Apparently Stike it Out’s ‘Sleeping Pods’ are safe enough to be used by emergency crews et al but conveniently and subjectively they have been deemed to be of dubious value and safety when providing shelter for people suffering stress from their loss of access to a home place in Launceston! Bureaucratic claptrap and humbug is what it is and it is, and it is clearly in evidence in this instance.
Safe comfortable and secure housing is a human right but ensuring that – well Launceston’s Councillors have evidently abdecated that role! They seem to be saying that as your representatives, they cannot help people suffering from the loss of shelter as a consequence government’s housing cum investment policies.
QUESTION: How do they see themselves ‘representing’ all their constituents without fear or favour? Seemingly, they – Councillors and the determiners of policy & strategy – can only see their way clear to be representing a constituency who ‘invest’ in housing as they, and their associates have done and in the ways that they do and have.
The facts are what they are. Launceston’s Town Hall sends homeless people off to a charity to find shelter and emergency sustenance without offering any support to its constituents in stress because they have for whatever reason lost access to shelter. Despite the Mayor saying that homeless people sleeping rough are "not moved on" they are being 'moved on' and there is evidence of it being so! There are three things that cannot be hidden … the sun … the moon. … the truth … and the truth of the Mayor’s assertions are clear to be seen on close inspection.
Sadly, collectively the Councillors and the officers they employ are by-and-large self accountable and the inconvenient truth is that is the way they like it. The take-away here is … 'make them accountable and hold them accountable!’.
IT JUST DOES NOT STOP AT HOMELESSNESS
What passes for 'strategic planning' at Launceston's Town Hall is siloed, and it exhibits disconnectivity, along with making assumptions that the status quo is adequate and thus it will/should remain or prevail as the background for change.
EssentIally what is being listed is a set of 'OBJECTIVES/GOALS' rather than the 'STRATEGIES' envisaged and required to fulfil an 'objective/goal' - a desired/planned/targeted outcome. This is where the DISCONNECTIVITY is and where the status quo is unchallenged.
Given the already obvious paradigm of climate change and the CHANGING international political realignments, the status quo must give way to change and quite possibly fundamental change.
Strategic planning is a process – something that is being done – it is not a product – something that has been done – and its coming to be must be transparent in order to be meaningful and truly purposeful.
Moreover a 'plan' in itself is absolutely useless and ever likely to be defective if it is imagined to be complete, resolved, fixed, settled, firm, unbending or established.
Nonetheless, planning is everything as is a purposeful planning process that has milestones and performance indicators.
What is really important, strategically, is determining what is NOT to be done as that offers the option of everything else plus the reasoning that informed why certain actions/goals should/would not be of strategic advantage.
ALBEIT A DRAFT, IS IT IN FACT WHAT IT CLAIMS TO BE??!!
A strategic plan in execution is the ability to convert a plan into purposeful and desired outcomes. Yes Lauceston does need a 21st C Strategic Plan but it must be purposeful and implemented. The most important thing about any strategy is its purposefulness and its execution. If you have a strategy, but you can’t or don't execute it, you’re nothing and you have got nothing!
Doing anything without strategic purposefulness is chaotic. Likewise advocating a strategy without implementation, without benchmarks, and without the achievement of measurable outcomes that is delusionary. Launceston needs a plan that clearly states:
- What objectives are being planned to achieve and who sets them and when?
- Why it is envisaged by whom that an objective is in need of being addressed?
- How and when will the planned objectives be achieved, by whom and by what means?
- That is the purpose of purposeful strategy to be determined, and that is strategic and it must be transparent – it is not ba wish list!
The DRAFT PLAN to hand bears the hallmarks of ‘Council Management at work’ and for all intension’s purposes the ‘elected12’s voices are silent (silenced?)’. This is deeply embedded in the https://tomorrowtogetherlaunceston.com.au/ planning process and clearly 'the people's, the ratepayers', voices are absenent and/or are being silenced in effect. The voices that are being heard are only being heard by ‘management' thus far and quite possibly the voices of the so far ‘voiceless’ may not ever be heard or given the chance to be heard.
Sadly, mediocrity executed brilliantly is sometimes better than a brilliant strategy executed poorly albeit that the status quo is ever likely to be intolerable given its inbuilt weaknesses and the unmitigated failures embede within. As Ronald Regan told us “the status quo you know is Latin for the mess we are in."
