They’re funny alright, the people who dream this stuff up. Funny enough to inspire a TV show – ABC TV’s brilliant Utopia, set in the fictional Nation Building Authority.
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Me, I can’t watch Utopia. Too close to a truth I don’t find amusing anymore.
At any rate, we get enough satire in real life. Take the recent decision to hand a chunk of cash ($144,000) from the Port Kembla Community Investment Fund to the NSW Government’s own departments.
The Planning Department gets $100,000 to study how surplus land in Port Kembla could be used to generate jobs. And the Environment Protection Authority gets $44,000 to investigate heavy metal contamination.
Using a community fund for departmental core business is dark humour indeed. And $44,000 is apparently enough to report on “lead and other heavy metals” in air, soil and roofs, as well as measures to “manage human health risk”. Hilarious!
Worthy ideas they may be, but the people of this region could expect government agencies would have been doing these things anyway – for many years.
As for the EPA, we’re entitled to have a chuckle when the environmental watchdog needs to go cap in hand to a funding competition just to do its job.
So: while the devil may be cunning, this time he was hiding right there in his usual spot: the detail.
The port lease sent the Macquarie St cash registers ringing immediately, but the return for the Illawarra would be dribbled out over 99 years – $1 million a year (with a double dose in year one) and no project would get more than $500,000.
There’s some good. But no real transformation of a depressed suburb will be achieved with a six-figure sum.
The upper grant limit is still less than Wollongong City Council spent on a new toilet block ($765,000) at Towradgi Beach Park. And the EPA’s heavy metal report gets a third the money ($134,000) given to replace Port’s Catholic church roof.
Sorry, it seems we may be slipping back into satire again.
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