Farmers take the federal government to court over risks from the Narrabri gas pipeline
A group of farmers and community members are taking the federal government to court, arguing that Australia’s environment minister has wrongly assessed the impact of Santos’ Narrabri Lateral Pipeline on water and the environment.
The government ruled that the pipeline, an approved 50 to 60 kilometres underground gas transmission pipeline connecting Santos’ coal seam gas field to the east coast, “wasn’t integral” to the project and waved the project through without applying its “water trigger”.
This refers to a mechanism that would have put the project under environmental scrutiny due to risks to the Great Artesian Basin and Murray-Darling catchment.
The group, known as the Mullaley Gas & Pipeline Accord, says the project crosses with Gomeroi Country, productive farmland, private property, and sensitive areas of the Pilliga Forest and putting the project under controlled action” isn’t enough. The project must be legally required to assess for potential risks to the region’s rivers, creeks and groundwater.
PCA’s Guide to Office Building Quality needs an update
So, at the event we had on Tuesday – Show me the Green Money (brilliant by the way) John Goddard of Goddard & Co took the opportunity to ever so politely ask Frankie Muskovic who heads policy for the Property Council of Australia when the PCA’s Guide to Office Building Quality might ever be updated. The version still doing the rounds is circa 2019, and people use it to assign a quality metric to their assets, Goddard said.
Hmmmm, can do better PCA, surely.
In a letter to the property industry’s umbrella group (it must be said), Goddard pointed out the guide is a “highly respected document relied on by the property industry”.
It sets the standards and definitions for the Grades: Premium, A, B and C for both new and existing office buildings, he said.
“It needs to be updated as a matter of urgency, or we run the risk that definitions of quality will become blurred and misrepresented as they were prior to the PCA issuing their first Guide in 2006.
“The last PCA Guide to Office Building Quality was #3, released in 2019. With the changes in the industry, particularly in energy efficiency and ratings, it is so far out of date that it lags behind the standards expected in commercial buildings, even the National Construction Code. (Now we know this means trouble.)
- Goddard reminded the PCA of the kinds of people who use the guide:
- building owners to promote their buildings’ standards,
- people who define standards for refurbishment and upgrade
- marketing, so that there is an understanding of the quality that is being offered
- In actual contractual documents relating to sales and leases
- architects, engineers and project managers to set standards and as a reference when designing new buildings
- valuers
Muskovic, equally – and always – politely, responded to Goddard that this was indeed a frequent inquiry at the PCA and that it is on the list. Goodard suggested there may be more than one volunteer committee member happy to step up to the challenge.
Yerrabingin appointed to renew Redfern Neighbourhood Parks
The City of Sydney has appointed Aboriginal-owned design practice Yerrabingin to lead the next stage of Sydney’s Redfern Neighbourhood Parks renewal.
The firm will use the concept designs the council developed in consultation with the local community and will enhance three pivotal community spaces: Redfern Community Centre open space, Yellomundee Park and Hugo Street reserve.
The design is said to address urban heat, increase biodiversity to invite in birds, bees and other non-human kin as well as take in community preferences for a trio of green, cool spaces for recreation and play that celebrate the area’s Aboriginal culture and heritage.
International news: TOMRA, manufacturers of reverse vending machines, has unveiled its “return and earn” machines that collect reusable takeaway food packaging. The first global look at the new machine was available at the Reuse Economy Expo in Paris last week, after a successful trial in Aarhus, Denmark, which saw an 85 per cent return rate.
Consumers will benefit as well, earning €0.67 ($A1.18) per takeaway cup when returned, similar to the New South Wales 10 cents per PET bottle return and earn scheme.
What are we reading
A recent New Yorker article claims that violence and crime are rooted more in “place” rather than “people”, and crime would geographically concentrate in the same urban blocks every year.
Something that has always fascinated me about criminology is how much turmoil the field seems to be in. You would think that with phenomena such as crime and violence—which have been with us for as long as human beings have—we would have sorted things out by now. But we haven’t.
When, for example, David Weisburd and Lawrence Sherman made the observation a generation ago that crime was concentrated geographically—that a tiny percentage of urban blocks accounted for an overwhelming number of a city’s crimes, that those same few blocks remained violent year after year, and that this observation was true everywhere—their findings shocked many. People didn’t believe them at first. In the course of all the many centuries that researchers had studied and catalogued crime, it had never (until that moment) occurred to anyone to ask whether violence might be rooted in place, as much as (or more than) it is in people. The shock carried over into the hot-spots policing movement that grew out of the observation about crime’s concentration. Maybe you shouldn’t put the same number of cops on every corner of a city, the hot-spots advocates argued.