Page 1266 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 29 March 2017
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been a high priority. Grandparents, child carers and parents spend time there. People choose to live in Holder because of this space. It brings the whole community together.
To one side of this grassed area is a little cottage-like building that has hosted PANDSI for many years. PANDSI, a not-for-profit organisation, is the only non-acute post and ante natal depression service which serves many mums and also dads who find the experience of starting a family is not as straightforward as they had hoped. Despite the stigma, these brave parents are seeking help, and the best thing about this facility that hosts the service is that it has been in a really private location. A mum could park right near the door and no-one knew she was there other than the other mums in her support group. It was a low cost rental from the government for this service, and it was perfect for their needs.
But the board of PANDSI heard mid-last year that there were plans afoot to build public housing on the site. As a local member I said to them, “I’ll write to the government and I’ll find out.” Before the last election I wrote to the government asking them for information. I thought a straight-out letter about what plans for the site were being developed might get a straight-out answer, but no. The letter was responded to with a claim that there was nothing planned for the site. But people in the building are not stupid. They knew that someone had been there measuring up the ground to do surveying work, and they have been proved to be right. There have been pegs marked in the ground since the middle of last year where this site was going to be, and people in Holder are not so stupid as to think that they were not being lied to.
The letters I sent and received were way before the election, and the surprise decision to suddenly move PANDSI out of their little cottage came within a few weeks after the election. The benefit of PANDSI being where they are on the grassland in Holder is that it is tranquil and private. In the Chief Minister’s letter he said that they would not be moved unless a more suitable site was found for them and for the community. It is a very broad stretch—and false too—to suggest that an organisation which operates on very small funds will be better off in a facility in a big former school site, paying a higher rent, with a lot less privacy for their vulnerable patients. Given the lies that had been told about the plans for this site before the election in the letters to me, Holder residents have no reason to believe anything that the government says.
Let us turn to Chapman. Chapman residents have lived through a lot, especially the residents of the western fringe of Chapman. Yet the government thinks it would be a great idea to build a development of 30 or so public housing dwellings right on a fire path in Chapman. Everywhere I go in Chapman and Duffy, and to some extent Holder, there are people who lived through the 2003 bushfires. It was a traumatic affair and robbed many of them of their peace, and they still have trauma today. One lady in her 70s whom I spoke to told me she packs her bags every single summer in case they have to leave their house. And yet this is a place where we should put 30 public housing dwellings all in a clump together, and all because it would cost too much to do the proper salt and peppering which people of this place have come to expect.
We have all had great public housing neighbours, and some of us have had public housing neighbours who have needed our support. The reason we could give them our support was that we knew what was going on, because they were one house next door
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