Tough Titties About Future Cities: Is The Townsville Council’s Heavily Shrouded Pet Creation The Town’s Real Money Sinkhole?

As a pointless exercise, there is evidence the council’s Future Cities  department puts even TEL to shame. An insider lets fly at the deeply flawed program … and says a few other things you won’t read in the Astonisher.

And Clr Fran O’Callaghan weighs in with a couple of interesting points from council minutes … but the way she reports them tells a tale in itself about Jenny Hill’s jackboot response to criticism.

Last Monday, The Australian business section gave all but the last rites to the proposed Magnis Technologies battery factory at Lansdown. Almost a week later, The Australian’s on-the-spot stablemate the Townsville Bulletin has not asked Mayor Jenny Hill one single question about the demise the project. The Magpie reviews.

The Weasel  Words Award of the Week is a no contest: it hilariously goes to the gormless member for Brisbane representing Thuringowa, Aaron Harpic Harper.

Plus BENTLEY’s back, and boy, those anti-vaxxers have made him grumpy as all get out.

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Now, onward into this week’s mire.

Those Vexing Anti-Vaxxers Need A Jabbing – Les Walker Style.

If there are any intelligent anti-vaxxers out there, they should take note of economist John Maynard Keynes most famous (attributed) quote, when he was challenged for altering a certain economic position:

‘When my information changes, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’

The underlying common sense of that statement seems to have escaped anti-vaxxers, who obstinately racket on about personal rights, individual freedom and the iniquity of proposed vaccine passports to show the holder is not a danger to others in society. This is The Shovel’s view.

No valid information – like advances in medical science –  has changed for this lot, thanks mainly to Facebook fuckwittery.

The ‘Pie well remembers when science discovered cancer-causing carcinogens and  the first campaigns against smoking started, he – a smoker at the time –  caught a cab in New York with a prominent sign ‘Your right to smoke ends where my nose begins.’

This is exactly the same situation the anti-vaxxers refuse to acknowledge, as though they are the only ones with rights in a respectful society.  How about ‘Your right to not be vaccinated ends when you start to endanger my life and the lives my family and others.’  

Bet that not a single one of these blowhards refused a dentist’s needle, but use the excuse that they know what’s being injected has worked on untold millions before. At this stage, how is that any different from a COVID jab; you may rest assured more people have become ill or even died from a dental injection than the .0001% or whatever of vaccine blood clotting.

Science has learned that COVID and its variants are transmitted in certain ways and can be blocked in certain ways But while a majority of anti-vaxxers happily accept a plethora of pharmaceuticals to treat ailments and pain by taking a pill, these drongos don’t realise they what they are actually quibbling about is simply how lifesaving medicines are administered. There must be something particularly triggering by needles and the word ‘vaccine’ for some of the developmentally delayed. And will bet there would be none of this ignorant posturing if all the vaccines were pills, and not injections.

Anyway, Bentley thinks, like COVID itself, there will be a jump between species, from anti-vaxxers to pets.

She’s Not Named Karen For Nothing

For politicians, there are myriad ways to play the COVID scare card, it seems, but here’s a new one. Some are apparently so addicted to the power of panic and scaring the pants of the populace, they come up with just plain silly conflation of two separate ideas. Like this.

It was all she could do to restrain herself from clutching her pearls, but this dingbat seems not to understand that her alarm would be just the same if COVID didn’t exist. What a muppet. What codswallop.

The Future Cities Farce

 

Or as it has been coined by one close to the action, the Futile Cities fiasco.

This week brought a significant lifting of the veil of secrecy that usually surrounds internal TCC shenanigans, when this lengthy trove of information was dropped into The Nest by an insider with a ring side seat. The ‘Pie is satisfied that the writer is accurate in describing the situation. This is the sort of thing that will never see the light of day in the Townsville Bulletin. Our informant writes:

After a string of failed and futile ideas, the mysterious Future Cities Department – a creation of Adele Young and answerable only to the CEO – must surely now be under the microscope. If not, why not?

The close talker (nasty habit) Future City boss Bret Brogan is about to depart – complete with a big payout, as per all the Adele Young NT acolytes. He is on the outer and heading off, having missed out on the Planning Director job, much to the relief of the local development big players who may well have whispered in Jenny (Dolan’s) ear. 2020 vision indeed – we didn’t see this bloke coming, but his departure is welcomed by staff and local movers and shakers who found him aloof and a poor communicator.

No one inside council other than the chosen few understood what Future Cites does, with a Chief Strategist (Brogan), City Place Makers (that ridiculous fairy light and ping pong table fiasco opposite the Mad Cow for a month was one of their ideas), a Principal Tourism Officer (isn’t that TEL’s job?), a City Economist (Lynch, now gone), Defence specialists to work on the Singapore training deal (good men with enough integrity to opt out of the circus) and a gaggle of flunkies with big titles and bigger pay cheques. A bean-counter mate tells me the FC budget is well hidden across vague budget lines, but adds up to millions each year just in wages.

So lets take a look at the legacies of Bret Brogan and the Futile Cities folly: (with acknowledgement of Tony Raggatt who was allowed to write a similar Bulletin piece on the stalled/failed projects recently but pulled up short of asking…. WHY?)

· 2020 Vision office in Flinders Street after a million spent in renovating, opened in 2019 to great fanfare, only to be closed and gifted to TEL. The FC team were moved back into the Executive Office in Walker Street where they were under daily observation of the successive CEOs.

· Strand Lagoon. Dead in the water (pardon the pun).

· Battery Factory – The Magpie has well documented its doubt and demise.

· Lansdown. Lets wait and see.

· Haughton Stage 2 – Yes the Pipeline team sat in FC for a while, under a former Darwin (surprise) girl Inga Davies, until it all got too hard and shuffled out of FC.

· Same with the recycled water pipeline project. Not a drop yet.

· The budget Hilton Hotel next to the Stadium. Must be a dud when even a mate of Dolans’ cant get this up.

· Castle Hill restaurant that became a $4m lookout with a shade structure. That must rate as the FC’s Placemaker team’s finest achievement.

· While we are on the Hill, what has happened with the permanent illumination project? Millions were spent on the HALO light show over two years, part of which was to be some permanent infrastructure to light up the Hill face year-round. Not so much as an Eveready Torch so to show for it.

· On the HALO subject – this was brought up from Sydney (by the people who do Vivid on the Opera House) for the first NAFA Arts Festival and a great success. So much so that the FC team decided that it was worthy of a stand-alone event run by them, away from NAFA. So, they did it in the wet season -against all local knowledge and cautions-  and guess what: a cyclone threatened and everything had to be pulled down and put back up again a week later at a cost in the 100’s of thousands.

· NAFA – a great success awarded a national award as community event of the year. Such a success that FC took the NAFA team into their fold, away from the council’s arts people. God knows they needed a win.

· Central Park. For those new to town, say in the last 50 years, that is what a few in council ( the placemakers, natch) call the strip of parkland along the tidal creek between the Stadium and Palmer street. A trendy name but as the recent NAFA event failure showed – nobody else in town knows where this Central Park is. Give due, the boardwalk is lovely but agreed to and funded before FC was born. Same as the Stadium – they can’t (but will) take some credit for that. So where are the $7m light trees? The park was dug up, pipes laid, dug up again and then turfed over with, again, not so much as a string of fairy lights. “Not the time to do this now’ is the piss weak response. Blame Covid, the greatest get out clause of all time.

· Event Strategy. A policy sought by council to bring its management and funding of events under a one stop shop with an external advisory board. If you look closely at the front of 143 Walker Street you will see a small sign above the door saying Events Townsville. This, and the bringing together of all the events and venue staff into one office, but dysfunctional under several managers is all that there is to show for a strategy adopted by the council over 18 months ago. In the meantime, multi million dollar funding of big events (Supercars, State of Origin, Rugby Union, NRL, Cowboys, Townsville Fire) all still sits comfortably under commercial in confidence in…ta da…Future Cities,  where deals are done, mostly on the back of an envelope.

· Townsville Fire. This is a Future Cities special, negotiating to move the Townsville Fire Women’s Basketball to the Entertainment Centre. 800 Fire fans in a 5000 seat venue won’t make it pay – just ask the former Crocs board and the ageing Crocs/Fire fans who railed against the Entertainment Centre’s food and beverage costs and lack of free parking. A friend close to the Fire tells me it’s a $600 000 sponsorship from the council, picking up all the staff and operating costs and rent to The Ville for the basketball games. A deal signed off by Brogan and the Fire GM. Commercial in confidence of course, or in this case – commercial incompetence. More work for the Ville workers, not so the casuals at the Townsville/RSL Stadium who will lose their hours. What becomes of that stadium now without the Fire?

So farewell Bret Brogan, shut the door of Futile Cities on your way out. But it isn’t fair to lumber him with all of the above failures. The Mayor, Councillors and successive CEO’s who created and fed this multi-million dollar sink hole of pure electioneering should all be accountable. Yeah right..

The Magpie often (rightly) questions the funding and return on investment of our much-maligned Townsville Enterprise, but equally a spotlight should be shone on the incompetence and waste of ratepayer’s money on this Future Cities farce.

The ‘Pie could’ve … but obviously didn’t  – write that, our correspondent seems to have picked some of the old bird’s style. Love it.

Maybe It Should Be Called Future Cities Fraud

Under the pressure of last year’s mayoral campaign, Mayor Mullet was forced to reveal that her Future Cities department had a budget of just over $6million 2019/2020 and had a staff of 19 (including a ‘southern conduit’ – whatever the fuck that is –  living in Brisbane). Mayoral candidate Sam Cox promised he would be slashing TEL’s ratepayer allocation by 40% if elected, saying ‘the existence of Townsville Enterprise and Future Cities is a kin to two jockeys riding the same horse’.

You can imagine where a horse under those circumstances would finish.

But It Would Still Finish Ahead Of Jenny Hill’s Favourite Mount, That Battery Factory Unicorn She Has Ridden To Death..

The Magnis Lansdown battery factory ($2billion wasn’t it, along with varying estimates up to 3000 jobs?) is now but a different sort of pipe dream – or nightmare-  for our mayor.This from comments during the week.

The Magpie 

September 14, 2021 at 4:07 pm  (Edit)

As if Adani airstrips for weren’t enough, here is a warts and all look at the people Mayor Jenny Hill has been dealing with on the now certainly dead-in-the-water Magnis/Imperium 3 battery factory at Lansdown. It’s been blue sky from day one, and it has taken The Australian newspaper to confirm what The Magpie has been saying for several years … and what the Bulletin hasn’t been saying.

That story on Monday vindicates The Magpie’s consistent view that Mayor Mullet was dealing with white shoe shonks right from the outset.

The importance of Townsville and the Lansdown project in the scheme of this sad and sorrow tale is the highlighted by the fact that it is not even mentioned in passing in this story. (Thank God.)

But apart from the risible ‘pre-feasibility’ millions handed out by Anna Alphabet, we need to know just how much the Townsville ratepayer has stumped up, courtesy of our legacy-seeking mayor. Even if this Magnis mob of shape-shifting wide boys ever comes anywhere near Townsville, even with the latest ‘packing shed for imported batteries’ proposal, warning flags should be popping up everywhere.

So fair enough, the story is paywalled, but here are some salient bits which The ‘Pie reproduces in the public interest. 

First, as The ‘Pie reported on each occasion it occurred, there was the boardroom turnstile, with new high-profile recruits joining Magnis. 

On each recruitment occasion, there was a share spike, usually from 25 cents to as high as 40 cents. But as you will see later, that didn’t last long. it seems the recruits soon saw what they’d got themselves into.

And another matter reported as recently as a couple week ago was the arms-length involved of John Hayward-Hancock, Gina Rinehart’s son.

And Rinehart Jnr sounds as shifty as our mayor, appearing to be applauding himself for pulling a swifty … he doesn’t say that of course, but read this and see what you reckon.

Note: Frank Poulis is the Magnis boss.

Surely the Bulletin cannot ignore this story, if they really want us to believe their endless honking on about being ‘all for you’ – that’s us mugs. The mayor must grilled on this, a development that puts the whole Lansdown project into deeper shade.

Wonder if Tony Raggatt, or even Leighton Smith, (he did a stellar reporting job on the hypocrisy of the council’s by-laws on property appearance in Monday’s paper) will be allowed to hold Jenny’s feet to the fire on this at long last.

It may mean that the Astonisher will have to gobble down some humble pie, given the unquestioning parroting of Magnis and mayoral bullshit over the years. But they have little choice if they really want us to believe their News Ltd slogan ‘We’re For You.’

As for Mayor Mullet … oh, well, she got an all expenses paid jolly to the USA a few years ago to meet with the American oil slicks running this barely legal and certainly unethical scam. Hope she’s satisfied with that as her ‘legacy’.

But Magnis was the anchor tenant for the Lansdown Eco-Precinct. isn’t the paper even slightly interested if the future of this project has been affected by the demise of the Magnis departure from the Townsville scene?

Councillor Fran Does A Detective Joe Friday …

…and reports ‘just the facts, ma’am, just the facts’.

Clr Fran O’Callaghan’s has published a Facebook entry  on matters in a recent Standing Committee Meeting. You will remember that when she posed some difficult questions and opposed the mayor on some issues, Mayor Mullet promptly had her silenced by reporting Fran to the authorities for some perceived wrong doing in her public questioning of matters Mullet.

So Fran now suddenly finds she has a far more effective way of getting her message of Jenny’s jackboot style out to the electorate … things are so fucked in Walker Street, that just the bare facts the public are allowed to know are damning in themselves – because those facts say certain things are secret – without any obvious justification. Here’s an excerpt from her latest post.

Standing Committee Meetings Part 2

Water and Waste Committee: A report was provided on the National Waste Policy implications for Local Gov’s from the National Waste Policy Action Plan 2019. There were two confidential reports presented on the Haughton Pipeline Stage 2. There was also a confidential report provided regarding the recommendation to award the tender for Wulguru sewerage works and there was a Capital Plan Update for August for water and waste.

Business Services and Finance Committee included the Treasury and Budget Variance Reports and tenders released and a confidential report relating to additions to the sole/specialised suppliers list.

Surely this arrogant nonsense has to end sometime soon.

Weasel  Words Of The Week …. Aaannnd We Have A Winner.

Aaron Harper Not Inspired By The Late Ken McElligott, who oncew held the seat he now infests.

The Magpie 

September 17, 2021 at 11:25 am  (Edit)

Talk about weasel words!

Aaron Harpic Harper handily wins this week’s award for blatant hypocrisy. His unmitigated gall in the manner he praised the late Ken McElligott in today’s parliamentary condolence motion shows just what a snivelling hypocrite he is … and all out of his own mouth.

The proof is in today’s Astonisher with the report on a parliamentary condolence motion for the recent death of Mr McElligott.

As is customary on these occasions, past minor brushes with corruption (rorting travel allowances) are glossed over to concentrate on the positives of Ken’s long career in local and state government, and that is as it should be – his considerable selfless contributions should not be dismissed because of relatively minor rule breaking. Even in retirement, he did sterling work for charity.

But Aaron Harper, despite praising Mr McElligott to the heavens (hopefully Ken’s new address) the current member for Thuringowa apparently didn’t see Ken as worthy of inspiration. This from the Bulletin story:

In other words Harpic, Ken McElligott was everything you are not when he served in the very seat you now grossly abuse, paid to represent it but which you do not … you remain Labor’s Brisbane member for Thuringowa – something you unstintingly praise Ken McElligott for NOT being. Ever think about emulating Ken and doing for juvenile crime what he did for health?

You are a hypocrite of the first water, Harpic, you should be ashamed of yourself (ha!!).

If ever abortion is made retrospective, you will be at the top of The Magpie’s suggestion list.

And Les Walker talked of things about which he knows nothing in the same condolence motion when talking about Mr McElligott.

A visionary is someone who sees what’s coming, not a trait shared by this winner of the Jimmy Sharman Canvas Back Trophy.

Please Note That Nuclear Is An Anagram Of Unclear.

The deal that Joe Biden struck with that bloke Down Under – whatisname, wasn’t it? about nuclear subs being stationed here and we get some as well, has upset a few folks around the globe. The Frogs now think we’re  le mob maison merde, and the french ambassador got a bee in his beret and has taken his snail fork  and stomped off back top Paris. And Bentley imagines there was hell to pay in Bejing when President Hu Flung Dung got wind of the deal.

But Aussies shouldn’t stress out about all the name calling, it’s a Clayton’s deal of very little solid agreement and not a single contract or binding agreement in place, according to SMH’s respected journo Peter Hartcher.

His analysis see it here (starts at 21.10) adds to the growing realisation when Smirko made the announcement, he was playing The Great Deflector, drawing the news cycle away from the  heinous behaviour of Christian Porter and his mystery legal fee donor imbroglio. Really, Porter’s got to go, or Coalition’s last tiny thread of probity and decency is down the toilet.

America Remains Gripped In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Of Democracy.

One particular aspect of those laws banning abortion in the state was the targeting of totally uninvolved people like Uber or taxi drivers, who could find themselves being prosecuted simply for taking a fare to an abortion clinic. That issue and the anti vaxxers drew the most attention of the yanks in the past seven days.

The Magpie Takes The Piss

1. The Magpie

   September 16, 2021 at 7:55 pm  (Edit)

   Tut, tut ,tut, Courier, this gets the So What Story of the Week Award.

   
   Look, my courier comrades, if you are going to run this sort of tripe, a little more pizzaz, if you please. The Magpie did his own interview with a parent, you clearly missed it.

   EXCLUSIVELY REVEALED!!!
   Angry mother Tiffany Prattle was appalled that her little Tarquin ‘ who can’t hold it in more than a couple hours’ was forced to piss in a bucket when a youth armed with a knife forced the kids into a four hour lockdown.

   “Just typical of the out of control Queensland police, and this government,’ Ms Prattle fumed to The Magpie’s Nest. ‘Couldn’t they have allowed the teenager to puncture a couple of the poorer kids and then the cops could shoot him dead, job done, no cost to taxpayers and the parents of the wounded kids would more than likely be delighted to able sue for a PTSD windfall. But no, what do these poor excuses for police officers do? They order a lockdown, and my little Tarquin was forced to do pee-pee – into a bucket!!! He was so traumatised we now have to be careful not to say the word ‘bucket’ when we’re ordering the KFC family deal … we did once and he had an involuntary wetness episode.’

   ‘What is this bloody state coming to, I ask you?’ Ms Prattle asked.
   
   The Magpie’s Nest was unable to answer.

And Before We Go, How Clever is This?

And just to prove The Magpie remains a youngster at heart, he will admit that he starts cackling whenever he thinks of this which arrived during the week.

…………

‘That’s yer lot for this week … comments are as lively as ever and you often find out things there you won’t find anywhere else … and you can have your own say about them. That Donate to the blog button your looking for is below.