THE mwcc HAS few friends
The Mount Wellington cable car company’s CEO says opponents of his scheme are "only a small, unqualified handful". Who are they?
“Only a small, unqualified handful oppose the cable car and none of their remaining reasons stack up.”
“80,000 Tasmanian oppose the cable car. No conservation organisation supports it. Community and recreational groups as well as expert urban planners and landscape architects proffer multiple, detailed reasons against it.”
When you show a 360 degree VR animation of “skybuses” ascending the blue yonder over the Organ Pipes, but not what this requires: not the tree-felling in Myrtle Gully, not the pylon blasting above the Organ Pipes, not the excavation of alpine moors and tors at the Pinnacle—to make way for a shopping centre—do that and you end up with …
A stack of Detractors
click on an image to link to anti-cable-car pages
These stout defenders of everything wild have opposed the cable car's intrusion.
Read more ... Social Licence
“I will never give up. Opposition is just fuel.”
“Perseverance is a virtue, but “never” is a curse. What if you face opponents who, like you, will never give up? This incites a conflagration. Those who want change must take the community with them. “I will never recant.” are the words of a madman, a heretic upon a burning pyre.”
"A small, unqualified handful" of people protesting the MWCC Masterplan, 2018
Academics' disapproval
Academics at the University of Tasmania have raised multiple and serious concerns about the proposed cable car project.
Hannah Murphy Gregory is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Tasmania. She researches projects that do not have a broad social licence. Her prognosis for the cable car is not sanguine. Favourable political treatment is not sufficient. Changing community views is the problem, and that, she says, is a hard ask. "Given the intensity of attachment to kunyani as iconic and Tasmania's image of unspoilt wilderness, I don't think it will be built."
Anne Hardy is a senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania and the Director of the Tourism Research and Education Network (TRENd). She is a specialist in tribal marketing, the drive tourism and recreational vehicle market and issues related to sustainability. Anne is particularly interested in collaborative research that forms two way linkages between the university and the broader tourism industry.
Professor Kirkpatrick The geographer and conservation ecologist, Distinguished Professor Jamie Kirkpatrick, has been awarded the Eureka Prize for Environmental Research and an Order of Australia for service to forest and world heritage conservation. He writes that "We sing to the landscape “a fish farm here, a hotel there, here a shining cable car, there a great big mine”, as we seek the holy grail of jobs and growth, but there is a countervailing emotional force, a love of places as they are, induced by the places as much as by us. This force can impel people to protect landscapes from the very changes that others are trying to sing into existence.
Associate Professor Kate Crowley
Who supports the cable car? Read more: Lukewarm Supporters
SPECIAL THANKS
Organisations: Residents Opposed to the Cable Car (ROCC). Respect the Mountain. The Divze Trust
websites: Tasmanian Times, ABC Online, Mercury newspaper
Individuals: Rob Blakers, Richard Flanagan, Geoff Law, Bob Burton. Others quoted without acknowledgement: tell us! and please forgive us—we will add you.
Sources: Wellington Park Management Trust. Tasfintalk, Bureau of Meteorology. TROVE. The Mercury Archive, Libraries Tasmania. Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, Overland magazine: A cablecar named Desire.
