JIM FAGAN
Noosa has the opportunity within 10 years of being recognised world-wide as the urban place that has done so well in connecting the environment to people, the economy and jobs.
And says Mayor Noel Playford, “We are breaking new ground all the time and it is being done by the community.” He was commenting on submissions on the future and management model of the Noosa Biosphere Reserve which have been made to the council during last two weeks. These are now being considered by a working party consisting of himself and Councillors Bob Abbot, Frank Pardon and Tony Wellington. They will then be taken to a general public meeting and a report and recommendations prepared for council. Mr Playford told Noosa Today Noosa Biosphere Ltd (NBL) had been costing ratepayers $500,000 a year for six years now and “We’re not happy. We think it can achieve a lot more and that’s why we are doing what we are doing. The system we’ve got in place just now is essentially a centralised model. “We have a group of people who are charged with doing all the things within the aims and objects of (NBL). That means it works from the top down which from my experience never works if you want the community to be heavily engaged. “My view is we need a model that works from the bottom up. It needs to be done on the ground, at grass roots level. Anything that is up there should only be there because it is needed by the people who actually need it to be done. “When we put together the strategic plan, the Noosa Plan, we started with a whole lot of community meetings and major questions were ‘Where do we want to go as a community in the future?’ ‘What’s your vision?’ “Back in the 90s there was a pretty commonly held view of this but I would say it is definitely far stronger now. I think it’s a question now of what we as a community do – not just council, community organisations, individuals or educational institutions – to help us to get to where we want to go.” He said Noosa had a long history of quite a lot of organisations and individuals working towards that. “We have them going now. People like Landcare, Noosa Parks, Clean-Up Australia, Jim Berardo and the Food and Wine Festival. It’s not just the environment. It’s about business, the local economy and what the place looks like and feels like. “If you want to use the Biosphere Reserve declaration as a bit of a catalyst or umbrella then its main objectives fit perfectly with what Noosa is about. As Bob Abbot has said the whole Biosphere program in UNESCO could have been designed around what Noosa was becoming. A lot of us see it as a means for increasing awareness and a bit more action at the community level. “You have a lot of people in organisations doing their significant thing and not doing it together. There are no connections. United you get far more value out of communities. We had amalgamation and we had a centralised system set up. I’m not shooting arrows at anybody, I’m just saying that’s what happened. Even the people who were involved in deciding on that system consider it hasn’t delivered what they had hoped. “It’s not their fault. In my opinion it was the design in the first place that wasn’t as good as it could have been. Better to get people working at the bottom together. If you are going to change a community in any significant way, it has to come from within the community.” He said once people could see projects and initiatives going on at community level under the auspices of the Biosphere Reserve, and could measure tangible outcomes as a result, people would start to understand why the council was doing what it was doing.
