Ballina Shire residents’ wish-list for 2025
Balina Shire residents love their river and the opportunites it provides for ‘peaceful pursuits, active recreation and commercial activities’.
And they think there should be more activity on the Richmond River and its associated creeks, provided they are not spoiled in the process.
These are just two of the findings included in the second discussion paper for the Ballina Shire Sustainability Strategic Plan 2025, which is being developed by the Shire Council. It will provide input into the review of the Ballina Shire Local Environment Plan, which is taking place from this year until 2009.
Other community inputs into the discussion paper include:
- Residents want good health services, including improvements to Ballina Hospital.
- Residents want the productive land in the shire to be protected, both for what can be produced now and for what might be production activities in the future.
- Residents want access to resources, and they want options for getting to these resources.
- Residents think that the natural environment is one of the shire’s most important and valuable resources.
- Residents want the beaches, ocean, rivers and creeks to stay clean.
- Residents want the beaches and foreshores to be public spaces.
Other information in the discussion paper includes:
- Ballina Shire has a higher than average percentage of people aged over 65 — 19 per cent in Ballina Shire compared with a State average of 13 per cent and a national average of 12.7 per cent.
- Thirteen per cent of residents in Ballina Shire live in poverty. For every family with an income of $1500 a week, there are 2.2 families with an income of less than $500 a week.
- Just over 29 per cent (29.2) of the population are wage/salary earners. The State and national average is 38 per cent.
February 20th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
The natural environment, IMO, is definitely the most valuable resource that we have and I hope that the council does everything in its power to keep it clean and accessible for everybody.
It has been sad to watch over the years the amount of housing popping up between Ballina and Lennox Head, fortunately we not seen another Gold Coast though!
The amount of poverty in the Ballina Shire both surprises me, and doesn’t surprise me [if that makes sense].
February 20th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Your comment about poverty in the shire makes sense to me — there’s a lot of people out there struggling. I wonder how a family could survive on $500 a week, given that if they’re on such a low income, it’s likely they would be renting.