Byron Bay

Byron Bay is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It is also a grisly reminder of the folly of letting green ideologists run anything.

In the name of conservation and affordable housing the Greens-dominated, cheesecloth-swathed council’s idea of managing development is to make the town as unappealing as possible to the tourists who are its lifeblood. Popularly elected Greens mayor Jan Barham once even proposed a toll on visitors entering town.

The council’s latest crackpot scheme is to ban short-term rentals in residential areas, the bread and butter for every coastal holiday village.

As local author and former journalist Ian Evans says: “Tourism is the only industry in town. We can’t revive the dairy co-op or the whaling station so it’s going to be basket-weaving and pottery for a lot of people in the near future.”

Evans, 64, who owns two holiday units, met yesterday with a group of other concerned Byron property owners to try to nut out a solution to the council’s nutty scheme. He is one of the few who won’t suffer, as one of his properties is in the small commercial centre where holiday letting will still be allowed, and where scarcity will drive rents skyward. But the other unit he will have to rent to long-term tenants, and the sudden influx of 700 holiday homes on the market will drive down long-term rents, thus providing the affordable housing the council is so keen on, at the expense of landlords.

“Green constituents don’t have much money and hate people who’ve had more success in life than they have,” observed one long-term resident who attended yesterday’s meeting. “They’d like to turn the clock back and have Byron Bay as some sort of gated community.”

Evans warns of the tourist “ghetto” that will be created in the centre of town, acceptable to backpackers but not families, who spend more money and create less havoc. He says the whole idea is “un-Australian”.

“Families, who traditionally like to spend quiet holidays by the beach, are going to be very unhappy.” What’s more, for the eight weeks of the year - obviously in summer - the council has grudgingly allowed property owners to generate income from tourists, the town will be uncomfortably crowded, then deserted the rest of the year.

One member of the local chamber of commerce has calculated the cost to the Shire economy to be as high as $50 million a year, and more than 1000 jobs lost, based on a 50 per cent reduction in tourists. The Byron Bay progress association, an unfortunate oxymoron in the circumstances, reports the council has already issued “stop letting” notices to four property owners threatening fines of $1 million plus $110,000 per day if they continue.

“These people are suffering emotional upset of the highest order, as well as facing financial ruin,” said the association’s Joy Hughes in an impassioned email to other owners. “If some corrective action is not taken we will lose the ‘family tourist’ that has always been the backbone of our tourist industry.”

Over the years, a variety of Greens-dominated councils in Byron Bay have managed to stifle any sensible new development. They’ve driven away holidaying families, sent the town broke, neglected roads in the hope people would stop driving, and approved a sewerage system smaller than needed in the insane belief it would slow growth rather than overflow.

They have turned their Eden into a mecca for brain-damaged pot-heads and unemployed ferals, and are transforming a century-old vibrant tourist industry into a low-rent backpackers hamlet and rowdy party town. The irony is that the more unappealing the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) locals try to make Byron, the more party animals flock to it each year. It’s poetic justice.

By Miranda Devine

Posted: Sunday, August 28th, 2005 Under: Gossip. | Home |

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