SUBMISSION TO COUNCIL

 

FOREWORD

For some time Launceston City Council has been involved in unproductive and ineffective contests to do with how Launceston as a place is imagined. Elected representatives are pitched against each other in contests devised to produce winners and losers and wherever possible to subject losers to rebuke. At best this gives us lowest common denominator results all too often.

Phone the council and you will be subjected to a message that is played over and over telling whoever listens about how many accolades the city has received while nobody is available to help them do what they need to get done. When as a representative you hear this reported it does not help to offer excuses and it certainly does not help to be seen shrugging your shoulders. 

Winston Churchill said that to improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. Without question Launceston City Council needs to change and not in the small ways that the criticism about ordinary things might suggest. Fundamental change is needed. Churchill also said that a pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. Sadly, as a council we are missing opportunities and we do not need to be.

Launceston has for too long been aspiring to do things properly according to this or that regulation and disappointingly finishing up with some form of some lowest common denominator. York Park is an example of a situation where the city is missing the point and is at risk of being a loser yet again unless the opportunity to effect change is grasped from the jaws of mediocrity.

If we are offered an amazing opportunity and we are not sure if we can do it, let's say yes and then get about finding how to do it. The question now is yes to what and when?

" Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."  ... John K Galbraith

CONTEXT: WHY RE-IMAGINE PLACES

A great many places have stories that belong to them; histories that belong to them; and people who belong to them. These things and more still belong to and in places and none eclipse another. Most importantly places do not belong to people as fundamentally people and their stories belong to places.

The place now understood by many Tasmanians as "York Park" actually belongs to nobody while a great many people and things belong to this place and in the many ways that is imagined. Cultures makes places and places shape cultures and not always in the same way.

The historian John Reynolds’ “Launceston; history of an Australian city” tells us about how “Ponrabbel” was understood in 1969. Looking at sentence one, paragraph one in Chapter One, “Ponrabbel”, he shines a light on the understandings of the time that would not go uncontested now. 

For the record, there is almost no ambiguity at all in Reynolds’ opening sentence ... “Launceston’s earliest known inhabitants were the extinct Tasmanian aborigines.”  Today such proclamations are now seen as coming with class-conscious, enlightenment loaded, and questionable Anglocentric sensibilities.

Meaning can always be found in the context. In 1969 Reynolds was writing as a historian and a Hobartian claiming settler heritage. Nonetheless he was informed from within, writing from within and somehow centred within, ‘Launceston society’. Here is neither the place or nor the time to explore in detail the multiple ways this place where York Park is located except to say there are a great many imaginings and one does not rank above any other.

All that said, currently there is nonetheless a rather strong case to be put that says York Park's "ownership" is class-conscious, ranked, ambiguous, unclear, and contestable. Without meaningful change the current state of affairs offers little promise of achieving win-win outcomes. That is so, just so long as the will to change is suppressed by administrators who have vested interests in maintaining current social and political understandings of "ownership".

Fundamentally, stadiums are places devised to stage contests where there are winners and losers. Losers live in the past. Winning is mostly about learning from the past in order to work in the present toward achieving change. There are many things that can make winners out of losers and deliver win-wins. Winning is about listening and being present in the present.

Typically, histories are not written by winners as mostly they are written about them and how they achieved the wins they've won and with whom for whom.

“A quitter never wins-and-a winner never quits.” 

Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

OWNERSHIP AND INVESTMENT

Currently York Park is understood as being "owned" by the City of Launceston Council. That is "owned" for and on behalf of the municipality's citizens who over time have invested millions of their hard won dollars – and that includes the grants received in recognition of their investment. Nonetheless, Launcestonians have more than dollars invested in the place understood as York Park and how it "owned" needs to be re-imagined given all that is invested in this place.

Imagining this pace as a stadium arguably runs counter to what is invested and why that investment was made. Stadiums are dedicated to somewhat gladiatorial spectacles where winning and losing takes place. Whereas, re-imagining a stadium say as an "arena" where particular activities, including those that involve competition of any kind get public attention would be more in line with community investments over time in York Park.

Stadiums reek with divisive politics and the circus idea where "bread and circuses" is a poetic phrase referring to superficial appeasement. It is attributed to Juvenal, a Roman poet, active in 1000 AD and it is commonly used in cultural and political, contexts and contests.

In its political context, the phrase means to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or public policy, but by diversion and distraction, or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a populace, by offering a palliative – food (bread) or entertainment (circuses). Juvenal used it to decry the "selfishness" of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. He was talking about the erosion of and/or the ignorance of civic duty as a priority.

The representatives of Launceston's citizenry and by extension the citizens of adjoining jurisdictions as well, right now have an obligation that falls to elected representatives. That obligation is to be effective in representing their constituencies in all their diversity. Right now it is timely that understandings that have long past their currency – their use-by-date in the vernacular – are contested, even if they are enshrined in rules and regulations for the benefit of planners – arguably redundant provisions awaiting change.

Right now it is timely to re-imagine "ownership" in a way that has currency in the here and now! Right now it is timely to negotiate and chart a new and more inclusive way forward where win-wins are achievable. Right now it is timely to put aside the redundant rules and regulations relied upon by planners.

If we don't know where we are going and why, every pathway ahead leads us nowhere or up some blind alley. Henry Kissinger, albeit a contentious diplomate, said ... "Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately." Ultimately, success is quite simple. You need to do what's right, in the right way, at the right time. 

Now is the right time to re-imagine York Park's ownership and to be investing an exploration of the possible win-wins available. However, there is a need to be mindful of past successes as they are very bad teachers. Often they are gambles that persuade otherwise clever people into thinking that they just cannot lose. Many of us have found that to be so.

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.
Bertrand Russell

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: 

it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Winston Churchill

CHANGING MINDSETS

There is no way to avoid contentious conflicts to do with the ownership of or the occupation of places. Mostly, they can only be postponed to the advantage of whoever mounts the most resistance to change. Not every change should be resisted but the quality of our lives depends not on whether or not we have conflicts, rather it depends on how we respond to them.

Cooperation isn’t to do with the absence of conflict, quite simply it is to do with the ways  conflicts are managed. There are ways to do so that can make the difference between damaging relationships and deepening them. Therefore, close attention needs to be paid to achieving win-wins more effectively. Inevitably this will involve divining who has what is invested in a place in open and frank deliberations.

Thinking about the pointlessness of most conflicts the British BAN THE BOMB campaigner, Bertrand Russell, observed that "War does not determine who is right - only who is left." With that class of thinking in mind, reimagining York Park as a place for political gladiatorial conflict should be avoidable. The prospect of a metaphoric image of a victorious champion atop of the bones of vanquished combatants is nothing more than an image of a hollow victory. It would be an image of a victory where too much has been lost by too many.

Returning to that Churchillian insight to do with change and improvement – "to improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often" – "change" needs to be negotiated and navigated carefully and especially so if some form of "perfection" is in prospect. Firstly, the regulations that precipitate the need for "change" need to be filed away for historic records sake. After that is done it is time to put on the table everything that is being aspired towards – no holds barred.

Whenever conflict is in prospect there is one thing that can make the difference between damaging relationships and deepening them. That thing is all about the attitude taken within the mindsets that come to the table.

Instead of imagining others as being right or wrong, and determining what's right and what's wrong in ourselves, the world's wisdoms invoke a middle way for us to consider. We might profitably ask ourselves can there be no agenda when we walk up to the table? Also, we might usefully think about not knowing what to say. We might consider not pigeonholing people as being wrong or right. We might well ask can we see, hear, feel other people as they really are? If we take such a mindset to the table true communication can happen in that open space.

We never really understand another person until we consider things from their point of view. Similarly, cooperation is not about the absence of conflict it is a means of managing conflict. In regard to reimagining York Park there needs to an open space within which to negotiate the new understandings that clearly need to arrived at if a win-win is to be arrived at.

Given, all that is in progress and prospect for York Park and the level of contest related to the building of a stadium in Hobart and the linkages between the two it is timely that the City of Launceston now be proactive in taking every available opportunity to initiate a root and branch re-imagination this place in a 21st C context. Maintaining the status quo is clearly not anything that can or even should be contemplated. Nevertheless from a wider community perspective there are layers of senses of ownerships and likewise, each of which implies obligations relative to placemaking and placescaping currently being contemplated.

Also, consider the possibility that rather than handover a community asset there now seems to an interest on the part of equity companies in buying a share of such assets and generating dividends.

Here is not the time or place to put forward particular options and opportunities as the imperative is to provide a open space where an open agenda can be contemplated. As for timing, yesterday might well have been the best time and tomorrow may well turn out to be way too late. The only way forward is to act expediently.

However, as the British social commentator and comic John Cleese somewhat poignantly pointed out ... "If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies."