Carol Altmann – The Terrier 

People power at work: as has been reported in the paper, the two Moreton Bay figs planted around 1903 in the middle of Banyan St have been saved.

You did this.

Scarlett Patrick, who started a petition that attracted more than 2000 signatures in four days, did this.

Everyone who signed and wrote letters and buttonholed a councillor, did this.

These glorious trees, planted just fifty years after Warrnambool was founded, were due to be chopped down last year to make way for a better footpath.

They had already been mangled through “pruning” by people with chainsaws who didn’t care less about what they looked like in the finish.

This makes them easier to cut down, of course.

As one wise woman said to me this week, trees can be whatever shape they bloody like.

Yes, they bloody can.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

There was no doubt that Warrnambool’s grotty, rundown old Liebig St needed a serious makeover, but is the $18 million upgrade being stuffed up by a lack of free parking?

Almost 3000 people who physically signed a petition for the return of central, 90-minute free parking say it is.

The 2833 signature petition – no small number – was tabled at the Warrnambool City Council meeting last Monday but barely raised a mention because of the much bigger news story that night – racehorse training on Levy’s beach.

The petition is pushing for permanent, 90-minute free parking in Parker’s Carpark (behind the Commonwealth Bank) and the Ozone carpark (behind the new post office) and was gathered by long-term CBD trader Max Taylor, from Taylor’s clothing and surf store, which has been trading in Liebig St for decades.

Max pulls no punches in the three page-document (see images at end of story) he added to the petition.

“Potential shoppers have left the CBD in their multitudes”, he says, because of damaging combination of expensive parking, confusing meters and lack of meters (only 10 in the whole street) that leave people worried they will be fined $68 for overstaying.

Some traders around Parker’s carpark, he says, have experienced a 20-30% loss in trade compared to when the 90-minute free carparking was in place during the street works.

And there are still 24 empty shops between Raglan Parade and Timor St (we won’t go into how many others sit empty along Lava and Timor).

Max also accuses the council Director City Infrastructure, Scott Cavanagh, of making misleading claims to the local newspaper about the number of shoppers parking in the CBD. The 5000-6000 people who parked every day included a lot of city workers, Max claims, thereby “grossly overestimating the number of shoppers”.

He also points out that local traders around the Parker and Ozone carparks paid a special levied back in 1984 to build the new FREE off-street carparks in Parker Arcade and the Ozone. Meters were added in 2004.

A lot has changed since 2004. Online shopping arrived. More shopping centres have been built on the fringe of Warrnambool, offering more than 2000 free car parking spaces.

And then there are the new, pedestrian friendly crossings in and around Liebig St which are so pedestrian friendly that drivers potentially have to brake before they get to the roundabout, in the roundabout, and leaving the roundabout.

My personal favourite is driving from Liebig St down Lava St, past the Centrelink, where you give way to pedestrians coming into and leaving the roundabout, then cross an ugly road hump, give way to buses leaving the bus zone and roll up to another pedestrian crossing – all within 50 metres.

I am all for slower traffic, but that really is ridiculous…and messy.

Maybe we just need more time to get used to it. Maybe we can all download the app and pay for parking that way.

Or maybe, as Max fears, people will avoid Liebig St unless it is absolutely necessary and shop somewhere else. For our long-suffering, high rent paying traders, that would be the worst scenario.

It is worth mentioning, as Max does, Port Fairy has no parking meters and seven-day trading. The little town won yet another award for being the most popular among tourists.

They just might be on to something over there.

Max’s petition, as per standard council procedure, sits on the table for 30 days and will be discussed at the next council meeting.

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By Carol Altmann

Phew, that was close. Two of Warrnambool’s oldest street trees have been temporarily spared from being chopped down by the Warrnambool City Council this weekend, but the fight is far from over.

The two, 115-year-old Australian banyan trees on the corner of, yes, Banyan St and Raglan Parade are not yet saved, but thanks to people power, the pause button has been pressed.

Let’s look at what just happened and what happens next.

What happened was the council falsely and arrogantly believed that it could destroy these two magnificent trees that have been alive longer than any person on the planet and nobody would really care.

It also believed that consulting the public meant putting a media release on its website, sending this to the local paper, and contacting a few nearby property owners – all just 10 days before the chainsaws moved in.

Lastly, it hoped that we would blindly accept that these trees had to be chopped down because they were causing car accidents, that they were bubbling up the footpath and that the whole avenue of trees would actually look better if these two trees were gone.

To say the council was wrong on every single count is an understatement.

More than 2000 people signed an online petition within four days to stop this massacre. The petition, started by local Scarlett Patrick, is still going strong.

People were furious. They were furious because their heritage was about to be ripped out (again), that our precious old trees were being treated with contempt, that nobody had a chance to offer an opinion or an alternative, that not one single elected councillor was jumping up and down in outrage, and that the justifications being rolled out just didn’t make sense.

The trees, as we all know, are not causing car accidents at a big intersection that has traffic lights. They are not causing drivers to rear-end each other, or to turn too soon, or too late.

VicRoads knows this and I asked them, just to be sure, if they had expressed concerns to the council about the old trees.

They hadn’t.

What VicRoads did do, however, was offer to pay for a new footpath if the council decided to pull out the trees:

“VicRoads (Regional Roads Victoria) is responsible for the maintenance of the footpath in the Princes Highway median, and has, as a result of the Council’s plans to remove the trees, agreed to fix any damage to the footpath,” a spokeswoman said via email.

The footpath under the big trees is getting rough, just like those at the Warrnambool Botanic Gardens, but there are many ways to improve this and, just to be on the safe side, there is another, perfectly flat footpath just 2o metres away on the other side of the road.

Locals know this, they can see it for themselves.

(They can also see the broken stump of a traffic and pedestrian light that has been sitting there for weeks, wrapped in orange safety tape, waiting to be replaced.)

Picking up on the angry mood, the council has now switched tack.

You’ve got it all wrong folks! The priority was not about traffic accidents and footpaths, but actually improving the full avenue of Australian banyans/Moreton Bay figs along Raglan Parade.

The original media release has been taken down from the council website (see above), but this is the opening line of a statement sent to me this week:

“Council’s intention in proposing to remove these trees was to address issues associated with aesthetics of the boulevard which had been impacted by heavy pruning of the two trees as part of power line and signal clearance works, other considerations included pedestrian access and visibility at the intersection.”

So you prune the trees so harshly that they look ugly, then you get rid of them because, hey, they look ugly.

Oh boy, we are back in George Orwell territory again.

The good news is that the council says it will now consult more broadly. When and how, we still don’t know, but it has decided to bundle the issue into its response to another petition, received in April this year.

That petition, signed by 19 residents, asked to have some native trees planted on the median strip in the southern end of Banyan St, between Timor and Merri streets.

Thanks to Scarlett Patrick, you, and more than 2000 other people, these 19 residents now have a whole lot more clout and the two Australian Banyan trees have a second chance.

More broadly, the council has been given a wake up notice that people are watching, that they do care, and that we need a better policy on how we manage our precious urban forest.

The Lorax would be proud.

[You can sign the petition here.]

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A petition has been launched asking the W’bool City Council to advertise the position of its CEO for the first time in 11 years*.

As far as I know, it is the first time such a petition has been launched in Warrnambool and it comes from a position of pure frustration.

While some might see it as a direct attack on the sitting CEO Bruce Anson, I see it as a predictable response to the secrecy that surrounds one of the most important and well-paid civic jobs in our city.

As I wrote recently, the WCC last month voted in secret to award Mr Anson a pay rise that increased his salary package to around the equivalent of $6000 a week.

This includes super and a car and doesn’t include tax, but even if we halved that package to $3000 a week, it is still an eye-watering amount to most of us.

Maybe, as I have said before, Mr Anson deserves every dollar that he earns.

And maybe, after 11 years in the job, he is still the best person to lead our city into the future. (The current contract expires next January).

But the bottom line is that Mr Anson works for us – the people of Warrnambool – and we deserve to know far more about the CEO position and his performance than we do now.

All we have been asking for is greater transparency: nothing more, nothing less.

And yet the WCC continues to act as if we have no right – us pesky journalists and annoying ratepayers – to even ask.

The petition now asks the question in a way that can’t be ignored.

It will be revealing to see how the new councillors respond.

* The petition can be signed at 150 Liebig St (next to Kathmandu) from 11am – 2pm Mon-Sat, and is also located in several local business. It is being organised by David Thompson, partner of former WCC election candidate Christine Thompson.

I met two unforgettable people last week while collecting signatures to erase the mural by sexual predator Rolf Harris at the Lighthouse Theatre in Warrnambool.

Both of them, one a man, the other a woman, were survivors of child sexual abuse and were, as they described it, “finding their voice” to talk about such a personal atrocity and do everything they could to ensure that no other child would suffer what they had.

They talked quietly, often looking into the middle distance, because the middle distance is a safe space when re-visiting a place of such hurt, such confusion and such silence.

The silence. The being told – constantly – that you must not say anything, that you must not cause trouble, that you must not ruin things, or make things uncomfortable for others by speaking up and out.

But as the man said to me, “you just want to be heard and for someone to do something”.

He was doing something.

That very day as he signed the petition on a wobbly card table on the Civic Green, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse delivered its final report.

This was a devastating report that has been five years in the making and to which this man had given hours of evidence.

Despite having made a contribution to this highest level of investigation, this man still turned up during his lunch hour to sign a little petition to remove a small mural in Warrnambool because he is not done yet.

None of us should be done yet.

And this was how the woman who told me her story, a story she is only now starting to fully articulate, went from talking to me about why removing the Rolf Harris mural didn’t really make a difference, to deciding that it did.

She had come to the Civic Green not to sign the petition, but to explain why she felt covering it up was enough.

We talked about the symbolism of covering things up, about the hard-to-hear argument of separating the sexual abuser from the person, and about this mural – this mural – being a chance for our council to follow the lead of others who painted over their Harris murals right after his conviction two years ago.

After 20 minutes or so she said “I am going to sign”, and she did.

These are the strong faces I see in my mind when people roll out the arguments as to why the mural must stay.

“But Carol, where will it end?” they say.

Apparently if we erase a Rolf Harris mural in Warrnambool, soon we will be pulling down churches and trashing Caravaggios and banning people from watching films and throwing  all manner of books, artworks and music onto a giant pyre, because if we don’t, well, we are being insincere and inconsistent.

Ironically, this fear-mongering and muddying of the waters is what the “yes” voters endured during the same-sex marriage debate.

A simple question – can two people of the same sex marry – descended into a frenzy about ending freedom of speech, people marrying goats, and children being taught in primary school how to use sex toys.

If you said yes to same sex marriage, you were saying yes to all these things too – get it?

Fortunately most of us in Warrnambool were smarter than that.

But we, as a city, own a Rolf Harris mural and it is through this mural we can again make and take a stand. We must make a choice. We either own it fully, and pull down that Perspex, or we roll over it as a symbolic gesture that we stand with survivors 100 per cent: not 50 per cent or 20 per cent.

“But Carol, where will it end?”

Well, I can tell you that for the survivors of predators like Rolf Harris, who use their power and position to abuse children, it never does.

And as the women and men now speaking out around the globe have shown, we are not done yet.

In fact we are just getting started.

The physical petition has closed with more than 100 signatures in five days, which was my goal. The online petition also closed on Wednesday 13/12 at 9am.

The petition will go to Warrnambool City Council for consideration at its first meeting for 2018 in February.