Whipping Boy

Mayor Ron Bellingham complains that he is tires of being the “Whipping Boy” for the State Government. Bellingham has become a master at passing the buck including his recent laying of blame for a $200,000 council election budget at the feet of the Electoral Commission Queensland. (Freetimes 14.7.11).
He needs to accept responsibility for the incompetence of the Southern Downs Regional Council. Freetimes reports that “Roads are a big job ahead with the 2011/12 Southern Downs Regional Council budget providing $27.81 million for work on council-owned roads, and that capital road works have been differed to future years simply due to the scale of flood repairs to roads”. I have been paying particular note of road repairs being done in and around Stanthorpe since the floods. In one case I observed daily, it took no less than six attempts, over a period of weeks, to repair two short sections of Amiens Road! Each attempt involved the presence of multiple council ‘workers’ and heavy machinery. These were lengthy periods of inaction between each visit to the sites, leaving partially levelled areas bare and unsheeted or sheeted with gravel only to be rained on and re-gouged and rutted by the rain and traffic. There should have been prompt, efficient, one or two visit attention resulting in completed, sealed sections.
Recently, I counted nine ‘workers’ and several heavy machines to patch a section of Britannia Street, again over a lengthy period of time. This patching is already deteriorating. Let’s observe the new patching in Folkstone Street to see how soon it begins to crack up. Driving through the go-slow, during the repair, I called out to the council employee as he leaned on his stop-go pole,
“I hope you guys are going to put a seal on here before the next rain.” “Naah” was his reply. So – how many million dollars was that again? Waste, waste, waste. Stop-go, stop-go indeed!
Surely the question is what to do about it? We whine and complain to each other – widely. Some of us write letters (a little more effective perhaps as each is held to represent the unwritten opinion of twenty people). How about a total boycott of the upcoming elections? The benefit being that even the most apathetic of us can participate as the only action required is inaction!
For those less lazy amongst us, how about a class action to test the legality of being requested/required to pay any rates at all and the historical origin and precedent. Perhaps we may discover that we could pay in apples, pumpkins, grains of granite, salt or peppercorns? By law, can any debt be repaid at $1 a week (or any affordable rate determined by the debtor) so long as it is being repaid in good faith and to the eventual full amount? The ratepayers ability to pay constant and steep increases is not inexhaustible and, I suggest, their willingness to pay is already exhausted – along with any goodwill toward our wasteful council, from the Mayor to the most humble road patchers. We are feeling the pinch and, squeezed dry, we may feel that we can find greener pastures elsewhere.
“Squeezed” D. Hand
Stanthorpe