Forum looks into Noosa's future
FEW public figures love Noosa more openly than Sunshine Beach playwright David Williamson but like the best of the characters he writes about, he is conflicted by its undoubted charms.
At the Where To Noosa public forum last Friday Mr Williamson swiped away at Mayor Mark Jamieson for his pro-development stand and what that might mean for Noosa.
But he confessed that one of the points that Cr Jamieson made - that work is hard to come by here - rang true in the case of a family member who was forced into the restaurant and service sector to get by.
"Jobs are a problem," Mr Williamson said.
"My niece loved it here - she had an environmental science degree and she assumed there might be a job for her in the national parks and ended up chopping vegetables in a restaurant."
He said the mayor's rejection of a Coast-wide development cap as bravely implemented in Noosa in the 1990s concerned him.
"Since I first came here in the 1970s to a lovely little village, things have changed big time....I just hope we don't keep evolving this way," he said.
"The headline today (in the Noosa News on Cr Jamieson population cap comments) does not make one confident that this is going to happen.
"The argument of the new mayor is that unless we let people keep coming then we will have our people who work in the service industries not to be able to afford to live here. The economy will collapse.
"The development at any cost that our new mayor is pushing is not a philosophy I hope that will be tolerated here."
Mr Williamson said he woke up every day thankful to be living in Noosa. "It's superb geography does make it a high-cost destination - you do need quite a bit of money to buy in here, but it's not a more expensive cost of day-to-day living once you are here.
"It still is beautiful thanks to the work of the (Noosa) Parks Association who have done a heroic job. It isn't the Gold Coast but it certainly isn't what it was back then? Should it be? I don't know,
but I do hope that the trajectory from the 1970s to now doesn't continue into the future.
He said he hoped that Noosa would embrace more recycling, more work from home, more teleconferencing and other green initiatives to lower the carbon footprint.
"But I wouldn't bet my house on it."
Forum devil's advocate was author Elizabeth Farrelly who happily owned up to being largely ignorant of Noosa, having only visited twice.
She confessed her love of big cities and mentioned that author David Owen in his book Green Metropolis argued that downtown Manhattan in New York was one of the greenest places on the planet.
Mr Owen contends that this high rise icon has the highest public transport use in the US, the lowest greenhouse gas output and a level of petrol use per person equivalent to the 1920s.
Ms Farrelly said Noosa's "chosen constraints" outlawing denser populations was the reason Mr Williamson's niece could not find her chosen job and why public transport would never be effective here.
