'Waterhaven' #video #environment #housingshortages #publicpolicy #Madden ...more farmland being sucked up by housing shortages and unsustainable developments

This a little video of my observations of the construction of 'Waterhaven' along the highway between Melbourne and Geelong...it speaks for itself really. It says something on the current housing developments in the outskirts of Melbourne or anywhere for that matter, where planning departments and developers are allowing the installation of a fake lake in the middle of the highway to be the incentive for people to move here and isolate themselves further in their new 'community'. Any notion of building a sustainable development here or anywhere is a distant option for the money hungry corporate developers and government planning authorities - who care little about the potential residents, stuck in the middle of nowhere, driving in their cars for everything, and less about the environment which they are destroying. The 'water', a fake lake, is being formed by digging a giant trench in once prominent farmland on the outskirts of Melbourne and the 'haven' I'm assuming will be created in the surrounds of this trench and pseduo bridge which an array of families will no doubt move into, as it constitutes the only option they have in obtaining affordable accommodation. Yet its fake atmosphere and damaged environment is probably not something they would choose to be involved if other accommodation could be provided in sustainable and urban environments. It seems that when you drive through these spaces which are presented as pseudo 'places' you may think that people want to live in these cloned villages with identical brick houses, no backyards and cheap fittings made to look like an upmarket version of a fantastic furniture catalogue; yet it makes you think, where would people live if they had the option to have a different looking house, a backyard or dare I say it, even incorporate the existing farmland into their own backyard and allow them the opportunity to generate their own power and grow their own produce, rather than spend their limited disposable income at the single supermarket chain that charges them to import their banannas from asia or beyond. Is this where and how the next generation of home owners want to live?

This is a topic I will write more on and discuss more broadly at a later date, in the meantime, enjoy watching your farmland being sucked up by a multi-national developer and be replaced with roads to drive your 3 cars on and a far less expensive and less detailed copy of a film set from The Truman Show.

Just some thoughts people, where do you want to live?

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#MIFF reviews: China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, USA, 2009, Documentary

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I watched this film, as part of the Doco shorts selection at MIFF (Melbourne International Film Festival) on 31 July 2010. It was an incredibly moving and emotive call for action, if only action at this stage could return the children lost to corruption, prejudice and bureaucratic inaction. As the synopsis explains: "For those grieving for the 70,000 who died in the Sichuan Province’s 2008 earthquake, justice is just one more thing they’ll have to live without."  

 

Directors Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill work for DCTV, which is a community Television centre in New York. The film captured the sorrow and pain caused by the Sichuan Province earthquake that occurred on May 12 2008. However, more painful than this natural disaster was the corruption and inaction of the government that led to the deaths of 10 000 children that were killed when their badly built school rooms collapsed and who were then left under the rubble in the aftermath.  For days afterwards they were trapped and slowly dying while no government rescue operations were instigated by the local government organizations. The corruption, cover-ups and the painful obsession by the government to be more concerned about their international reputation than that of the parents who lost their only children was at times difficult to watch. I was astounded by the difference in what occurred in China and what may occur in my own country if the similar disaster was to unfold. I thought of Stuart Diver  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Diver and his burying in rubble in Thredbo in a landslide in 1997 and how for days rescue teams carefully searched for survivors, which after 67 hours Stuart was found and brought to safety. Then I listened to the father who told of his primary school age only daughter (due to China’s one child policy) phoning him from the rubble and begging him to come and rescue her and to call the fire brigade. She was not rescued, as there were no operations conducted by the government at all. I began to consider that as the victims involved were villages and farmers they were treated as not deserving the same respects and rights, the wealthy classes in the city might receive.  After the earthquake, the government told them to take care of the situation themselves. One mother explained how she dug her child out at 3 am in the morning and she tried to carry her deceased daughter home on the back of their motorbike, until it broke down, leading them to carrying her home on foot.  They buried her in their own land. I could not help but be disgusted with this treatment and the resulting conclusion that no follow up investigation or final report was ever given to the parents, despite them marching for hours to protest and beg for an investigation to occur, which on camera the officials agreed to.

Hence the documentary was covering a very controversial and political issue that I was not aware of and that disheartened me greatly. The state corruption that led to the buildings being built to such a low standard was devastating enough, but to see how the government then offered the parents an extra $8000 for their loss, if they agreed to not bring China into disrepute was horrifying. I could not help but wonder how the farmers and villages all over the world are given less human rights than people who live in the city and this concerned me greatly. Where did this prejudice and ill treatment stem from? Where do the government officials and wealthy citizens in the large cities all over their world think their own rice and other farming produce comes from? Why would these people deserve any less than anyone else in their country? And if the government (as seen in the documentary) was so concerned with how their international counterparts would perceive them, why did they not take the appropriate action after this dreadful incident and show the world that they do care about their people, in particular their children and in the very least have an appropriate investigation into the cause and resulting inaction of this ‘unnatural disaster’ in the Sichuan Province.

 

The documentary was filmed on the go in the early aftermath of this disaster and I would love to know how the American filmmakers even had permission to film, which I will follow up on.  The cinematography was fitting with the cinema verite style it was shot in and it goes to show you that the story alone can be more powerful than any carefully designed set. The long close ups of the mourning parents was very emotive. The opening scene, before the title of the film or any detailed description of the subject matter, was an emotionally charged beginning. The young child who had somehow survived in one of the school buildings that had collapsed and killed all of her friends visited the site with her parents. She cried and wished her friends good luck in their journey.

I left the cinema with a mixture of emotions. I was disturbed with what I had witnessed, I was grateful for cinema and its power of being able to spread these stories and make people aware of the pain and suffering people all of the world go through in our very different lives; and I left bewildered and concerned that there was nothing I could do to ensure something like this does not happen again. Except of course to continue to make films myself and somehow contribute to at least making people aware of people’s actions and perhaps one of these days the people responsible will start to worry more about their people, than their reputation that only stems from their ill treatment of their people to begin with.

 

You can buy a copy of this film here.

Posted via email from PunchyP