On 1st March 2018 the WA Minister for Planning Rita Saffioti announced her decision that she had accepted the WA Planning Commission’s (WAPC) recommendation to reject the proposed Mangles Bay Marina Metropolitan Region Scheme Major Amendment 1280/41 and has withdrawn the proposal.
Minister Saffioti wisely accepted the WAPC recommendation to reject the proposal based on numerous fatal flaws and breaches of State Planning Policies. The evidence against the proposal was simply overwhelming.
Minister Saffioti demonstrated the due diligence and competence that had been sadly lacking from all 3 levels of Government ever since the fatally flawed proposal was kicked off 15 years previously by vested interests.
You can read the full WAPC report here https://www.planning.wa.gov.au/publications/7917.aspx
It was nearly 15 years that community fought against the fatally flawed proposal and it showed what ordinary citizens can ultimately achieve by banding together and never giving up. It didn’t come easy but finally some due diligence and competence prevailed.
It really is quite an historic precedent for the WAPC to make a decision like this and to recommend against a government initiated and supported project.
The WAPC decision to recommend against the MRS amendment was the turning point. It would have been very hard for the WA Planning Minister to go against the WAPC’s recommendation which they based on the large number of submissions they received. For example the Hands Off Point Peron Inc. submission was 600 pages across 3 volumes
Getting all the evidence against the proposal onto the public record was crucial. It was crucial because without the public contributing to the assessment process by putting in their own submissions, the WAPC would be relying solely on the information that the proponents/developers gave them.
History has shown that developers only ever include the information that they want a decision based on in their assessment reports and they routinely leave out crucial factors. For example, we know that both the WA and Federal Governments granted environmental approvals without any consideration of our Little Penguins who feed in Mangles Bay.
This is typical of our environmental assessment processes in WA. That’s why environmental groups are forever protesting about stuff – because our current environmental laws are nothing more than a smokescreen used to convince the public that the threats to our environment are being considered when they are not. Big changes to our laws are needed but disappointingly there is no appetite amongst the major party politicians to fix them.
The HOPP campaign was very much an evidence based campaign using the facts and public interest grounds to argue the case against the proposal. The politicians were lobbied intensely and were held to account as much as possible every step of the way. From lobbying Rockingham City Councillors not to take on the role of waterways management by rallying outside Monthly council meetings and asking pointy questions during public question time simply to get our concerns onto the council minutes hence on the official public record, to fire- bombing the Rockingham region with tens of thousands of information flyers over the 10 years prior to the proposal being finally withdrawn.
This was in addition to ongoing petitions over the years with thousands of signatures, protests, public meetings, rallies and numerous media attracting activities. BUT the community should never have had to do all this – it’s not right that ordinary citizens were forced to become activists
Reflections on learnings from this hard fought win include;
All 3 levels of Government had a hand in this proposal progressing as far as it did.
Before the WA Government really kicked this proposal off in earnest, they asked the City of Rockingham if they supported the proposal. The council at the time was heavily weighted with members of the Liberal party whose support for the Mangles Bay Mega-Canal continues to this day. The point is that local council elections do matter.
Local councillors are not expected to be scientists or engineers but even a cursory glance at the proposal by our local councillors at the time would have revealed that one way or another, the public would have ended up picking up the tab for the constant dredging that would have been required to keep this Mega-canal marina from silting up.
It is a myth that local council is just about rubbish collection and roads. They have a lot more indirect ‘influence’ than people realise should they choose to exercise it. It was clear from the outset for anyone who looked closely at the proposal, that it had numerous fatal flaws and breaches of State Planning Policies.
The fact is millions of taxpayer dollars were wasted on this fundamentally flawed proposal.
All along the drawn out assessment process, many people simply weren’t doing their jobs properly, they weren’t doing their civic duty and no-one was being held accountable.
So it was left to ordinary concerned citizens, hundreds of them, who banded together and built the case to show that the evidence against the proposal was simply overwhelming.
Together the community made sure that all the evidence was on the table; on the public record. The community made the politicians and the WAPC accountable and made them all understand that the people would forever hold them to account should they decide to proceed with the development.
It is crucial now that we remain vigilant in resisting future attempts to urbanise Point Peron; because they will be back, albeit on a smaller scale next time
The best insurance against the urbanisation of Point Peron is to make sure that the area now becomes an A Class reserve as was always intended for this public land under the conditions stipulated in the 1964 Point Land Transfer agreement.
The community must now continue to build support for the tourism and jobs rich Cape Peron Coastal Park option – Rockingham’s Kings Park of the South
