Perth Voice Interactive

THE Friends of Coolbinia Bushland are gearing up for another Djilba of restoring remnant bush, and are inviting folk along to get to know their rare urban woodland on Bradford Street.

The group’s now marked a year tackling the exotic weeds that had been crowding out the native vegetation, having revived a dormant Friends group that fell away many years ago.

On September 4’s open day they’re marking the Noongar transitional season of Djilba with a smoking ceremony by Phil and Neville Collard, guided walks through the area to learn Noongar knowledge, and some millennial ventures like workshops on how to take a decent wildflower pic with a mobile phone.

FoCB coordinator Karen Lee says it’s calming and restorative to spend time in urban bushland, a bit like a bush holiday but with less travel time.

“Local bushland is an undiscovered gift right here in our neighbourhood. You have a chance to step out of your everyday experience to see the wonders of more than 90 local plant species, many of them in flower right now. Once your senses are attuned, you can return whenever you like.”

The group holds regular busy bees and they’re hoping more people get onboard with helping preserve the patch.

“Urban bushland needs people to know it and care for it to keep it safe as habitat, for our enjoyment right now, and for future generations. If we don’t look after this place, it will be lost,” Ms Lee says.

Phone photographer Sophie Xiang is heading along to teach people how to get the most out of their phone flower pics.

“I love the bright colours and rugged beauty of Western Australian wildflowers,” she says.

“It’s amazing that you can see them in the city too in places like Coolbinia Bushland.”

And she sees a lot of character in our flora: “I like taking portrait-style photographs of flowers to convey their unique personalities.”

It’s on Saturday September 4 from 1pm and everything’s free, but some events have limited numbers so plug “Coolbinia” into trybooking.com to nab a spot.

by DAVID BELL

A HUGE request for a $25 million ‘contribution’ to the WACA pool project has landed on Perth council’s door.

It comes as the state government tries to get the current council to make good on its predecessors’ tentative agreement.

Back in September 2020, just weeks before the current line-up was elected, the council was being run by caretaker commissioners appointed by the state government. The commissioners agreed to contribute the $25m to the WACA pool and $10m for Roe Street upgrades as part of the Perth City Deal between all three tiers of government.

But the pool funding was “subject to council’s future consideration and endorsement of a business case”.

The new council didn’t like the cost, estimated at $151m over its 40-year lifespan (a figure disputed by the state government) and reckoned it was better off looking for another site and doing its own thing.

But the state still wants a “one off” contribution to honour the commissioners’ commitment, sending a request for the $25m earlier this month.

Hard cap

Perth council CEO Michelle Reynolds has advised the council it might be a good idea to pay up as long as they get it in writing that it’s a hard cap that doesn’t include any maintenance.

Her recommendation to councillors notes they’ve been keen on eventually getting some kind of pool in the city, and paying $25m as a one-off was probably the quickest and cheapest way to go about it.

Councillors vote on whether to pay up at the August 31 meeting. 

Tacked onto the request for $25m was also another optimistic invoice from the s tate for a $10m contribution for “unspecified CBD transport initiatives”.

It’s separate from the $10m the council committed for Roe Street upgrades (which has now ballooned in price and will cost them $12.5m), but they still don’t know what’s in the transport mystery box.

Ms Reynolds reckons councillors should say no, given “the lack of clarity”, and also noting the city pays millions to the state in parking levies every year for an increasingly bloated fund that’s meant to cover that stuff.

by DAVID BELL

AFTER years of disputes, frustrations and delays around Vincent council’s heritage and character area retention scheme, there’s finally some renovations coming to speed things up.

The policy was intended to let people nominate their neighbourhood as a heritage area or character retention area, to ensure future development fitted the existing character.

Owners of at least 40 per cent of properties in a proposed area had to agree to nominate it, then neighbours would gather for council-facilitated workshops to nut out the exact details they liked and discuss what to encode into a policy framework. The council would have the final vote over whether to declare a retention area. 

But in the six years the policy’s been around progress has been achingly slow and has led to heated arguments among neighbours, and only a few small areas have been declared.  

The process “took significant time, did not result in a clear understanding by the community of the proposal and led to disagreement within the community and frustration in the delay of an outcome”, a Vincent council report says. 

Under the new policy locals will still nominate an area and gather the 40 per cent of signatures, but instead of public workshops bogged down with planning policy framework, council officers will do the work of translating what locals like about the street into planning-speak and drafting up rules.

Once guidelines are ready the workshops will be held, with a council vote still the ultimate decider. 

West Perth local Marie Slyth is hopeful a quicker process will mean fewer old houses are demolished while waiting for the nominations to be processed.

“It’s so important we protect this slice of history and hold onto these beautiful homes,” she says.

She’d nominated several streets over the years but said it was always a race against time: In some cases like that of Florence Street, it took so long for the nomination to be finalised that a lot of the old homes had already been demolished or sold to new owners who didn’t like the retention area idea. 

Mayor Emma Cole says “we were losing momentum if we can’t act quickly on a nomination request”. 

She says guidelines stemming from the new system will still be based on the residents’ nomination but be quicker for council staff to draw up and then put out for feedback. 

Rather than tackling whole chunks of a suburb, smaller sections are encouraged to nominate. Then if nearby segments like the idea they can jump onboard too, rather than trying to get a widespread area to reach consensus. 

The policy changes still have to be advertised then it’s hoped five nominated areas in the backlog can be handled. 

by DAVID BELL

THE streamlined rules follow a fierce neighbourhood dispute around a patch of Mount Hawthorn being declared a character retention area.

March’s council meeting was peppered with comments from those for and against. Those in favour wanted to keep the area’s interwar houses, those against said they shouldn’t be prevented from developing their properties by a minority of history fans. 

“How dare the council even consider this ridiculous change,” Mount Hawthorn resident Robert Gemelli said in March. “It surely cannot be legal to have different rules for different streets. My home is my home and when I want to develop it, I should be allowed to build my dream home within normal rules as is now.”

A resident in favour of character retention said: “I live next door to an ugly modern house that was built in 2012-2013, despite the objections of many residents who were relying on the council to ensure that street character was retained. I therefore hope that this new policy will prevent this from happening again.”

From an initial plan to cover a wide area of Kalgoorlie Street, Buxton Street, The Boulevarde and Matlock Street, councillors eventually settled on adding just a segment of the latter two. 

MAYLANDS’ heavily congested railway crossing at Caledonian Avenue will be closed by the state government, but locals fear pedestrians and cyclists will face such lengthy detours they’ll drive instead.

In 2017 Labor promised to close the crossing and upgrade surrounding crossings to ease traffic flow, as drivers were routinely waiting more than 10 minutes to cross. The boom gates are lowered 150 times a day for a total of nearly four hours, causing traffic to bank up along Whatley Crescent and Railway Parade.

Removing it wasn’t precisely costed but the government estimated it’d come in at between $50m-$70m.

On August 25 transport minister Rita Saffioti announced a more frugal $15m plan to close the crossing in the first half of 2022 (said to be necessary for the Forrestfield-Airport Link), upgrade the intersections at 7th and 8th Avenue, and make the whole of Whatley Crescent two lanes to give people an easier drive through alternative routes.

But it’s a long hike round for pedestrians or cyclists. 

Bayswater councillor Elli Petersen-Pik says in the past four years he has several times advised Metronet and the state government they needed to provide a safe crossing for pedestrians and cyclists, such as an underpass.

“It’s a main crossing for many people from one side of Maylands to the other,” he said.

There’s a lot of housing on the north side and schools and shops on the south.

Now pedestrians will have to hike at least another 350m to venture down under Maylands train station’s crossing, and cyclists are in for a detour of at least 500m each way.

Cr Petersen-Pik says the crossing closure is required but is concerned that in the mitigating measures “all the focus is about cars”. He fears that such lengthy and inconvenient detours will just end up with more people choosing to drive, especially people who used to ride with their kids to school. Since raising the issue many locals have echoed his concerns.

“It goes against what we’re trying to do on council, the Safe Roads to School plan,” Cr Petersen-Pik says.

He says there should’ve been more consultation ahead of this week’s surprise announcement.

The state government media release says a road bridge at Ferguson Street, close to Caledonian Avenue, had been considered, but 14 homes would have to be demolished and more traffic would’ve ended up on local streets. There’s no mention as to whether a lower-impact underpass or pedestrian bridge was considered.

It does give pedestrians a small boon, saying pedestrian access at Eighth Avenue and Guildford Road (the crossing south from the Maylands Station) will get upgraded. 

Cr Petersen-Pik’s planning to raise the issue again with the state in a briefing to councillors scheduled for this week.

by DAVID BELL

AS local government elections draw near Perth council is scrambling to patch a number of “high risk” weaknesses in its vetting processes that could lead to election fraud.

Many of the risks identified by a recent audit relate to the troubled roll of property owners and occupiers; people who claim a vote because they own a non-residential property or rent a property in the city. 

It was identified as being a source of bogus voters by the City of Perth Inquiry, which found it “common practice” for people to invent sham leases to run for council or cast a vote.

Trying to keep out bogus voters was a headache in 2020.

A last minute surge of voter applications in 2020 led to undertrained council staff interpreting complex legislation throughout the weekend to get information on several thousand applications to the WA Electoral Commission in time.

The audit states there’s a “likely” risk (between 66 and 95 per cent) that “applications are inconsistently and/or incorrectly assessed resulting in errors and potentially non-compliance with the act”.

With applications closing August 28, the council’s governance staff are on a three-week leave ban to process the influx of applications, and an election coordinator has been employed for a three-month stint.

The council’s software for storing applicant information and the roll was also found to be hot garbage, or as the audit delicately puts it, a “problematic technology solution intended to be decommissioned”.

The audit says the software’s so complex anyone without a background in infotech can’t even fully use it, and the only person from the last election who was fully trained has switched to another department. 

And while it’s complex to use fully, it also hasn’t been secured, making it pretty simple for a staffer to blunder their way in and pilfer a copy or edit data even if they don’t understand the full workings.  The audit says the lack of security “increases the risk of error or possibly election fraud occurring which may not be detected”. 

There’s no time to replace the software before this election so the council will try to train up a new person to be fully across the byzantine program, and clamp down on who can make edits.

Councillors will have to decide whether to upgrade the software at the next budget. 

ONGOING problems with vetting voters has been worsened by a lack of help from the WA Electoral Commission, a Perth council-commissioned audit declares.

The 2021 audit was carried out by KPMG Legal and found “communication between the WAEC and the City of Perth has been largely ineffective”.

At 2020’s election Perth council staff identified concerning cases of people applying to vote, but when asked to provide proof of a lease they presented forms that showed their first date of occupation was after they’d applied to vote. 

A 2020 audit reckoned “on this basis the occupier nominee claim should have been rejected rather than accepted,” but the council’s rejections “were later overturned on appeal by the claimants to the WAEC”.

The new 2021 audit says the council has never received an explanation from the WAEC, setting the stage for a possible repeat.

Risk

Another risk stems from the WAEC not wanting to train external temporary staff brought in to handle the extra election workload. 

They’re dealing with voter applications but don’t get training about “the release of sensitive information and the potential implication this has for the city if this type of information was to be leaked”, and the audit flags 

a medium risk that “sensitive information may be released inappropriately to councillors, city staff, or the general public”.

The council tried to train the temps via informal slideshows but reckons the full resources of the WAEC are needed to get them up to speed. The audit says “the city has contacted the WAEC to determine the possibility for the agency to provide training, this request was declined”.

Instead the council will try to train up all governance staff who’ll then try to train the temps in time. Temps will also be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement this election.