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.

FORMER Melville councillor Pam Neesham met up with the Chook this week for a chat about the former Woodside Hospital. 

She talked of her enormously successful family who, despite a raft of successes in many fields of endeavour, are best known for decades of success in AFL, water polo and other sports.

That’s how the wildly successful ‘cousin’ Sam Kerr’s name arose.

She didn’t bat an eye as she ticked off all the top-level Olympic and other representation and wins in her immediate family, and especially daughter Stephanie’s part in the Australian women’s water polo World Cup win in 1995. 

The straight-talking, ferociously independent local pollie from 1989 to 2001, said she’d been following the campaign to save the Woodside hospital site over the past few years.

She said three of her four children with husband David had been born in the maternity hospital, as had about 40 per cent of the ever-growing clans she had married into in the 1950s. 

“But it could have been much more,” she said offering to ask around the Regans, Millers, McManuses, Duggans, Sheas “and all the rest I hope to be talking about early next year” when she gives a talk on the family’s successes at the Melville History Society.

Mrs Neesham added she just couldn’t understand why the development of the site on such a scale was even being proposed in the middle of a residential suburb when Fremantle, no longer a retail centre, was crying out for new purposes as a city centre.

And what could be better than health services.

THIS week’s Speaker’s Corner comes from Mount Lawley neurologist CAROLYN ORR, who explains why so many medical doctors are concerned about the looming “human health emergency” posed by policies favouring fossil fuels.

ON Friday December 1, more than 50 medical doctors rallied outside Parliament House against WA’s support for oil and gas expansion. 

Why is the medical profession, usually so conservative, taking on both the state government and the fossil fuel industry?

Medical doctors recognise that the climate crisis is a human health emergency.

Climate change causes illness and death by driving extreme weather events, increasing risk of infectious diseases, causing air pollution, rising sea levels and biodiversity loss.

A warming climate threatens the very foundations of our health – reliable food supply, clean air and water, and safe shelter.

Our emergency departments and general practices are already seeing the health impact of climate change play out in real time, with hospitalisations increasing 10 per cent in a heatwave, and emergency department visits and deaths spiking during bushfires.

This climate crisis is driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas. 

This year is now confirmed as the hottest in human history (by a scarily large margin), with oil and gas-driven heatwaves, bushfires, droughts and flooding occurring around the country and across the globe. 

The same fossil fuels that cause climate change are also the largest preventable cause of air pollution, responsible for about 1 in 5 human deaths.

The science is clear that to halt the climate crisis, and secure a safe and liveable future for everyone, we need to phase out fossil fuels and replace them with renewable energies. 

But the WA state government is supporting oil and gas expansion despite the escalating evidence of the health impacts of climate change, most notably in their support for Woodside’s Burrup Hub project.

This will be Australia’s most polluting fossil project ever and is projected to release over 6 billion tonnes of dirty carbon emissions.

Medical doctors successfully took on the powerful tobacco industry half a century ago to protect human health.

Our focus is now oil and gas, which need to be phased out to protect us from the dire health impacts of global warming. We need an end to new oil and gas projects, an end to subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and to fast track a just energy transition towards a renewably powered economy.

We urge the state government to prioritise the health and wellbeing of Western Australians over the short term profits of the fossil fuel industry.

A COMPETITIVE monologuist from Joondanna has won silver at the World Monologue Games for a two-and-a-half minute speech where he broke into seven languages.

Jay Jay Jegathesan came in second in the main professional category, with judges scoring his performance of a self-written piece The Script Doesn’t Matter as an 8, just behind France’s Tracey Collis who won with a 10-pointer. 

Jegathesan’s second place was all the sweeter for having pipped the number one ranked world champion Hugo Capelato of Brazil, who got the third place this year with a 7-point speech. 

The global ranking points carry over year-to-year, and this year’s showing put Jegathesan at number 4 ranking in the vaunted main professional category.

Jegathesan said it was “a real honour” to finish on the virtual podium. 

“I never imagined I would get here. I came out of a 25-year acting retirement in 2020 when I took part in the first games, and prior to that, my last major acting credit was for The Tempest in the early 1990s at UWA’s Dolphin Theatre for the University Dramatic Society.”

He says “there is great value in participating.

“I won the bronze in the ‘endurance’ category of the inaugural games in 2020 with a piece called Soul Catcher, and I was lucky that up-and-coming West Australia director Steven John Mihaljevic saw this, and offered me a role in a film he was writing at the time called Violett.

“This has turned out to be the first feature film I am in.”

Jegathesan also holds number 2 ranking in the endurance category, with Australian actress Louise Chapman in top spot.

Before the Covid pandemic competitive monologuing was typically held live on stage, but in 2020 Australian producer and writer Peter Malicki started up the online-based World Monologue Games allowing competitors to film remotely.

With performers from 120 countries so far, Australia is a strong performer: We hold 151 ranked spots out of the 495 top rankings across six categories.

Meanwhile Violett has some local showings coming up at The Backlot Perth in January 2024, having already nabbed a couple of honours at the 2023 West Australia Screen Culture Awards.

PLANS to move a concrete batching plant out of Vincent and into Stirling have not been warmly welcomed across the border.

Stirling council this week unanimously voted to write letters to all parties involved expressing “concern” over the proposal.

Vincent council and many Claisebrook locals are desperate to see the end of two concrete plants so their neighbourhood can be rejuvenated. The plants have been operating on rolling time-limited approvals, with the idea that they’d eventually move out and let Claisebrook grow.  

 The current plan is for the plant owned by Swiss-based Holcim to move to the company’s Welshpool site, and for the plant owned by Sydney-based Hanson to move to an industrial lot on Linwood Court in Osborne Park, over the border in Stirling (“Concrete disapproval,” Voice, November 25, 2023).

The Osborne Park lot is currently occupied by Vincent council’s works depot, which would move to a Mount Claremont site offered up by the state government.

A Stirling council report from December 5 says: “The state government initiated a working group to identify alternative locations for the relocation of these batching plants… of particular concern is that the City [of Stirling] was not consulted at any stage during this process.”

Stirling officers were briefed about the idea by Vincent staff on November 7. Vincent councillors endorsed the idea on November 21.

Stirling councillor Lisa Thornton has now put up a notice of motion calling for mayor Mark Irwin to write to planning and lands minister John Carey, environment minister Reece Whitby, Vincent mayor Alison Xamon and Perth lord mayor Basil Zempilas to express the City’s “concerns”.

A written explainer by Cr Thornton says, “we are at a crucial juncture concerning the future of the Stirling community”.

Cr Thornton acknowledged the intent behind the time-limited approval was so that the plants would eventually move out and allow Claisebrook to host a “high-density, mixed-use community and transit-oriented development in the area”, and notes that is “a vision not dissimilar” to what Stirling is planning for its nearby Herdsman-Glendalough precinct. 

The Linwood Court lot is zoned “industry”, and a concrete plant would likely be classified a “permitted” use. That means Stirling council would be in for a fight if it refused permission, and the decision at risk of being overturned on appeal. 

A report by Stirling staff says, “this type of use has the potential for off-site adverse impacts and to discourage the development of sensitive land uses outside of the Osborne Park industrial area, as has been the case in Claisebrook”.

Councillors unanimously approved Cr Thornton’s motion, and sent Mr Irwin off to pen the four letters of concern.  

The plants’ approvals are set to expire on June 30 2024, and both companies are asking the WA Planning Commission to grant an extension to keep operating while they prepare to move out. 

Mr Carey, who’s been assisting the relocation attempts in his capacity as minister for lands, told us last week it’d been a difficult search: “I’ll be frank: Say the words ‘concrete batching plants’, and it’s not like anyone throws their hand up and says ‘please pick me’.

“It’s not as easy as it seems to just pick a spot,” as the location needs to be accessible to trucks and have plausible routes to construction sites.

Many Claisebrook residents want the WAPC to play hardball and deny any extension past June 2024.

But Mr Carey told us last week: “We need concrete production. We need it for the large infrastructure program happening right now in WA.

“Just for them to stop because their approvals expire would cause a disruption in concrete supply for housing and for major infrastructure, and we would likely see increases in costs for homebuilding.”

by DAVID BELL

A VETERAN Stirling councillor has played down her sharing of social media memes which have been criticised as having racist undertones.

Councillor Elizabeth Re is a prolific re-poster of memes, and while many are on contentious topics, one using the word “illegals” in reference to asylum seekers has put her in the spotlight.

The memes were posted to her personal Facebook page, which does not present her as a councillor nor use council iconography. 

One from the series featured an image of a British soldier and the text, “we owe illegals nothing and our veterans everything”. 

It was shared from a Facebook page called “Speak Up, Britain!”, a free-for-all page for posting political memes, many of them right wing and almost all of them blurry.

Blurry

Another featured a rural scene with all-caps text stating: “You came from there because you didn’t like it there, and now you want to change here to be like there. You are welcome here, only don’t try to make here like there. If you want to make here like there you shouldn’t have left there in the first place.”

The posts were highlighted by racial equality advocate Suresh Rajan on his own Facebook page, where he said: “The page from which she shares these posts is Speak up Britain. It is a notoriously racist page.

“I hope one of my media friends will pick up and run with this. And it is hoped that Mark Irwin mayor will do something about this rubbish,” Mr Rajan posted, tagging the mayor to alert him to the post. 

The community paper PerthNow – Stirling edition indeed picked it up and ran with it, quoting Mr Irwin as saying the posts had “racist undertones and inferred that migrants aren’t welcome.

“Cr Re’s comments do not align with city values. 

“On behalf of the city I strongly object to this message and have written to Cr Re to request that she reconsiders and apologises and/or remove these posts while the city follows any due process.”

PerthNow contacted Cr Re for comment but she was on leave.

At the December 5 council meeting’s public question time, resident and regular attendee Roland Hadley defended Cr Re’s shares: “Illegals is a term used by the media and in Parliament referencing people who come by boat to Australia. They are not migrants in this context, nor is it a racist term,” Mr Hadley.

He asked who’d tipped off the media about Cr Re’s posts, and Mr Irwin said, “you’d have to ask the media. It certainly wasn’t from myself ‚Äî you can do a [freedom of information request] on my emails”.

Cr Re, back from leave, spoke to the Voice this week but was guarded about not breaching Stirling’s restrictive communications policy.

“The only thing I can say is I will, and always have, supported veterans,” Cr Re said. “It’s about support of veterans above all else.”

Cr Re also drew a distinction that “illegals are different from migrants”, noting she herself was from a migrant family. 

The term “illegals” was popularised during former prime minister John Howard’s era but had fallen out of mainstream favour by 2010. It was revived by Scott Morrison in 2013 during his time as immigration minister, and then carried on by Peter Dutton through the late 2010s. A search of federal hansard shows Liberal MPs have eschewed the term in recent years. The last use of the word in Parliament was by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, on November 6.

by DAVID BELL