Yet to see benefit from urban consolidation

Regarding the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) statement in the Peninsula News (July 11) raising questions about the Peninsula Urban Directions Strategy.

ACF Central Coast president Mr John Wiggin says that "The ACF is not opposed to urban consolidation".

It must be assumed that Mr Wiggin is referring to urban consolidation in the context of the Woy Woy Peninsula.

I would ask Mr Wiggin to give some reason for this statement.

The Peninsula has led Gosford city in consolidation for the last 10 years and we are yet to see any benefit.

Urban consolidation was supposed to be about putting increased population into places that had underused infrastructure to enable a maximised usage of that infrastructure.

After 10 years of this State-enforced policy, the Peninsula is now some 20 hectares short of open space.

One of the great myths of urban consolidation is that by consolidating people into units, townhouses and villas, funds (and space) will be available to meet the demands of the consolidated community.

On the Peninsula, we have shortages of parking space, roads that are at saturation, a water and sewerage system that is close to collapse and massive social problems.

In 1996, the Gosford Residential Strategy warned of "a recognised lack of social infrastructure", stating that "backlogs exist in the provision of community facilities and services".

Our rail services are near capacity and getting worse.

Facts are the rail has gotten slower in the last 40 years despite the State Government promising in 1994 to provide the long-suffering commuter of the Central Coast with a Fast Rail connection between Sydney, the Coast and Newcastle.

Mr Wiggin continues "and we are not opposed to multi-storey development...our own headquarters in Melbourne is an energy-efficient, naturally-ventilated multi-storey building".

May I ask Mr Wiggin what is the point of comparing multi-storey buildings in a Melbourne CBD with developers attempts to plonk multi-storey buildings on sensitive foreshore sites at Ettalong?

Did the ACF rort the planning provisions in Melbourne to build an ugly, out-of-scale building on a foreshore?

Is Mr Wiggin telling Peninsula residents that he approves of developers pushing the Gosford City planning codes and State Environment Planning Policy to allow nine-storey development on sensitive foreshore sites that are zoned for three-storey buildings?

On close reading of this excessive and unnecessarily long article one can only come to the conclusion that Mr Wiggin has never been to Ettalong.

"The ACF is not opposed to urban consolidation or decentralisation," says Mr Wiggin.

I would end with this quote from Professor Patrick Troy of the Australian National University: "Urban consolidation is a highly-suspect, socially-inequitable policy, cooked up to justify cutting back public dollars for infrastructure."

Bryan Ellis, Umina Secretary Save Our Suburbs