Why this
exists

Nobody asked me to build this. There’s no group behind it and no money in it. It’s one person from this town who got sick of a particular conversation.

My grandfather left Italy with nothing much and a reasonable expectation that things would be better somewhere else. He picked here. Then, one at a time, over years, he brought the rest of the family out to join him — including my father. That’s the whole story of how I come to be from Bunbury rather than a village in Molise: a man decided a place was worth building a life in, and then kept talking people into following him.

I’ve got a son now. I want to give him what my grandfather went looking for, except I don’t want to have to leave to find it. I want it here. That’s the entire motivation and I’d rather say it plainly than dress it up as civic duty.

I’m not from somewhere else with a plan for your town.

I’ve started businesses in this region. I’ve employed a lot of people here, across a few different things, for a long time now. Which means I’ve spent about twenty years having the same conversation over and over — with staff, with suppliers, with tradies, with other owners, at barbecues, in car parks.

We should do this. Imagine if we did. The bloody council should just—

Everyone agrees. Everyone means it at the time. And then everyone goes home, and the idea that fifty people were enthusiastic about on a Saturday gets decided on a Tuesday night by whoever could be bothered writing a submission. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just how it works when agreement is invisible and objection is organised.

So this isn’t activism and it isn’t a campaign. It’s a counting exercise with good design attached, because I happen to be able to make things look like they already exist, and it turns out that’s the part that changes minds. People will argue with a budget line forever. They stop arguing when they can see the thing.

I’ve done the incorporated-entity version of this before — a community group that got to 1,400 members and then died under the weight of constitutions, memberships, fees and annual general meetings. I’m not doing that again. There’s nothing here to join except a list, and the only thing the list does is turn up when a project is live.

The point isn’t to be right. It’s to make quiet agreement countable.

I’ve kept my name off the front of this on purpose, and that deserves an explanation rather than a mystery. It’s not anonymity — the councillors and staff who’d care already know exactly who’s doing this, because I’ve sat across a table from most of them. It’s that the moment a thing like this has a face on it, people start arguing about the face. Whether he’s got an agenda. What business he’s in. Who he voted for. That argument is more interesting than the ocean pool, and it eats the ocean pool.

So the number is the thing on the front page, not me. If you want to know who you’re dealing with before you put your email in, you’re reading the page where I tell you.

What I get out of it: I get to live somewhere I’d have chosen on purpose, and so does my kid. That’s it. That’s the return.

What I don’t get: no fees, no retainers, no commissions, no land, no preselection, no board seat. Nobody pays for a project to appear here and nobody can. If that ever changes — if I’m ever engaged commercially on something that shows up on this site — it’ll be written at the top of that project’s page in the same size type as everything else, before you’re asked to back it.

And if you think something here is wrong, say so. The objections page on each project isn’t decoration. The best argument against the ocean pool is on the ocean pool page, in the words of the person who made it, because a project that can’t survive its sharpest objection has no business getting built.