AN APPLES AND BANANAS COMPARISON

MULLUMBIMBY AND LAUNCESTON HAVE SOME THING IN COMMON

Yes, Yes, Yes,..The Examiner (Launceston) is currently undergoing a significant restructuring as part of a broader business model shift by its owner, Australian Community Media (ACM).
Key details regarding the current and recent changes include:
• ... Move to Digital-First: ACM is transitioning its newspapers to a model focused on strong digital subscriptions during the week, with a focus on print editions only on Saturdays

• ... Closure of Local Printing: ACM closed the Launceston printing plant, which involved cutting 29 local jobs and moving production to Hobart.
• ... Owner Strategy: The publisher is implementing this restructuring, which is expected to continue in various forms over the next seven years.
• ... Note: In 2015, the newspaper also underwent a restructure that saw job cuts and a shift to a "NewsNow" editorial system

LETS SEE HOW THAT GOES AS AND WHEN

THE SUBSCRIBERS FLEE!!??

As some wise person has said... excellence is the unlimited

ability to improve the quality of what you have to offer!!!

Echo Editor <editor@echo.net.au>; Mullumbimby office … Phone: +61 2 6684 1777 … Fax: + 61 2 6684 1719 ... https://www.echo.net.au/contact-us/ ... The Echo newspaper published its first issue on 11 June 1986 largely in response to marijuana raids made by the New South Wales Police Force in valleys surrounding Mullumbimby. Shand and Lovejoy founded the newspaper as a civil rights watchdog due to news media refusing to report on aggressive and illegal actions made by police.It has become a local institution, the kind of which there is a need for more of! Notably the paper takes its critical commentary right up to where it cuts the deepest and they pay their bills – and more than survive! 

Excellence, that unlimited ability to improve the quality of what you have to offer is what maintains RELEVANCE and PROFITABILITY!!!

WATCH THIS SPACE

HOUSING MINDshift

Thinking of building a granny flat? How new rules might make it easier By Bailey Forbes ... Updated March 12 2026 - 4:36pm, first published March 11 2026 - 4:00pm

Plans to substantially increase the allowed size of granny flats have been praised by industry insiders, who say it will be a win for families, investors, and anybody looking for a home.

Minister for Housing and Planning Kerry Vincent announced work was underway to increase the allowable size of granny flats from 60 square metres to 90 square metres, saying it will provide more options for those looking for a one- or two-bedroom house.

Jason Zadow of Tiny Homes Tasmania. Picture by Craig George

He described the move as "low-hanging fruit" for increasing the medium-density housing stock.

"By expanding this size, we can create more diverse housing stock, giving Tasmanians greater options for where they can live," Mr Vincent said.

Launceston-based business Tiny Homes owner Jason Zadow, who specialises in building detached single- to three-bedroom homes, said one of the company's most popular models was the 70 square metre dwelling.

Previously, customers bought that model to live in as a primary residence - now they can place them in their backyard.

"I believe we will see entire families merging with others onto the same title as a result of this initiative," Mr Zadow said.

Jason Zadow of Tiny Homes Tasmania. Picture by Craig George

"Many people simply can't afford to buy land, and build-it's just too much of a stretch.

"By eliminating the cost of land, this offers families a practical pathway to escape the rental market and secure a place of their own."

Mr Zadow said he suspected customers who were previously put off by the limitations of the smaller 60m2 flats would be interested in the larger ones.

He said the proposed changes will allow the company to build even bigger homes.

Planning Institute Tasmania branch president Mick Purves said he was pleased with the way the reform had been handled and expects the community reception to be positive and for the changes to be adopted.

He flagged a concern that homeowners will now push for flats bigger than 90 square metres to be legislated, as people typically like to get granny flats as big as possible.

Harcourts Launceston director Jeremy Wilkinson. Phillip Biggs

'It can only be good'. Harcourts real estate agent Jeremy Wilkinson said properties with granny flats are a big business and regularly attract investors, drawing huge sales numbers.

"Let's say it's a standard three-bedroom house in Newnham, and they've got a granny flat out the back," he said.

"A three-bedroom house might rent right now in today's market, if it's neat and tidy, at $550 a week, and say you've got a two-bedroom granny flat out the back, and that rents for $350, maybe even $400 bucks a week.

"There's $900 a week of income coming in for that property."

It does attract investors. They say, 'that's probably worth it'.

- Real estate agent Jeremy Wilkinson. Mr Wilkinson said properties with two-bedroom granny flats regularly fetch $800,000 to $900,000.

He echoed Mr Zadow's experience that granny flats are becoming more popular, with homeowners looking for comfortable places to place parents, children, and to later on earn rental income.

Also becoming more common is parents buying larger granny flats for their children so they can gain independence while saving for their first home.

"I think it's a good thing, it can only be good," Mr Wilkinson said.

"This could effectively free up entire rental properties, potentially relieving some of the pressure on the rental market in the long run," Mr Zadow said

LANDliteracy A PERSPECTIVE

 

SEE ALSO ... https://theagency7250.blogspot.com/2026/03/landliteracy.

"The best time to plant a tree is 

always twenty years ago.

And the second-best time 

is always now." 

THEwatcher

LANDliteracy’ succinctly describes the ability to read the land for the purpose of assessing its ability to offer sustenance and shelter. 

Clearly, if more people could detect the early signs of land degradation this would foster more affective holistic approaches to designing LANDliteracy and LANDuse strategies in both urban and rural areas. 

Likewise, social and political responses to land custodianship and land stewardship would be enhanced if there were a higher levels of LANDliteracy – particularly so in urban areas.

LANDliteracy can be understood as one's ability to read and appreciate the signs of health in a landscape. By implication, this definition also implies the ability to read the signs of ill-health in a landscape. Being 'land literate' is a reason for including ‘art’ in the 'LANDliteracy equation'.

LANDuse is invariably dominated by humanity's ability to read a landscapes' capacity to fulfil the needs of individuals and groups and ultimately a network of groups. What is looked for in a 'place' is its capacity to meet humanity's four imperatives and the extent to which a CULTURALlandscape to  sustain life and a cultural reality within a network of interdependent cultural realities. 

LANDuse cannot afford to be anything that depletes a landscape and compromises any lifeform's capacity sustain itself within it. What is true for any one is true of all including humanity despite the myth that humans are the apex predator. 

Humans are considered to be the ultimate, apex predator due to advanced intelligence, tool-making, and adaptability, allowing them to dominate all ecosystems. Unlike specialised predators, humans utilisbeste technology to override environmental limits, influencing food webs, causing extinctions, and functioning as hyper-apex predators.

Thus knowing what needs to be known about a place's resources is fundamental. As it turns out that it is those who know this best are those who are directly seeking the sustenance and shelter within a place. Moreover, in order to 'know' a place's occupants need to be literate and LANDliterate.

Ideally LANDliteracy involves a community's collaborative and cooperative effort to read a place's 'placedness' albeit that some individuals and groups will have specialist knowledge – and indeed ancillary 'readers' may well be enlisted from outside.

LINK ...https://tazmuze7250.blogspot.com/p/land-literacy.html

LINK ...https://landliteracy.blogspot.com/

LINK ...https://redtreetasmania.blogspot.com/

LINK ... https://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/mm0795.08.html

Links [ 1 ] - [ 2 ] - [ 3 ]

Typically LANDcare launches projects that allows members to submit Expressions of Interest (EOIs) outlining projects they want to deliver - from habitat restoration to weed control, dam improvements and community education. Once approved, these projects are listed on a website, ready to be matched with grants, partnerships, or new funding opportunities. It’s an effective system that helps small ideas grow into fully funded, on-ground outcomes, while also enabling members to showcase their projects and connect with others interested in similar initiatives. While all such projects are laudable they compete for funding with some (many?) falling by the wayside.

LANDlieracy might well fall outside such funded projects in that, at their best, they inform day to day LANDuse initiatives and oftentimes involve contesting the purposefulness of authority funded, TOPdown, ideologically driven, initiative that all too often serve the maintenance of the investment oriented status quo.

LANDlieracy arguably functions best, or better, when structured rhizomatically given that under such modelling there are multiple engagement and disengagement points. Rhizomatic refers to a non-hierarchical, interconnected network structure that allows any point to connect to any other, operating without a central authority or linear, top-down organisation. Coined by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it describes systems that grow horizontally, similar to roots like bamboo, asparagus, and ginger, emphasising multiplicity, change, and adaptability.

In LANDliteracy's case it refers to to 'placedness'and ultimately to aCULTURALlandscaping.

That is, where people belong to places rather than in the INVESTMENTparadigm being where 'place ownership' and fiscal dividends are paramount. LANDliteracy's speaks of social and cultural dividends!

KERALA: Geographically a leader in sustainable land use management & LANDliteracy

Resource mapping Kerala's most innovative development effort is the People's Resource Mapping Program, which mobilizes villagers to inventory their resources on maps. These homemade maps are combined with scientific maps to guide environmentally sound local planning discussions of the long-term consequences and short-term gains of resource use. KSSP activists see the project as a logical extension of the total literacy campaign: the People's Resource Mapping Program is an attempt to create land literacy.

Because they see poverty and inequality as threats to sustainability, activists are suspicious of large-scale central plans that are drawn up in the national and state capitals. They put their faith in local landowners, arguing that they know area resources best and are better able to judge which land-use practices or inputs will improve land productivity. Collective action of villagers, with input from scientists, the activists contend, offers the best hope for promoting socially and ecologically sustainable land-use practices.... continued

LINK ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNEzWUhe9r8

LINK. .https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocalamus_giganteus

VIDEO ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZjy-eqwjVU

KERALA MODELLING

LAND REFORM IN KERALA CLICK HERE

HISTORY OF KERALA CLICK HERE & HERE

VIDEOS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NotryFowKU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJbftc_R3-Y 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq1uL9R_w5E 

END NOTE: While political parties often take credit for the 'Kerala Model,' the state's success actually stems from a multi-layered history. Pre-independence, the Maharajas of Travancore were visionaries who institutionalized free education and higher learning. Christian missionaries later expanded this by building a robust network of schools and hospitals. Post-independence, it was 'Gulf Money,' rather than local industry, that fuelled prosperity. One could argue that without the safety net of the Indian Union, Kerala’s focus on welfare spending over industrial growth would have rendered the state’s economy unsustainable, like many other communist countries.

EXAMPLE OF RESOURCE INTERROGATION

LINKS [ 1 ] - [ 2 ]

https://bananasnow.blogspot.com/2026/03/companion-cropping.html

https://bananasnow.blogspot.com/p/zingbananaponx.html

https://theagency7250.blogspot.com/2026/02/proposition-58.html

LINK

Authors Tandra Vale & Ray Norman

https://www.facebook.com/groups/4185231235021806

BACKGROUND LINKS 

[ A ] 

[ 1 ] - [ 2 ] - [ 3 ] - [ 4 ] - [ 5 ] 

[ 6 ] - [ 7 ] - [ 8 ] - [ 9 ] - [ 10 ] 

SEE https://raynorman7250.blogspot.com/p/landliteracy-links.html

VIDEO ... https://www.facebook.com/reel/2052097605537361

A LINK ... https://www.facebook.com/reel/2376786569499373

GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS

VIDEO... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40QwzhZLeeA

Gross National Happiness
The phrase ‘gross national happiness’ was first coined by the 4th King of Bhutan, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the late 1970s when He stated, “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.” The concept implies that sustainable development should take a holistic approach towards notions of progress and give equal importance to non-economic aspects of wellbeing and happiness.

Since then, the idea of Gross National Happiness (GNH) has influenced Bhutan’s development policy, and also captured the imagination of others far beyond its borders. In creating the Gross National Happiness Index, Bhutan sought to create a measurement tool that would be useful for policymaking and create policy incentives for the government, NGOs and businesses of Bhutan to increase societal wellbeing and happiness.

The GNH Index includes both traditional areas of socio-economic concern such as living standards, health and education and less traditional aspects of culture, community vitality and psychological wellbeing. It is a holistic reflection of the general wellbeing of the Bhutanese population rather than a subjective psychological ranking of ‘happiness’ alone.

Structure of the GNH Index
The framework contains nine constituent domains of GNH. They are psychological wellbeing, health, time use and balance, education, cultural diversity and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity and resilience, and living standards. The nine domains include 33 GNH conditions expressed as indicators. The indicators and domains aim to emphasise different aspects of wellbeing and human flourishing, and different ways of meeting underlying human needs.

By assessing nine domains and 33 indicators, the GNH Index provides a comprehensive and balanced assessment of Bhutan's progress as a nation. Concretely, the GNH Index measures whether or not each individual has attained sufficiency in each of the 33 GNH conditions. For the GNH Index, a person is classified as happy if she or he has sufficiency in at least 66% of the 33 weighted indicators or domains. The GNH Index combines the share of happy persons with the sufficiency achieved among the not-yet-happy people. It runs from 0 to 1, with values closer to 0 suggesting low GNH and 1 being a perfect score.

The nine domains are equally weighted because each domain is considered to be equal in terms of its intrinsic importance as a component of GNH. The 33 indicators are statistically reliable, normatively important, and are easily understood by large audiences. Within each domain, two to four indicators have been selected that seemed likely to remain informative across time, had high response rates, and were relatively uncorrelated. Within each domain, the objective indicators are given higher weights while the subjective and self-reported indicators are assigned far lighter weights.

The Centre for Bhutan and GNH Studies constructed the GNH Index using the Alkire-Foster method. The GNH Index is calculated as 1 minus MPI, focusing on sufficiency rather than deprivation. By generating average sufficiency and applying a happiness cutoff of 66%, the measure determines the proportion of people classified as 'happy', with the remainder categorized into the 'not yet happy' group....Click here to read more

MOVING TREES OR BEING MOVED BY TREES

VIDEO LINKS 

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1185624256984009

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keXr2AUfIyI

googleLINK

IF you are ideologically predisposed to a MINDset the chances are you'll not be too all that careful in contextualising what appears to be the case before you. Nonetheless, if you are mistaken and you risk discovering that you'll learn something. If you are not making mistakes then you are not really aiming to achieve anything. 

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new" is a famous, likely authentic quote by Albert Einstein encouraging risk-taking and learning from errors. It reframes failures as essential, courageous steps toward innovation and personal growth, rather than signs of weakness. Indeed, action researchers welcome the mistakes they because it narrows the field of exploration.

It is also said that if wish to discover how something works set about repairing it or changing it. Changing MINDsets turns out to be a monumental task and very quickly it is discovered what needs changing is wedded to the STATUSquo given that the minds that might change have invested heavily in maintaining it. Incomes and profits are at stake.

Trees need to be honoured not left standing by necessity! There many ways to honour a tree, a coppice, a grove, a forest even! Currently trees have precious carbon in storage and relatively easily that can be preserved. However, there is more to it than that in that trees have a place in our CULTURALlandscapes and their stories give substance to 'placedness'. Mostly all of this is to do with LANDliteracy and PLANETconsciousness.

Sadly very little of this figures in 'representational governance' as the 'representatives' are self-nominated and when push comes to shove they'll defer to self-interest as that's where theire= 'investment' is located.

Politicians and bureaucrats make enormous mistakes all the time and typically that is because they lack 'expertise'. That expertise exists all around them in their Communities of Ownership and Interest. However, on the evidence, that turns out to be an inconvenient truth more often than not! 

FOR THOSE ASPIRING VTO BE MORE LANDliterate

• ... https://onetreeaustralia.blogspot.com/

• ... https://www.commonground.org.uk/what-we-do/

• ... https://onetreeaustralia.blogspot.com/p/2-unluved-trees-story.html

• ... https://onetreeaustralia.blogspot.com/2021/10/zcjb7000.html

• ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m4Aq7_DXrY

.

ANOTHER KIND OF FOREST/GARDEN

 

CLICK HERE

LINK

GOOGLElink

PINTREST LINK & HERE

LINK

botanicalTOWER

LINK ... https://www.instagram.com/franciscoescapil.works/

PLACEDNESS

 

PLEASE CLICK ON AN IMAGE TO ENLARGE

• ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placemaking

• ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place

• ...  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_place

• ...  https://www.placeness.com/placemaking-and-the-production-of-places-origins-and-early-development/

• ...  https://www.pps.org/article/5-steps-to-making-places

• ...  https://www.townteammovement.com/whats-the-difference-placemaking-place-management-and-place-activation/

• ... https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/rtf-fresh-perspectives/a556-placemaking-of-a-space/

Placemaking An Ethos and a Practical Approach to Improving Places

As both an overarching idea and a hands-on approach for improving a neighborhood, city, or region, Placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community.

Strengthening the connection between people and the places they share, Placemaking refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value.

More than just promoting better urban design, Placemaking facilitates creative patterns of use, paying particular attention to the physical, cultural, and social identities that define a place and support its ongoing evolution.

What if we built our communities around places?

As both an overarching idea and a hands-on approach for improving a neighborhood, city, or region, placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community. Strengthening the connection between people and the places they share, placemaking refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value. More than just promoting better urban design, placemaking facilitates creative patterns of use, paying particular attention to the physical, cultural, and social identities that define a place and support its ongoing evolution.

With community-based participation at its center, an effective placemaking process capitalizes on a local community's assets, inspiration, and potential, and it results in the creation of quality public spaces that contribute to people's health, happiness, and well being.

A 'PLACE' almost anywhere

all the time anf all at once

LINK ... https://www.remogiuffre.com/about

COOLseats

 

z

LINKS

https://www.coolseats.com.au/blog/blog-post-title-one-ld5ne

https://www.coolseats.com.au/

https://www.sustainablehouse.com.au/michaels-blog/2023/10/24/introducing-the-newest-coolseat-design-and-collaborators

https://www.sustainablehouse.com.au/michaels-blog/2024/2/6/how-we-built-a-coolseat

https://www.1millionwomen.com.au/blog/how-coolseats-are-composting-promote-community-and-end-food-waste/

We have to do something

for Earth every day.

Coolseats

You and I - we can all end our food waste with coolseats - a four-in-one solution:

• sit on a seat that’s a compost, and a garden bed, and a self-watering, time-saving, soil-growing, easy to assemble and use, no-smells, rat proof compost

• coolseats is elegant, long-lasting street and garden furniture

• fits in lifts for apartments and small gardens, parks, streets, cafes, footpaths

• use one, or join two with a connecting seat, U-Shaped, z-shaped options