Perth Voice Interactive

Opinion piece by ANDREW SMITH, former mayor East Fremantle and democratic town planning expert.

THIS Thursday the fate of the historic Woodside maternity hospital, birthplace of 50,000 West Australians including the wildly popular Sam Kerr, will be decided. 

As will most of the intact rich history generated by the site over the last 100 years which will likely be swept aside by ‘the stroke of a bureaucratic pen’.

And it’s already looking very ugly with what appears to campaigners a ‘complete takeover’ of agencies of government like the WA Planning Commission and the WA Heritage Council by the powerful and pushy property industry. 

This rot in the WA planning system has its roots in the late 1990s when then WA planning minister Richard Lewis began a very strong pro-development campaign. 

It gathered pace under Liberal premier Colin Barnett in 2014 and then ‘went nuclear’ under Mark McGowan. It is marked by powerful attacks by the industry on government, especially local governments, which cower under its attacks

An uncompromising planning report by the bureaucratic State Development Assessment Unit to be considered by the autocratic WA Planning Commission has effectively dismissed every single objection from a raft of local residents likely to be adversely affected by a massive, old-fashioned, five storey, hospital style institution which will completely dominate the site and surrounding area.

It also completely ignores the current expert opinions of the History Council of WA, eminent local historians such as Professor Charlie Fox of the University of WA, Professor Deborah Gare and Dr Jan Gothard of Murdoch University, and of top health economist and planner Rhonda Kerr who unceremoniously dismissed the proposed model; Let alone all the experts who over the past 10 years painstakingly documented and identified high conservation values requiring full heritage protection for the whole site which the WA heritage council granted some years ago.

Experts

Worst of all, the planning report fails to even name any of these prominent public experts. 

It rudely renders them invisible to a very critical world, purportedly to protect their privacy.

If the development proposal sails through as expected it will ultimately kill off 60 per cent of the protected buildings, and with this destruction all the rich and important cultural history of the site. 

Woodside House, the grand former home of one of the colonial gold rush era Merchant Princes of Fremantle, is due to have internal walls removed, doorways bricked in, other doors put in to retro fit four modern apartments, thereby destroying its interior heritage. 

The massive building proposed also wipes away an enormously important locus of women’s history, a place for women’s labor and the birth of children, which was campaigned for strenuously more than 70 years ago. 

The campaign was led by The (ALP) Women’s Labor Movement, the Nationalist Party’s Florence Cardell-Oliver – the first female Cabinet minister in Australia – and a host of supporters who wanted for southern suburbs women a service equivalent to King Edward maternity hospital in Subiaco.  

While the campaign gathered strong support it was largely run by women for women. And many of the women who then staffed the new maternity hospital were strongly committed to buiding a state of the art facility which they did.  

The locals in East Fremantle today are being dismissed with the same disrespect as scores of others across Perth and Fremantle in a fast-emerging series of ‘urban land wars’ likely to threaten the future of the WA Labor government which dominates the WA parliament. 

The three-year-old Woodside redevelopment proposal is by Fresh Fields, a partnership of Hall and Prior Aged Care Group and a WA government entity, the Fire and Emergency Services superannuation board which reports to WA treasurer Rita Saffioti who was the former WA planning minister. 

This commercial relationship in itself is worrying conflict of interest for which there has been no WA government probity assessment as far as we can tell. 

Ms Saffioti under the direction of then WA premier Mark McGowan introduced dramatic, temporary amendments to the WA planning act to fast track development to combat the 2020 covid pandemic.