By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
A REGIONAL newspaper owned by NewsCorp has prostituted itself to a grand starry-eyed plan to turn the city of Geelong into an Agenda 2030 “Smart City” aka a digitally-connected (read controlled) community.
A bunch of corporate whizz kids have joined with the local council, state and federal governments, to use the warm and cuddly term “connectedness” to describe their “bold vision” for their “Future Geelong”.
But the city is already under an assumed economic role under UNESCO, as one of four four Victorian cities designated a “UNESCO Creative City”. Geelong’s designated role is “design”. Melbourne is “literature”, Ballarat “craft and folk art” and Bendigo and regions “gastronomy”.
The people of Geelong have not been consulted over these grand plans. They have simply been dumped on them by the local council and now the local newspaper, that can obviously see guaranteed future advertising revenue down the track as the big plans are rolled out.
The newspaper editor Nadja Fleet cites the views of an American neuroscientist as evidence that the city doesn’t just need food and water, it needs “connection”.
“Connection is personal;” she writes. “Connectivity is the framework that makes those connections possible.” It’s a very deep need, apparently.
And how does this work? Well a bunch of 25 or more government and corporate high fliers named by the newspaper all connect among themselves to think up whizzbang ideas to bring business and jobs to Geelong and region.
But given that these high-fliers are usually busy six days a week attending their multiple board and committee meetings, one might wonder just how they are going to find the time to carry out the latest grand plan for the future.
But no doubt the corporate kingpins will manage to squeeze a Future Geelong meeting or two into their busy schedules – after all, the meeting will probably qualify as a deductible business cost.
Now there’s nothing wrong with economic development but Australian governments at all levels with their overbearing and bloated bureaucracies are the biggest blockers of enterprise in the nation. If they got out of the way and focused on jut the basic needs like water, transport and law and order, the people themselves would do the economic development job, because that’s what motivated people do.
What they don’t need is to be treated as some sort of play thing of a monstrous UN bureaucracy based in Paris. And yet another committee of 25 movers and shakers is unlikely to produce much more than hot air – especially when a Committee for Geelong already exists – in addition to the local council.
How well this latest “grand corporate vision” serves the people of Geelong is now unlikely to be critically addressed by the local newspaper, given that they have appointed themselves the official corporate spruikers for it.
And while such grand plans throw around buzz phrases like “strategic partnerships” ‘digital hubs” and “connectivity”, they essentially involve a lot of bureaucratic hot air and unoriginal ideas recycled from the “Smart City” agenda written by UN bureaucrats, such as the grand plan to recycle the city’s sewage water.
The town’s former mayor Trent Sullivan, who was denied by the council a $25,000 overseas junket to find new business for the city, believed the city had “obligations to UNESCO to fulfil” under its design city designation.
And of course being officially linked to UNESCO puts Geelong well within in the orbit of the “Smart Cities” network. UNESCO works with cities through its National Commissions, in this case the Australian National Commmission for UNESCO – yet another layer of bureaucracy.
In April last year the City of Greater Geelong participated in the unveiling event to showcase the four UNESCO Creative Cities. Exactly how a Paris-based bureaucracy working through its Australian agency at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is going to benefit these cities is anyone’s guess. Maybe UNESCO will dole out some “free money”? Now there’s some economic incentive for you.
Meanwhile Geelong’s big water recycling plan is a standard prescription for Smart Cities worldwide, and big multinational water companies like Veolia will already be lining up for the multi-billion-dollar contract to hook up the city and region to a sophisticated recycling system guaranteed to drive up your water bills and leave the city and state further in debt.
This has already been done in South East Queensland where a power-hungry $1.2 billion desalantion plant was installed as part of the package, supposedly to provide water in a region said at the time in a well-organised marketing campaign, to be facing a water supply crisis.
As it turned out, Queensland and Northern NSW entered into a long-running wet weather cycle, while the plant needlessly pumps ocean water, which is force-fed through the equivalent of a brick wall and then remineralised because the “pure water” is highly corrosive. All this is paid for by SE Queenslanders’ hefty water bills as rivers and dams overflow.
Another “Smart City” scheme dumped on Queenslanders was the Gold Coast light rail. This multi-billion-dollar project involved digging a trench through kilometres of already long-established city water and sewage and electrical infrastructure under roads.
Small businesses along the way were blocked off from traffic and customers and a considerable number of them were forced to close while the track inched along at its painfully slow pace.
But it wasn’t just about transport. The scheme incorporated, “Smart City”-style, precincts along the way e.g. a “health and knowledge precinct” with the university and hospital “slated to become a point of integration for learning and innovation, with commercial services” … Smart City hype which means little to nothing to everyday residents.
We strongly suspect the people of Geelong have had enough of this hyped-up Agenda 2030 baloney. And like the government agencies, the local paper would be better advised to stick with its bread and butter issues.