Hansard debates

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (10:54): I rise to support Mr Davis’s motion:

That this house, pursuant to section 38(2) of the Planning and Environment Act 1987, revokes amendment C95 to the Moorabool planning scheme.

And I do so as I have done before. As Mr Meddick said, today a gathering of the community was on the steps of Parliament House, and I was pleased to be there to support them. But I have been out in the community on numerous occasions—in February, when a town hall meeting had 500 people present at very short notice, and again in March, when there were 1500 people in the town square. Unfortunately no other members of Parliament turned up on the second occasion, and the community are very disappointed that the Labor representatives in this electorate have been silent.

But I rise to speak to Mr Davis’s motion on the Moorabool planning scheme. It relates to a subject I have raised many times before—namely, the threat to dump mountains of West Gate Tunnel Project soil, potentially toxic soil, at the Maddingley Brown Coal site in the beautiful community of Bacchus Marsh. This is now my 15th contribution in the chamber on this matter, and I make no apology for that. It is exceptional because the circumstances are exceptional, and I do it again now because this may be the last chance we as a chamber—as a Parliament—have to correct the wrong that has been done. There are many more avenues to fight the cause outside of Parliament, but our vote today may be the final opportunity for this house to intervene directly and see common sense and democratic decency prevail. I am conscious we have very little time to do justice to this matter and that the few minutes we have available for this debate in no way do justice to the size of the threat to the Bacchus Marsh community.

Put simply, the site proposed for this soil processing and storage is utterly unsuited to the purpose. It fails the test on nearly every score. Visiting Bacchus Marsh, as I have done on numerous occasions, you simply cannot ignore the close proximity to schools, healthcare facilities, residential properties—indeed the whole town itself, and that is why the brown coal site was there in the first place—nor driving through can you ignore the size of the roads, so woefully unsuited to 460 additional heavy truck movements every day. Indeed, as I have said before, on the traffic arguments alone this proposal should have been binned. And, worse, they have to go through the iconic Avenue of Honour, that memory to fallen soldiers in the area, which is so precious to the community. That will also be put at risk. But worse still is the threat of contamination, not just to Bacchus Marsh Grammar school, which is just metres away, and the surrounding residential properties but to the vast swathes of prime agricultural land which surround the town and which draw water from the channels so closely adjacent to the Maddingley Brown Coal site.

Had ministers or department secretaries bothered to visit Bacchus Marsh either when making their decisions or in turning up to justify them to the people whose lives they are affecting, they could not have failed to have noticed the lie of the land. Built on hilly, undulating fields, Maddingley Brown Coal borders watercourses which serve some of our state’s finest fruit and vegetable producers. It takes no imagination or specialist knowledge to look at the topography and work out what happens when the rain falls. This is a site where no waterborne pollution should ever be risked. But that it may include PFAS-contaminated soil, the health effects of which are still imperfectly understood, makes it even more unconscionable. It is just inconceivable that in the entire state of Victoria there is not a flatter, drier, safer site, distant from populations and purpose built for this project that could have been found. This project has been years in the planning and yet this most basic requirement has been overlooked. So the scale, the geography and the physical situation of the project at the heart of a small residential community mean this idea should never have got off the ground.

Beyond even the inadequacy of the site, the partners chosen to operate it are hugely questionable. Corporate social responsibility, it is fair to say, is not a phrase they appear to understand. Indeed Moorabool Shire Council have been forced to take enforcement action against the company at VCAT over their existing operations. It is evident that throughout this process Maddingley Brown Coal have done nothing to convince the community that their desire for profit is balanced by any consideration of the health and happiness of their neighbours whatsoever.

But these are simply the problems with the proposal. I can understand that sometimes unpopular proposals arise. Government projects will never be universally popular. Large infrastructure in particular always creates losers as well as winners. The issue here is the process. As anyone involved in business knows, to do anything constructive in this state involves satisfying a huge number of obstacles—perhaps ‘safeguards’ is a fairer word. In this case, however, at every stage it is the process which has failed so badly. The whole point of our planning process, of our public health regulators and of our environmental laws is to stop inappropriate proposals getting through and allow only the considered and appropriate to make it past the drawing board. What has happened here is the complete subversion of the process. Planning processes, environmental laws—these are the reason that so blatantly wrong a proposal has got as far as it has got. So why then has this happened? It is clear it has happened because at every level this government was hell-bent on making it happen—to deliver a political promise to rescue a project in trouble. They have rammed it through at lightning speed. As Mr Davis said, the details of where you put the tunnel spoil should have been worked out years ago in advance of the project and the contract being signed.

As I have said in this house before, it is one of the worst cases of sustained mistreatment of a community by government I have ever seen—a transparent campaign from ministers who simply would not take no for an answer. My plea throughout has been that the people of Bacchus Marsh should not be made to pay for the ineptitude of the government. They cannot be collateral damage, chosen as the easiest solution to the problem of toxic soil, which should rightly have been considered at the very beginning of these works.

We have seen consultation conducted cynically, not widely, as Mr Melhem suggested. We have seen planning decisions removed from local hands. We have seen the Environment Protection Act 1970 altered by delegated legislation. This was perhaps the worst of all. It was not simply a technicality. The new regulations introduced without consultation or parliamentary debate mark a massive watering down of longstanding environmental protections surrounding the storage of potentially contaminated soil. They include the removal of the existing licensing process, with its requirements for public consultation and the fact that it can be challenged in VCAT; the reduction from 500 metres to 200 metres of the buffer zone required between sensitive land use and houses, health services and schools; and removing the safeguards previously placed on contractors.

The minister’s exemption certificate claims that ‘existing regulation’—that is, disposal in licensed landfill sites—is ‘disproportionately onerous in comparison to the risks to human health and the environment’. Tell that to the people of Bacchus Marsh, I might say. It says the regulations and environment management plan provide a ‘simpler, faster process’ which is ‘therefore less burdensome on industry’. In the minister’s own words it states:

… the proposed Regulations do not provide for public consultation regarding development of EMPs, nor review of EPA decisions by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (both of which would be available for works approval or licensing decision making processes required …

I said before I think it is an abuse of process to use a statutory rule to bypass full parliamentary process when the matter at hand is as controversial as this. It was even less acceptable at a time when Parliament had been unable to exercise its normal oversight. In short, we have seen protests ignored, letters unanswered, decisions unjustified and legislation rewritten by ministerial fiat. Even as an opposition politician it has been extraordinarily uncomfortable to explain to people just how badly they have been let down by the system which we all represent.

This government has cynically failed to consult meaningfully. Where they have consulted, they have ridden roughshod over every objection. The approach from department bureaucrats to local officials has been appalling. Documents have been denied and unreasonable deadlines demanded. There has been a total lack of consultation let alone the collaboration one level of government should reasonably expect from another. It is appalling that Moorabool shire has been reduced to issuing FOIs to obtain information. They have been shabbily treated at every turn.

We have a chance in this house to put a brake on this process, to force ministers to reconsider, to engage with the communities they have ignored to date and to restore the established environmental and planning protections they have disregarded. This house has once already acted to uphold proper process in demanding the government release documents relating to the West Gate Tunnel Project.

I want finally to come to the most recent development. It is a further indication that the situation I have outlined is not the product of my instinctive opposition to the Andrews government or of a local, single-issue, nimby protest group. As yesterday’s Age reported, the EPA has been forced into a humiliating backdown. In the face of legal action from the Moorabool Environment Group and Bacchus Marsh Grammar school they have conceded their grant of an environmental management plan to the Maddingley Brown Coal site was legally invalid. The EPA’s solicitor, Christine Giles, admitted formally that the regulator did not have the power to issue approvals for Maddingley to receive West Gate Tunnel Project waste. The environmental management plan submitted by Maddingley Brown Coal failed to satisfy the requirements set out in the new EPA regulations governing tunnel-boring soil—yes, even those cynically watered-down provisions.

It is extraordinarily damning that this environmental management plan, the rigour of which process Minister Wynne relies on repeatedly in the planning approval we now consider, can be so flawed. This extraordinary oversight occurred because from the start pressure has been placed on all those involved by the political masters behind this promise.

If this were a normal instance of amending a local planning scheme, I would have considerable sympathy with the argument that we should not become involved. In the normal course of things individual planning matters should not be in the purview of the Legislative Council. But this is the clearest of special cases. Here it is a minister of this Parliament who overrode local planning powers. It is a minister of this Parliament who disallowed via secondary legislation and without consultation public announcement or explanation hugely significant environmental protection legislation. At every stage it has been this government which has bent the rules or torn them up entirely to ram through this project.

It is not simply another planning decision; it is far more than that. It is not even about the proposal for Bacchus Marsh, important though it is to stop that. It is about doing the right thing for those Victorians to restore their faith not just in our planning process and our legislation but indeed in democracy itself. The government must be held to account for their behaviour in this case, and I urge all members of the chamber to look to do that today.