Noel Pearson-Submission to Noosa Shire Council (Good Shepherd College)

good conscience not want for future children and their parents the same amenity
and peace of mind | enjoyed in the use and enjoyment of GSLC’s facilities?

This tawdry deal which the current school leaders have led the college into, is a
violation of their trusteeship to Good Shepherd Lutheran College as an institution of
learning. Right in the middle of the school precinct. At the very corner of its two
street frontages. This will mean that neither from the Eumundi-Noosa Road aspect,
nor from the Walter Hay Drive aspect, will one’s view of the college not be
compromised by the incompatible and quite frankly, ugly, view of a service station as
the frontage for the school.

Service stations are essential and welcome in appropriate places. In the middle of a
school precinct is not an appropriate space, no matter the potential commercial
opportunity of its situation for the proponent developers.

2. No other school in the Shire has such an incompatible land use affronting
its visual amenity and clear set-aside as a school

There is no other school in the region which has such an inappropriate commercial
development in the middle of its school precinct: Tewantin, Sunshine Beach,
Noosaville — it is inconceivable that those holding these schools in trust would put
their schools in such a situation.

Would Matthew Flinders school expose their institution to such a foolish prospect as
the current school leaders of GSLC are doing? They too deal in real estate and have
fiscal challenges they need to resolve: but would they sell their trust for a mess of
pottage?

The technical basis for the objection to this kind of ugly intrusion into the frontage of
a school is visual amenity, but the amenity goes deeper beneath the surface, as |
have sought to argue in the first section of this submission.

The Noosa community needs good schooling institutions over the next century. Why
could not Good Shepherd be as esteemed as my old alma mater, St Peters, in time?
Noosa needs first-tier schools for the future: with the capacity to educate children to
the highest standards of achievement and social justice.

To allow the current school leadership to make a tawdry, short-term, real estate
transaction, because of some shortsighted fiscal imperatives, and compromise the
long-term vision of the school as one of Noosa’s network of fine schools — is
something the Shire Council should step in and avoid. To show a vision which the
current school leadership does not. To show a sense of trusteeship which they have
failed to uphold.

3. GSLC leaders should not be allowed to make a windfall out of land which it
gained from the Shire Council because of its school purposes