Helicopter View

On 2 December 2011 I attended my first OROC (Orana Region Of Councils) meeting. OROC at the time consisted of eleven Councils in the region – generally the Councils North-West through to South-West of Dubbo. This meeting was held in Coonabarabr…

“Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.” Forever more, no review of Dubbo for this year will be complete without the analysis of Council amalgamations and the consideration of Hitchen’s razor. Hitchen took the Latin proverb above an…

This was an opinion piece published in Dubbo Photo News on Thursday 26 May. . . I received a phone call last week. Actually I received a lot of calls and texts and e-mails and messages and…you get the idea. One phone call stood out though. I s…

Democracy. It is a simple enough word. Kids learn how to say and spell it from a young age. There are very few words in the English language that can stir up such emotion and motivate mankind to commit acts which would otherwise never be considered. …

I am currently returning from a (non-Council funded) couple of days in Kuala Lumpur where I had the chance to speak at a global conference on Tourism. I had the chance to speak to the people attending about Evocities and creating events to drive tour…

My last column focused on the success of Evocities and the population boost experienced by the seven participating cities as a direct result of the campaign. Way back on 21 July 2006 I sat through a presentation by Gary Wells from Wagga Wagga when th…

I am sure you are familiar with the scene. Kevin Costner (playing Ray) hears a mysterious voice one night in his cornfield. Despite taunts of lunacy, Ray feels the need to act. He builds a baseball diamond on his land and waits for the ghost of his f…

Forty years ago today Ronald Wayne; Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded a little start-up technology company called Apple. After forty years of twists and turns including verging on bankruptcy, it now sits atop the NASDAQ as the most valuable compan…

Lock the gates! I am not talking about a form of anti-CSG protest but economic development. There are some in any given community (mainly existing businesses) that would be quite happy if their Council froze all existing business development and acce…

Avid readers of my column out there (hi Mum) would remember Column 68 which was published in Weekender at the end of October 2014. In that column I introduced a concept that I called MONEY. MONEY was not what we normally think of as money, but instea…

I thought I might put my hand up for the Indian Premier League (IPL) this year. I could put together a pretty good document telling the franchises about the wonderful feats I could perform for them if they secured my services in the auction. The high…

I am currently sitting at the end of the nervous nineties with this column being my ninety ninth Weekender column as Mayor. If my name was Shane Watson I would somehow manage to make this my last column! Who knows – with the current State Gover…

Newsflash! Humans are fallible. Some may like to think otherwise but it has been proven a few times in the past that we all make mistakes. Organisations, including Government organisations, are made up of humans. It would therefore stand to reason th…

Over the last few months of last year and particularly over the Christmas break, we have seen a number of incidents involving representatives from all three levels of government that have ranged from questionable to thoroughly disappointing. It start…

We all know that the Federal Government will spend over $1 billion in the next four years to promote research, development and innovation. Malcolm Turnbull wants to drive an “ideas boom” in the nation to replace the slowing mining boom. T…

Very early in my time as Mayor, we were undertaking a major construction project in Dubbo. It was a good project with a large amount of money coming from the Federal Government. Unfortunately, during the project, it was obvious that we were going to …

The initial goal of any good business person when they see a random person walk in their door is to turn that browser into a customer. This initial purchase can occur by having a good solution for a client need and by offering that packaged with exce…

Well the HSC has finished for another year. That is 10,710 hours of class time – and countless hours of study – finished. While 77,000 young adults across the state contemplate the next chapter of their lives, the challenge for regional c…

When someone asks me to review their small business, I have a series of questions that I ask about the business that will give me a brief snapshot about the business before I start to dig deeper. The first two questions are critical: Did you make a p…