My Manifesto: The Incoherent Ramblings of a Madman

Port Macquarie has a dichotomy of people. Port Macquarie is an ugly mix.

Land prices here are very expensive, not as high as Sydney prices but higher than land anywhere else outside of Sydney in NSW, with the exception of a few large cities such as Newcastle and prime real estate in other areas. The only people who can afford to buy land here are retirees from Sydney. Basically what people do is sell their shithole house in Sydney for a few million, buy a block of land here for about 400,000 and put a fantastic house on it for around 300-400,000 and end up with a mansion, a huge block of land, and enough money to live for the rest of their lives - so basically they trade up in house/land/lifestyle from their work-a-holic Sydney days. So we have the really rich retirees who build their separate suburbs so they can dissociate themselves from the rest of the town.

On top of the really rich retirees there are all their surfie bum children who are all unemployed. Some of them live off their rich retired parents and are pretty uppity snobbish; some of them are sent out into the world on their own to fend for themselves; most of them are too rich to get youth allowance so they are usually broke, however, they still try to live to the means of their parents and still act like upper class snobs.

In an ugly stark contrast to the above - there's the locals. The locals born and bred can't afford to buy land or a house because the stupid rich Sydney retiree bastards have pushed land/house prices up so high. The locals are all renting. Rent is expensive. Port Macquarie has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The lack of skills/training they have puts the locals at a severed disadvantage with the rich Sydney bastards who run the town.

So there we have it: rich Sydney bastards are the "haves"; the locals are the "have-nots"; and the rich Sydney bastards children are either the "haves-don't-have-to work-an-entire-day-in-their-lives-rich-snobs" or the "have-nots-but-still-act-like-rich-snobs". Never make the mistake of thinking a person who surfs and smells like they just crawled out of the sewer is poor. Never make the mistake of crossing a Sydney person who lives in Port Macquarie.

The main reason that people here are unemployed is because they're stupid, very stupid, stuck in the past stupid; very, very, very stupid. They cling onto the idea that Port Macquarie is a holiday destination. Port Macquarie has only just made it into the top 30 tourism destinations in NSW recently – there are hardly any tourist destinations in NSW – and the category Port Macquarie falls into includes Coffs Harbour and Forster – Tamworth alone beats all of those towns put together in tourism and they only have one event a year!

What people do is train in tourist related courses hoping to get a job. Port Macquarie has gotten rid of all of its affordable: motels; caravan parks; and tourist attractions. All that is left is high rise apartments. The thing that is keeping the economy going here is the development. So you have engineers, surveyors, home improvement shops, hardware stores, architects, draftsmen, banks, lawyers, real estate agents, accountants, financial planners, builders and all manner of development related businesses everywhere - the problem is the people aren't trained to do any of these jobs. So again, the rich Sydney bastards come in and take them all, and the silly locals lose out and just get poorer. Of course there's a huge problem that they're going to run into in about a decade or so - development can only go on for so long. Once you develop everything, you can't expand anymore, then there's going to be nothing here for anyone to do and the silly people here are going to still think it's a tourism place even though by this stage they've knocked down all of the motels and replaced them with high-rise apartments but the silly people here haven't learnt thus far? So in 10 years time will they learn? Of course not - they're stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

So there we have it - all about Port from an outsider’s perspective and it's all true - because, quite frankly, I don't give a shit what happens to this town yet, it doesn't really like me, and I don't much like it. I have no reason to cover the lies like the locals do.