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What is inclusivity and why is it important?

Broadly, if you think of a community, and Byron Shire is a series of them, you have a far stronger and robust community if you have diversity within it. To have diversity, you must be inclusive. And what that means is you need to be inclusive of people at different stages of life, with different abilities, different cultural backgrounds, and diversity of income as well.

Humankind and Byron Shire specifically has benefited from creativity and innovation. Lots of positive social change occurs because of creative people. Often, these people don't have a lot of economic resources behind them, so they have to be creative.

What worries me locally is what happened in the urban centres, both nationally and globally, were creativity flourished and then got priced out due to gentrification. We are pricing creativity out.

How is accessibility related to this?

Accessibility is about having a community where everyone can participate fully. People with disability aren't disabled by the fact that they might have some form of impairment. They're disabled by the fact the community isn't accessible, because it doesn't fully understand how important it is to ensure complete accessibility. As a result, the extraordinary contribution of people with disability can't always be realised and our whole community loses out.

Everyone has the right to participate and to be valued within community. And if you're not creating a community that's accessible, physically accessible, culturally accessible, then peoples' human rights are not realised. People are unseen.

How would you rate these factors today?

I think most people have good intentions. I just don't think there's understanding yet around what inclusivity really means. I think that's the barrier. And the way we think about things now isn't the way we need to think about things in the future. One of the Northern Rivers great strengths is this incredible commitment to environmental sustainability, but people ought to think about social sustainability, too.

A socially sustainable environment is where everyone belongs, everyone feels connected. They feel they belong. They're seen. They're heard. They feel they're making a valuable contribution and are a legitimate part of the community.

What happens if we fail to plan for these things?

A whole range of issues emerge when you don't have that sense of being a valued person who belongs within the community. You get the problems we have now around mental health, family dysfunction, and family violence. Very often when you work with someone who's at rock bottom, they've got nowhere to live, so you get them a house. Then you get them into education and then support them into participating in work. And you just see their whole attitude and commitment to life change. Being able to see value in yourself means that you can make significant changes.

The other problem that arises is a loss of vibrancy in the community. The economy is driven by people who tend to have lower-income jobs. The accommodation, hospitality, and cultural creative arts communities tend to be people on less money. And if we don't have people with a diverse range of incomes, because they can't afford to stay, we end up with a monoculture. We're already facing real and increasing issues around where our authors, musicians, baristas and chefs live. Not to mention the healthcare workers and teachers.

What are the opportunities for the Shire?

I think our opportunities are to look at European villages. They have beautiful villages with quite high populations that thrive on relatively small footprints. I do think it's better to focus on the developed space than to keep going out there and putting huge wide roads and sewage systems in, when you could really look at how you get greater density into a walkable town. How do you really make that work? It's basically townhouse and apartment dwellings that's not an ugly brick tower. I think that's the biggest opportunity. ▲