Sunday, 29 November 2009
Recycle via the post office. In the US the Postal Service offers free postage on small disused electronics items.
Mail it back with USPS! In select Post Offices, customers can get free mail-back envelopes for recycling inkjet cartridges, cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras and other small electronics.
If our once beloved Post Master General’s communiqué and epistle service had not drifted from its core mission we might have such pre-emptive innovation. Nowadays your local Aussie post office shop is a great place to buy such gadgetry and contribute to the problem.
*Update, 5 Jan 10: They do! How to recycle via Australia Post
Hunter Street 2/3 full. The Herald conducted a survey. A third of Hunter Street buildings - between Tudor and Pacific Streets – are derelict or empty, up 50% from 7 years ago.
Business leaders and retailers have described the decline as a "disgrace and an "embarrassment" for Newcastle .. and want the State Government to immediately adopt and implement the findings of the Hunter Development Corporation’s city centre renewal plan. The plan, issued in May, embraces investment for tertiary facilities in the CBD, an upgraded legal precinct and a new transport system.
A new transport system? Some form of matter transfer? Why would a new transport system influence the decline? Or are these ‘business leaders’ suggesting removal of an ‘old transport system’?
Throsby suspects the bleedin’ obvious. Shoppers, those fickle and easily-bedazzled creatures, are thronging to Westfield Kotara, Charlestown Square, Market Town, Stocklands, and sundry regional shopfests. He ponders, therefore, why the ‘retail revival’ of the CBD is even a topic. It has shops that serve locals. It has no need of a gargantuan competitor-mall using the East End’s delicate street fabric as a retail battleground in some mock battle against similar bulls crashing around the Charlestown and Kotara china shops.
He wonders also why incongruent public housing is being inflicted on established ‘organic’ residential neighbourhoods when it’s sitting vacant in the city where, after all, public housing is needed. That’s what a ‘city’ does. A city, it happens, that needs people.
Throsby conspiratorially smells a scheme to buy a coastal city on the cheap. What might you imagine the effect on vacancy rates along Hunter Street should an elephant quaintly monikered Hunter Central plonk its large hairy retail buttocks firmly on the top end of this tired old town? A developer with deep pockets would find burgeoning and very cheap pickings on Hunter Street. And suddenly. Looks like a good plan for the cunning dudes in suits who do this for a living. You know, play Monopoly with dumber folk’s lives. The icing on this speculative cake: a retired rail corridor.
Something tells me our trusty state gummint – who sell everything not secured with superglue and whose shysters are relentlessly at work on legal solvents – would roll compliantly on this little bonanza.
Back to the Post Office. Newcastle City Council website lists the status of some of our more famous derelict buildings. Sad, is it not, that Newcastle has such a list? How long has Newcastle’s former Post Office been vacant and how much longer? While various entrepreneurs refine their visions for what sort of binge barn the fine old lady should be, the tragedy drags on. In exasperation, decades of it, one begins to ask if there isn’t another approach. Surely the whims of moneyed developers aren’t the only future for forlorn icons of yesteryear?
Movements are afoot in those places around the world – you know, foreign climes where we discover fashionable ideas and try them here .. like selling everything. One renegade revolution comprises conservative folk who suggest the progressive idea of re-empowering public ownership. Not nanny-state style, but in the form of “civil companies” or “mutual societies.”
The new power is that of ‘civil association’. Any self-organising frontline group of professionals who thought that they and their clients would do better by themselves in an alternative model of public provision would have a new ‘power of civil association.’
This power, if granted, would allow a group of staff in the public sector to self-organise and constitute a new civic organisation. Crucially, the budget (including where appropriate budgets for support services and non-fixed overheads) for providing those frontline services would go with the self-organising association.
..an ownership society [is] based on the notion of recovered civic groups and civic groups and individuals owning and having a stake in something that isn’t the state, and isn’t the monopoly market, is the genuine condition for democracy, liberty, and prosperity.
Two synergistic ideas dominate the document cited above.
One is the idea of public mutuals. We’ve seen them before, in the form of the Newcastle Cooperative Store which for a century paid dividends to its ‘customer-owners’ but was eventually crushed by that new import: American mall culture. We still enjoy them, as unwitting beneficiaries, in Building Societies and Industry Super Funds.
The other is employee-run businesses. If that latter seems absurd novelty, you will be enlightened by the outstanding success of Ricardo Semler who gave his company over to the experiment in 1982, growing it from $4 million to over $200 million. And by the list of corporations experimenting with the concept, like Ikea, Starbucks, BMW, Google, and Toyota, who each offer staff a form of ‘stake down.’
The thinking’s been done. The experiments are complete. The models work. The question is, do we have the bottle to transform Our Town into our town?
Or just let the Westfields, Stocklands, GPTs, and the two-bob millionaires run this city?
Their model made Hunter Street what is is today.
