The release of draft legislation to retrospectively approve a wharf through sensitive dune systems on Robbins Island demonstrates exactly what many experts and coastal communities feared – government is bulldozing long-established environmental settings at the behest of a multi-national corporation, so it can build an industrial development where otherwise it would be prohibited.
This has implications for sensitive mobile dune systems across the state and long-standing policy protections that, in the Minister’s own words have ‘served us well in protecting the coast and providing for sustainable development’.
Despite receiving legal advice in March that supposedly substantiates these retrospective changes, this advice has not been released and the Minister has failed to name one development, aside the Robbins Island wind farm, that has been approved contrary to the State Coastal Policy.
The Greens again call for the release of government legal advice claimed to justify this retrograde move, so as to inform debate on the bill and the public submission process.
It is telling that the much quoted advice that has prompted this retrospective legislation has still not been released, or even summarised.
As an island with an extensive, sensitive coastline and an brand built on pristine and protected, interfering with a live court Supreme Case that is seeking to protect the coast by changing foundational policy is an aggressive backward step.
Make no mistake, this is Government acting for a multi-national corporation wanting to build a development that should never have been proposed in the first place. Robbins Island is not only a sensitive natural environment of coastal dunes and threatened migratory birds, it is an ancient Aboriginal Cultural Landscape that has a long and turbulent shared history.
Australia and Tasmania needs new renewable energy projects but they can’t come at a cost to the environment and longstanding, well-established protections that ‘have served us well’.
