The two problems are:

Firstly, over-nervous drivers coming in from Old Narrandera Road not taking advantage of the breaks in traffic.

Secondly, for some reason council will not be pro-active in having the development application for the proposed shopping centre terminated so a fresh proposal can happen.

A completed shopping centre would take hundreds of vehicles a day off the bridge.

There is now quite a lot in the media about the benefits of limiting suburban sprawl.

Urban consolidation is deemed to be a good thing, because it keeps infrastructure costs down and frees up agricultural land for farming. This is true.

But counter to this, urban consolidation can also be detrimental to a regional city's reputation for being a great place to live and work.

I am talking about Wagga.

Those who plan for Wagga's future encourage us to embrace the trend toward high density housing in very tall, high-rise towers.

Sadly, we know from the experience of others that it is difficult to shoe-horn many hundreds of people artificially into a residential site never designed to cater for them.

It would not be unreasonable to predict that the present neighbouring households and the new flat-dwellers might both face the same unhappy situation: streets more congested, traffic choke points, parking restrictions, increased air pollution and noise.

Nearby residents may have trouble with overshadowing, loss of streetscape, loss of amenity, loss of privacy, loss of open space.

Past council planning has given us a legacy of five and 10-acre blocks girdling the city, only minutes from the CBD.

Wouldn't this be the ideal place to start the 'infill' rather than the already sufficiently crowded Central Wagga?

I recommend to all interested in reviewing all sides of the climate change subject to look up research from environmental expert Michael Shellenberger, who among others has been called upon by the United Nations (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) as an adviser.

Some very interesting assessments indicating, for example, that much of the alarmist rhetoric is either completely unfounded in fact or not realistically feasible to implement.

As an example of this, to move to 100 per cent energy renewables would require the amount of land required to increase from the current 0.5 per cent to 50 per cent.

Breaking news: Trade tensions escalate.

China threatens to stop buying Australian politicians.

What will China apologists do now for news they agreed to spread?

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