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LOCAL & INDEPENDENT
LEP ‘removes protection’
From Uki to Nepal, with love
Ken Sapwell
Lee Jessamy, left, Wilma Maddern and Carolyn Jones, right, with some of the colourful quilts made by Uki locals and friends for the families of students at a poor rural school in Nepal. Photo Luis Feliu Luis Feliu
Student numbers at a poor rural school in Nepal have doubled recently and some will be warmer thanks to the generosity of a group of Uki residents and friends. The Ram Rudra Primary School in the Himalayan foothills town of Pokhara had barely enough furniture for its 20-odd pupils and couple of teachers 18 months ago, but now has grown to over 50 students and five teachers as a result of $17,000 funding from cash donations from Uki locals, who also made, or helped make, a bunch of brightly-coloured blankets and quilts for student families. Tomorrow (Friday) one of the brainchilds of the project, Lee Jessamy, of Rolands Creek, leaves for Nepal with two friends and a parcel of nine lovingly crocheted patchwork quilts, throws and blankets to meet the staff and students and see what
else they can help the school with. ‘I was on a trip over there two years ago and saw how desperately poor they were and that anything really would be a help, so I asked our tour group leader if we could help in any way and he told me his village badly needed a new school as the kids were sitting on the floor,’ Lee said.
Extremely generous ‘So I said that’s fine, we’ll do that. I asked him to send me some photos and I returned a year ago with some funding as the school needed fixing up, but what hit me was the extremely generous people around here, one person gave $1,000 in cash and others continually keep contributing, so now the school’s twice the size. ‘A lot of the kids are from low-caste families and can’t afford books but with this funding they’ve managed to put on three extra teachers, buy tables and chairs, books and pencils. There’s
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Changes far from ‘minor’ ‘In my view these changes are far from “minor” as is claimed in the same accompanying documents and there is no material accompanying the public exhibition which attempts to justify these very significant changes.’ In the case of changes to the building heights provisions, he said there was no material being exhibited which attempts to explain how the increase in allowable building heights would lead to better planning outcomes. In regard to the proposed hands-off approach to native vegetation clearing in environmental zones, there is evidence that the reduced protection was mainly due to changes by the NSW Department of Planning after it considered a draft sent to it by council. Under the draft now on exhibition, the council would have no power to require application to be made to clear environmental protection zones and so would have no power to control clearing that pre-empts applications for development or rezoning. ‘The draft LEP is grossly inconsistent as a result of state government rules governing the preparation of continued on page 2
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60 kids going there now, most of them children of people who could not afford to send their kids to school, they were too poor,’ he said. One of the group, Carolyn Jones, said her ‘little local knitting club’ got together to help the school, as she said they knew that with Lee behind it all, the funding would get to the school and used properly. ‘We had a fabulous response, some people would drop off a square and we wouldn’t have a clue who they were, lots of Uki women got involved, neighbours Ida Daly and Kim Hollingworth sewed many of them up, we’ve knitted quite a few blankets, quilts and throws since Christmas,’ she said. Longtime project contributor Wilma Maddern, of Wooyung, praised Lee for ‘doing all his homework on this, saying ‘we just saw a video which pointed out for every dollar we contributed, a dollar was given to the school’.
Buildings will be higher, environmental protection land will be more than halved and native vegetation will not be adequately protected under Tweed’s draft shire-wide Local Environment Plan (LEP). That’s the startling conclusion reached by former long-serving councillor Henry James after an in-depth study of the draft LEP 2010 which will guide the shire’s future development over the next 10 years. On Tuesday, Tweed Shire Council adopted a mayoral minute extending the deadline for submissions for both the Tweed Heads and shire-wide LEPs from March 31 to April 30. Mr James, a former member of council’s vegetation management committee and noted environmental watchdog, says the documents accompanying the draft LEP fail to spell out some of the more radical changes on the drawing board. ‘In a nutshell, the draft LEP proposes a great reduction in areas zoned for environmental protection and council’s powers to control pre-emptive clearings by land-owners seeking rezoning,’ he said. He said a document relating to a draft amendment to the soon-to-be superseded LEP 2000 states that environmental protection zones will be slashed from 13,600ha to just 5600ha and will provide no meaningful protection for native vegetation. The draft LEP would also increase the allowable heights of buildings quite significantly by allowing buildings in villages and towns with a three-storey height limit to increase
heights to 13.6 metres, virtually adding an extra storey. ‘Documents attached to the draft LEP basically admit that these changes aren’t the result of reshaping the current provisions to fit the statedriven changes aimed at bringing in a standard format for LEPs throughout NSW,’ said Mr James, whose reputation remained intact following the council’s sacking in 2005.
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