In a decisive victory for community common sense over ridiculous NIMBY small-mindedness and childish political posturing, a new public toilet has finally been approved for Brunswick St. The new location is the corner of Brunswick and Victoria streets (a wide street with a wide footpath suitable for locating such a facility).

The previous potential location, the corner of Brunswick and Westgarth streets, was opposed by the nearby Firefighters’ Credit Union office for no logical reason. This was supported by socialist councillor Steve Jolly, who saw the provision of a public toilet near union premises as a right wing conspiracy.

Listen fucktard, you permanently lost my support because of this issue. Everyone needs to shit, and in this instance you’ve inspired a lot of Fitzroy property owners to dump (on) you. Public toilets are essential for hygiene and human dignity. More public toilets should mean less public urination and defecation.

The City of Yarra has been woefully inconsistent for many years about the installation of public toilets in Fitzroy. Why does Smith St have at least three, but Brunswick St (until now) have none? Both are busy shopping and leisure destinations. Where’s the common sense in this difference? There isn’t any. It’s a fundamental planning failure.

The council reports that the new toilet should be installed by December. It is also persevering to find a new location for another toilet on Queens Parade, near the corner of Michael St, in North Fitzroy, after its previous flawed planning efforts and more NIMBY whining caused the original proposal to fail.

It’s interesting to see that with this new proposal, the City of Yarra has finally listened and is using its website to request and collect public feedback about the issue via a simple survey. I asked them to do this the last time after they asked for community feedback on their website but made contributing tedious, time consuming and difficult by not doing it online.

By developing a method for doing it easily online and encouraging people to use it (and to vote in favour of it), Fitzroyalty was responsible for generating over a third of the feedback about the Victoria St site, and I think this was a significant contribution towards getting the proposal approved. I’d like to see the City of Yarra adopt this as standard practice for all public consultation from now on.