More grounds for sacking Bass Coast Shire Councillors

 There was an excellent response in this week's South Gippsland Sentinel Times newspaper to the outrageous nonsense last week from Cr Mat Morgan and the Save Westernport Woodlands cult. Rob Parsons from The Gurdies urges everyone to learn from the woodlands’ history

LAST week’s Sentinel-Times’ report

on Bass Coast Shire Council’s request

to the Planning Minister for interim controls over the Western Port Woodlands

did what most local coverage of this forest has done for some years.

It presented the fight to protect the

Woodlands as a fight that began recently.

That framing has an appeal.

It also erases a chapter of local history

that everyone with an interest in these

woodlands ought to know.

The Woodlands were saved once already.

It happened in the mid-1990s, under a

Coalition state government, and it happened because the community here refused to accept anything less.

The vehicle was the Sand Extraction

Strategy Lang Lang to Grantville.

Melbourne needed a long-term plan

for sand supply and the coarse sand under this coast was too valuable to leave

unplanned.

The community understood that.

It also understood what was at stake.

The nature reserves and Crown land

stretching from The Gurdies through

Grantville toward Lang Lang are the

largest remaining piece of intact coastal

woodland in Victoria.

From the outset the community made

its position plain.

Public land was not on the table.

Everything else could be negotiated.

Public land was not.

The community effort was carried by

residents whose names deserve to be remembered.

Meryl and Hartley Tobin, working

through the South Gippsland Conservation Society, were central to it.

Anne Westwood, who today sits as a

community representative on the Grantville Quarries Reference Group, worked

alongside them through a separate

group and was part of the same effort.

They did not demand.

They requested, and they put forward

a proper, reasoned and well-considered

case.

Two Liberal figures made that position

stick.

Alan Brown, the Member for Gippsland

West and Deputy Leader of the Party,

backed his community without qualification and took direct action to see the

required protection put in place.

Rob Maclellan, as Planning Minister,

backed the community request and

implemented it, taking the Strategy

through to Gazettal on those terms.

Public land was excluded from extraction.

The only exceptions were a handful of

blocks already tied up in pre-existing

tenure that could not be unwound.

Everything now called the Western

Port Woodlands sits, and has always

sat, inside that carve-out.

If the current effort is to be lasting, its

most useful next step is not another letter to another minister.

It is to sit down with the people who

negotiated the original strategy and

work out how to reinforce what that

strategy already delivered.

The Woodlands were saved once, by

good, well-meaning people working together in the community interest and by

a Coalition government willing to listen.

That is a story worth remembering,

because it is the story that got us to a

position from which the current fight

can be fought at all.

Rob Parsons, The Gurdies