DEAR News Of The Area,
WALK into the Hawks Nest Community Hall and you can see what decades of neglect looks like.
This is our only community hall. It is supposed to be a neutral place where the whole community can meet, hold events and come together.
Instead, it is falling apart. There are holes in the walls. The building is run down. The stage is cluttered, scratched and damaged, the curtains are worn and broken – there are no modern stage lights. The air conditioning is ad hoc, with one unit broken. The timber floors are so dry they leave splinters. The ceiling fans rattle, the ceiling battens are damaged and plants are growing through the outside gutters.
The hall dates from the late 1960s. The Progress Association records its completion in 1967; MidCoast Council records the community centre as opening in 1970. Either way, this is more than half-a-century old.
An add-on extension was finally completed in 2024 after years of lobbying and a $300,000 federal commitment. But putting an extension on the building doesn’t fix the deterioration of the original hall. It’s terrible.
Then look at the Singing Bridge. It opened on 6 April 1974 and has now been carrying the daily traffic between Tea Gardens and Hawks Nest for more than 50 years.
Corrosion and deterioration are visible, and Council has previously acknowledged the failure of protective coatings and the need for replacement sections.
This isn’t unique to us. Regional communities across Australia are watching public infrastructure deteriorate while governments find money for other priorities.
Under the current Labor government, the frustration has become even harder to ignore. Billions are being committed to international programs, and the expansion of government, while we live with ageing halls, deteriorating bridges, dangerous roads, and basic infrastructure that desperately needs renewal.
Grants are being cut, ‘pork barrelling’ a documented reality, and political favouritism the norm.
Canberra and Sydney feel very far away when you’re standing inside our run-down public facilities.
We write letters, apply for grants, lobby local politicians: nothing happens. The politicians and bureaucrats making decisions about billions of dollars of public expenditure aren’t the ones looking at our crappy blue curtains or the rust corroding the Singing Bridge.
We are.
Local taxpayers expecting governments to look after the infrastructure they already own.
The Hawks Nest Community Hall and the Singing Bridge deserve better. And so does every regional community that has watched its public infrastructure slowly decay while Canberra decides where to spend the next billion dollars on its next pet project, summed up by its UN pitch: ‘we listen, we protect, we partner’.
Seriously? Start at home.
Regards,
Sandra Bourke,
President,
HNTG Progress Association,
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