Wightman

After a hectic 18 months of debate about building heights in Hobart, it’s time to draw breath before locking ourselves into new height constraints that we are likely to regret in the months and years to come. Let’s be clear. No one, least of all me, is arguing that Hobart should turn into some of sort of “Shanghai by the Derwent” with skyscrapers hundreds of metres tall. But neither do we want to impose a building height limit than turns our city into a monoculture of buildings, stopping the current renaissance of our inner-city in its tracks. This is because the effect of unrealistic building caps – particularly at the low heights proposed by the Hobart City Council’s Planning Committee at their meeting on Monday night – will be to restrict available floor area, thus forcing developers to eschew design aesthetics in favour of maximising what little space they have left available. Unfortunately, what has developed over recent months in Hobart is a form of bias where developers ...

I am a cricket fanatic who could listen to or watch every single delivery of a Test Match. A person who still feels surprised when people fail to understand or accept my passion. In fact, my devotion so great, I have visited the dental surgery every year since 1986 because of a fielding mishap, ensuring a comfortable retirement for our local legend dentist once he has rectified my current saga… With children and one television in the house, I rely on the ABC App, the Cricket Australia Live App, or the slightly off-station wireless (91.5FM for authenticity), to keep me entertained and informed. The large TV, purchased in my mind for sport, is more likely to be showing The Next Step, Red Bull TV or endless YouTube re-runs of street trials cyclist Danny MacAskill to inspire, rather than Meg Lanning, Alyssa Healey, Tim Paine or Nathan “Areas Garry” Lyon. Kids these days. My cricket career was shortened by ‘mental disintegration’ during the 1990’s, when it was an incredibly tough ...

A Federal Election will be held by May 2019. By then, many constituents will be experiencing fatigue after a Tasmanian State Election in March 2018, followed by Legislative Council voting for the Divisions of Hobart and Prosser, and then it was local government’s turn during October and November. But even if our current mood is apathetic, we must recharge as a community and view the upcoming Federal Election as an opportunity for Tasmania. On the face of it, we have a government desperate to retain power, and an opposition hungry for the treasury benches. The winner could be our state. In the lead-up, population and infrastructure will be centre stage in political debates and community conversations. The eastern seaboard, particularly New South Wales, is where a discussion regarding immigration will be prominent, with capping or reducing a perceived community winner. However, in a cautionary tale, as the recent Victorian State Election emphatically highlighted, running a ...

One airport, one runway operating and high winds reaching 70 kilometres per hour cancelled my flight from Sydney on Friday afternoon. Collectively, travellers appeared calm and understanding, many having viewed the aborted landing of QF12 from Los Angeles. The cold front also delivered a dust storm on Thursday that left the Harbour Bridge impressively visible for an Instagram moment one minute and in darkness the next. Sydney is in all but name, the nation’s capital. It’s business suits, designer labels and far less hipsters than Melbourne. It’s banking and finance and politics and busy lunchtimes tracking down sushi rolls. It’s iPhones and earbuds and social media. An organised big city with endless infrastructure and construction projects underway, trying to support a consistently increasing population. I enjoy spending time in Sydney; captivated by modern architecture’s link with buildings of the past, sensitively highlighting difference rather than trying to cover i...