!" This is a deeply disturbing allegation. Column 8 will take a day off during the week and play the course, after a lengthy lunch, to be certain of the provenance of the initial claim. On the other hand, it could have been a miraculous slice shot, picked up in the rough by a nesting magpie, and deposited in the hole as a humiliating testimony to the waste of the time and effort by the gentleman in question. Far sillier things have happened in golf.

"A report prepared by Kempsey Council on designs and uses for a street mall at Kempsey," we are advised by a concerned and amused Mike Dutton, of thereabouts, "includes, among suggested events, an 'Antic Market' to be co-ordinated by a 'mall manger'. I wonder what would be for sale there - silly walks? Handstands? The mall is also to be upgraded, in accordance with 'design principals'." Hmm not too flash on the face of it. When's the next council election up there, Mike?

"An ad in the Herald classifieds on Saturday," reports John Williamson of Tewantin, Queensland, "is for the sale of the Bali Villa and Restaurant, which apparently 'runs by itself 150 staff'." We have a feeling that a sceptical John may have been in the catering caper, but if true, it seems a bargain at any price.

We don't often run replies to Heckler columns over here but we've had quite a response to Laura Jardine's rant on Friday about dodgy names for kids. "Every generation has its share of creative names for children," replies Janet Power of Blayney. "In past generations, Wendy and Cynthia raised the eyebrows of grandparents. Any teacher will tell you of the disbelief that greets the list of new enrolments each year, but girls named Jordan and Cameron no longer draw a reaction. It's the fanciful spellings that take our breath away. And as for boys' names, my late father (born in 1922) rejoiced in the name Gladstone. Besides, I have to keep an open mind. Just this week I became proud grandmother to Atlas!" Heavens above, Janet - this load-bearing baby isn't a girl is it?

Column8@smh.com.au(no attachments please).Phone 9282 2207 fax 9282 2772. (include name, suburb, daytime phone)

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, 14/09/09