By Mitch Gaynor
Case almost closed
SUNSHINE Coast Council has now retreated on some of the key limits it wanted imposed on the Glass House Mountains quarry, leaving ratepayers entitled to ask whether years of delay, argument and legal expense were worth it.
Following the Planning and Environment Court’s decisive judgment in Heidelberg’s favour, council continued to seek restrictions in the final conditions.
These included a cap of 372 truck movements a day, no more than two production blasts a month and a 50-year limit on quarry operations.
It ended up zero from three.
There is set to be no daily cap on truck movements, while the quarry will be permitted to conduct up to 48 production blasts and 20 secondary blasts a year.
Operations will also not be restricted to council’s preferred 50-year limit.
After years of argument and a long-running court battle, council’s position on these headline issues has fizzled away to almost nothing.
Council says it was acting in the community’s interests, and an expansion of this scale deserved proper scrutiny.
Ratepayers are still entitled to ask what the fight cost, what it achieved and why its key demands were ultimately abandoned.
How sick is sick?
It seems I’m not alone in having spent the past few weeks juggling work with sick family members, as one bug after another does the rounds while I watch on, wondering how much creative licence is being applied to the symptoms.
The thing is, when you’re genuinely crook it is pretty hard to fake, and one daughter presented with enough maladies last week to secure a full week off school.
That was fine and, eventually, I had to return to work, only to get a call saying her stomach hurt so badly she needed to go to hospital.
“Chat told me I need to go to hospital … now!” she cried meekly and pretty convincingly through tears.
I didn’t particularly want to be ‘that’ dad who dismissed his daughter’s burst appendix because he was on deadline. Then again, I was pretty busy.
So I took the middle lane and tried to organise a doctor’s appointment online, only to discover that a fever ruled out an in-person consultation and left us with a $100 telehealth appointment. This is where we’re at.
That night my sick one came crawling into the lounge room, phone in hand, pleading to go to hospital because, she insisted, “Chat told me to get straight to a hospital”.
In fairness, an official-looking government health website appeared to agree.
But going through the same checklist with her while maintaining strong eye contact, the urgency miraculously faded.
The good news is, she survived.
Never fear, though: the first week of spring is here and temps are already heading into the mid-30s.
With a ‘super’ El Nino forming, this could get nasty.