Howdy and welcome to the blog and another dose of the minutiae related to the biggest issue in Mt Gambier...(apart from the St Martins Lutheran School Child Abuse Cover-up which involves local Mayors Perryman, Gandolfi, etc, Rory McEwen, Mt Gambier City Council, SAPol, etc, etc, as covered in numerous previous posts-Ed)...ok, the Rail Lands Retail Agenda is the second biggest...
But First: a preemptive apology written retrospectively at the close of this post 'cause I never got to the RLRA stuff...sorry...the RLRA is however financially the most critical issue...(if you don't include the disastrous South East Forestry Estate Sale to pay for the ludicrous Adelaide Oval-Ed)...well, ok, if you don't include that...so the RLRA is the second most...(no, make it third, there's the whole Bunnings/Penola Rd fiasco that has destroyed any future hope of appropriate planning in and around Mt Gambier-Ed).
Well I was of course including that debacle in the RLRA because the February 2006 plans that Council produced/co-authored/whatevs (in previous post), those plans state outright that the RLRA is to stop supermarkets/shopping centres being developed on Mt Gambier's outskirts...and hasn't that worked out well...but first some apparently important news about me...
Housekeeping and Feedback: No, I am not gloating, not even a little, when I talk about running into so-and-so at the supermarket or wherever, and the various hilarious reactions/responses...(now hang on, now that right there, that's gloating...'hilarious' is gloating...when people are turning white with fright and you laugh about it, that's gloating-Ed)...ahh, you got me sort of...yes, I am laughing a little if not quite gloating, but it is genuinely a rye laugh, accompanied by a rye smile...
My natural default position when nervous is always to grin like the Cheshire gorilla, lots of people do this...and I am well aware that being reasonably large it upsets people if I'm frowning and scowling, and I do make a point of never raising my voice in public meetings, etc, so as to not upset other people, but it is really my natural manner anyway...however, when people are 'confronted' to the point of paleness because of what they've done, and I'm just standing there smiling, well that's their problem, not mine...
But that's only a small part of it...for me it's more about a reversal of the behaviours and incidents that were largely responsible for me developing Agoraphobia...(hope you've spelled that correctly-Ed)...the incidents of public abuse I was subjected to re the St Martins Child Abuse Cover-up, where people felt it was appropriate to abuse me at volume in public places, eg, the supermarket, on the bus, etc...I'm sure I spend a good deal of time frowning and scowling at Council meetings, but even then I make a point of not staring or glaring at anyone particularly, and I've got my head down taking notes most of the time anyway.
For example, if the ABC's Stuart Stansfield wants to repeatedly taunt me and mock me and laugh at me and abuse me and yell at me and hang up on me from the other end of a phoneline, but then when I happen upon him in the supermarket he goes a whiter shade of pale and scurries away as fast as he can, that's his behaviours and his problem...and yes, if it weren't so sad, I would find it funny...and no, I don't think he was just being 'appropriate in a public space' himself...not even close.
When you break his behaviours down into their constituent motivations, I find no humour in this because I consider the main issue driving his reaction to be the St Martins Cover-up...(fair enough-Ed).
In My Own Defense: is my own behaviour, as anyone who attended the Council Budget Public Consultation meetings can attest...(or anyone who has read the posts in this here blog TMGI, and believes that reportage-Ed)...quite...that I was often under attack from multiple Councillors, with Mayor Steve Perryman twice deliberately trying to provoke/pick a fight with me, etc.
It is a slight exaggeration but not a joke to state that I feel most at home, most comfortable, that I function best in a room full of people who hate me...I've had to learn how to because of the way I've been treated by, for example, the Lutherans and City Council...I've had to adapt, and the beautiful irony is that therefore it has become relatively easy for me to attend say, Council meetings...doesn't hurt that they look so pleased to see me when I get there.
I know that I've been through this stuff previously but it continues to be the case that it's not strictly about me, these are the issues, this is what's currently churning away just beneath the surface in good ol' Mt Gambier...some other quick news...
Fergus McPherson: is a New South Wales public servant who, from 1998, was responsible for the NSW Maritime leases around Sydney Harbour, and his duties included ensuring that there was no roll over of leases to guarantee that the public received maximum income, and some of his charges were the cafe/kiosks on the Ferry wharves...(very nice little earners-Ed)...absolutely...and directly involved in those particular leases were 'disgraced' Labor politician Eddie Obeid.
Starting from about July 2006, according to Mr McPherson, he was told to 'change his attitude to protect his career' in that his enquiries and official objections to the kiosk leases were not appreciated by Mr Obeid, Joe Tripodi, and several others...basically because of his honesty Mr McPherson's reputation and career was then quite deliberately destroyed by Eddie & Co, and he went a year without any income, etc, but has retrieved a private career.
I include this story for 2 reasons, namely 1) because I'm always ranting how everybody's a crook, etc, and here's a great example of a public servant who was honest and strong and paid the price and was duly vindicated...and if it were down to me I'd be ordering Mr Obeid et al to pay restitution of several million dollars each directly to Mr McPherson...that is after they've repaid the $100millions of stolen NSW taxpayers money...(and paid the massive fines soon to be imposed just before the lengthy gaol terms are-Ed)...well quite, one can only hope...
And 2) Mr McPherson and I are a world apart, but we have a very similar experience of being personally attacked and denigrated by the corrupt politicians we're trying to deal with...he made conscious decisions that trashed his career, I was dragged unwillingly into a disaster...but in both cases these were not situations of our construct, and in both cases the official response has been to attack and attempt to destroy the credibility of the 'whistleblower'.
In Context: for all the criminality and corruption in both our cases, Mr McPherson I'm sure would agree with me that there are other things going on on the planet that makes our experiences seem quite trivial...I was shocked to see the current violence in Iraq is now being referred to as 'a potential Civil War'...(I don't think 'Civil' is appropriate, I'd prefer to use 'Internal'-Ed)...certainly...and I'm not an expert at any level, but what I have seen of Iraq via the media is an Internal War and has been for over a decade because whoever has been doing it, it is happening within Iraq amongst the general population.
I don't think it matters whether it is a basically USofA led 'invasion', or an United Nations led mission, or inter-factional and sometimes even infra-factional conflict, the daily violence in Iraq is a perpetual Internal War that appears to be without resolution...and the constant deliberate targeting of civilians at mosques, churches, markets, etc, mean that the civilian population are living permanently in a war zone...it does my head in just trying to imagine what that's like...
Again I apologise for getting distracted today away from the RLRA, but I promise,
Tomorrow: The RLRA Just Won't Go Away
And so it is that it appears here yet again.
I am Nick Fletcher and this is my blog...cheers and laters...
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