I was talking to a Sunshine Coast business owner just after November’s federal election and he was bemoaning the lack of interest some of his young employees had shown in the proceedings.

When he had asked them who they were going to vote for, they told him: “John Howard, I suppose. He’s been in for a long time.”

“I told them that if Howard got back in they would be working for a dollar an hour on Sundays,” the owner said with a laugh as he recounted the conversation.

“That got their attention.

“I’m their boss, so I guess that’s not the position I’m supposed to take.”

The employer, who runs a very successful operation, wasn’t interested in a society that he saw was beginning to create two classes of people – those with money and those would be forced to work for a pittance.

By comparison, 10 days before Christmas another group of Coast workers received a 25-page document from their boss, a nationally listed company.

It was an agreement the company wanted signed by Christmas Eve that would bind their working conditions for the next five years.

Among other things, the agreement allows the company to call in workers, who live all over the Coast, for a minimum two-hour shift if required.

It meant for some that the cost of getting to and from work would be more than they earned on the shift.

These scenarios are instructive of the different cultures that exist between smaller owner-operated businesses in the region and those ruled by a share price and a management that sits outside the area.

There were many examples in December of small-business operators on the Sunshine Coast sharing some of the profits of their ventures with the workers who had contributed to that outcome.

These are operations that value their employees and recognise that they are people with their own set of needs rather than just units in a process.

Like the employer who had to pull his politically disconnected workers aside and explain where their best interests lay, these are businessmen and women who are as concerned about the society they live in as they are the profits that inflate their bank accounts.

With less than 12 weeks to go before the local government elections that will bed in the region’s new super council, now is the time we all started getting interested in how this region’s future will be shaped.

Make no mistake, the first four years of the new council, and the quality of representatives that make it up, will determine quality of life here into the future.

Are we going to create, or just accept, a future where the bottom line rules and all other rules bend to it?

Or will growth be measured by the quality of jobs it delivers and quality of the natural environment in which we live.

We can expect very little help in these matters from the state government.

There is no ambiguity about its purpose.

It intends for this region’s population to reach 500,000 people in the next 18 years and is building the infrastructure and the planning instruments to ensure that occurs.

Mayoral candidate Joe Natoli may be right when he says that situation is something beyond the control of either him or any other potential regional leader.

But a new council with a powerful mandate from its community would be in the strongest position possible to ensure that the future was not just about money.

We should be afraid

Premier Anna Bligh has proven once again just how dictatorial the state Labor government has become.

With Noosa council negotiators struggling to maintain the integrity of its town plan – including things like building heights, signage sizes and vegetation protection – inside iconic status legislation that is supposed to enshrine such things, Ms Bligh’s failure to commit to former premier Peter Beattie’s “lock, stock and barrel” guarantee to the community is ominous.

Whether Beattie meant what he said before his retirement or whether it was just a sop to keep the restless natives quiet for a while is now not relevant.

If the new premier does not intend for the iconic legislation to protect these core elements of the Noosa Plan, what likelihood is there that the protections allegedly afforded cane lands and riparian corridors, through the instrument of the South East Regional Plan, actually exist?

It’s time for every one of us to get interested.