Living in Canberra has benefits when the national cultural institutions dig into their collections to exhibit some of their gems, writes "Canberra Matters" columnist PAUL COSTIGAN.
"The Rattenbury-Barr government operates with a lack of transparency and is comfortable with the use of disingenuous spin and obscurity to hide the reality of how it spends money.," writes "Canberra Matters" columnist PAUL COSTIGAN.
About 15 years ago the planning authorities in this town used to respect and document stuff around "neighbourhood character", writes "Canberra Matters" columnist PAUL COSTIGAN.
"ACT federal politicians do not get involved with local stuff. They are busy with important stuff and would not want to dirty their hands with local urban and green space issues," writes "Canberra Matters" columnist PAUL COSTIGAN.
"People are not fools – they know when Greenslabor politicians make worthy sounding but disingenuous statements (prepared by spin doctors) and when they make statements of values they adhere to," writes columnist PAUL COSTIGAN.
"The ACT Greenslabor government’s standard is clear. Canberra’s streets have the capacity for bumper to bumper traffic, 24 hours a day," writes "Canberra Matters" columnist PAUL COSTIGAN.
Residents had good reasons to be puzzled by the August 16 decision by the ACT planning minister to use his precious "call-in" powers, says "Canberra Matters" columnist PAUL COSTIGAN.
"Any DA that is placed into the public domain should be easily understood and should be thoroughly checked for faults and if necessary, sent back to the proponent to be resubmitted or binned," writes columnist PAUL COSTIGAN.
"This government and its bureaucracy are skilled at cherry picking and misrepresenting statistics to back up their plans to abolish the RZ1 residential zone system," says "Canberra matters" columnist PAUL COSTIGAN.