NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Breaking News from the Landfill Front

On Friday 29 April 2016, Kay and Robyn Davies met with Premier Hon. Colin Barnett and Hon. Jim Chown, MLC for the Agricultural Region, at the Flour Mill Café in York.

You can read a report of the meeting, and view a photo of the participants standing together outside the café, at https://www.facebook.com/Stop40YearsOfPerthRubbishInYork/

The report makes clear that the main topic for discussion at the meeting was the proposed SITA landfill at Allawuna.

I was pleased to see that in addition to making known their concerns about water, threats to agriculture and potential traffic problems along the Great Southern Highway, Robyn and Kay raised with the premier the unjust impact on the WA community and environment of the rules governing the operations of the State Administrative Tribunal and the Departmental of Environmental Regulation.

Those rules were established in legislation introduced by none other than the premier and current government. Their purpose was to facilitate ‘development’ in all of its aspects by enfeebling the community’s ability to obstruct or prevent it by way of action in the courts.

According to former York CEO Ray Hooper, as reported in the media some years ago, the aim of the new system was ‘to take the emotion out’ of planning processes. 

You know what we forelock tuggers are like—when we think proposed developments endanger the welfare, comfort, safety or livelihoods of our communities and families, we get angry and start screaming and jumping up and down, pulling our hair out and gnashing our teeth in impotent rage. 

Stupid bloody nimbies, the lot of us.

I don’t know how Mr. Barnett responded to Robyn and Kay, but I think I can imagine it. 

He would have clucked sympathetically, denied having known anything about a landfill in York and what SITA is up to, then told them that the relevant bureaucracies had completed their work and there was absolutely nothing he could have done or can do now to help the people of York in their fight against SITA’s proposal.

So, despite York’s historic importance and its value as a tourist destination—not to speak of its agricultural significance—and notwithstanding that he is now WA’s minister for tourism, he is and always was powerless to intervene.

I bet that’s more or less what he told Robyn and Kay, with the Hon. Jim nodding benignly in the background.

He would have stumbled his way along the bumpy rhetorical track pioneered by his minister for water.

Since Premier Barnett can’t help us, perhaps the Almighty wouldn’t mind stepping in to take his place.   Surely He could organise a minor earthquake or flood, or a series of major traffic pile-ups—no injuries, Lord, please, a few harmless truck roll-overs will do, so long as they inconvenience dozens of politicians and bureaucrats wending their way homewards to Perth—to demonstrate some of the dangers of permitting a landfill to be sited at Allawuna.

Meanwhile, back at the farm…

Not long ago I mentioned a rumour flying around York that SITA intended to pull out of the Allawuna deal.   The rumour predicted that this would happen because the company had bought Perthwaste’s much bigger landfill at North Bannister, thereby rendering Allawuna superfluous to its requirements.

Is that rumour true?  I’ve still no idea.  Until I receive confirmation from an unimpeachable source, namely SITA itself in the person of its state manager, Mr. Nial Stock, I shall go on burning candles to St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

What I can confirm, after closely examining a sheep’s entrails, is that Allawuna is still the property of Mr. and Mrs Chester.  The sale to SITA hasn’t yet gone through. 

After four years of uncertainty, this must be a trying time for the elderly vendors and the real estate agents representing them.  For their sakes as well as ours, I hope another rumour does turn out to be true, that somebody is waiting in the wings with an offer to buy the property and farm it without converting part of it into the site of a noxious industry. 

Now that would be providential—and a well deserved poke in the eye for anybody hoping to profit, at the community’s expense, from a rubbish-led recovery in York.

POSTSCRIPT Readers, I was wrong to imply above that Colin Barnett had simply washed his hands of the landfill issue.  He told the Shire and members of AVRA as well as Robyn and Kay that he intended to investigate the community’s concerns and discuss them with SITA.

See the report and accompanying photograph on the front page of the current edition of York and District Community Matters.

 
 

Robyn and Kay Davies, farmers of York

Hon. Colin Barnett, MLA for Cottesloe, Premier of WA, Minister for Science and Tourism

                     Hon. James Edward (Jim) Chown, MLC for the Agricultural Region