2023-03-07
A busy start to the year covering issues of environment and sustainable habitat, penal conditions and animal welfare, and visiting university O-days
By Hon Brad Pettitt, MLC, Member for South Metropolitan
It’s been an excellent couple of months since my last MP report. We had our first two sitting weeks of WA Parliament in February, and I am excited for all the advocacy we have planned for 2023.
Climate and environment
January and February were quite busy on the climate and environment front. As many of you may know, over the last several weeks there has been much media coverage of Alcoa’s proposal to mine bauxite next to a dam in the Darling Scarp. Not only does this pose an immense risk to our environment, already-vulnerable Northern Jarrah forests, and communities, but it also is threatening to contaminate Perth’s largest drinking water source, the Serpentine Dam. I have been asking a series of Parliamentary questions on this to multiple Ministers and collaborating with stakeholders like WA Forest Alliance to draw attention to Alcoa’s harmful proposal. In a small piece of good news, WAFA referred Alcoa’s bauxite mining proposal to the EPA earlier this week which will hopefully enable greater public scrutiny.
The WA State Government finally made a long-overdue announcement that they will legislate a 2050 net-zero emissions target in WA. While this commitment is a good start, both the Greens and the scientists know that what matters most is a 2030 emissions target and cutting our emissions in this critical decade. Details have been pretty sparse on this announcement, but I anticipate that legislation will be introduced sometime this year. When it gets to the Upper House, I will of course be scrutinizing the bill closely and moving a number of amendments to ensure it is based on the overwhelming scientific evidence put forward by the IPCC, IEA, and numerous other expert organizations.
I also had the pleasure of catching up with Greens legend and good friend Bob Brown while he was in town. We both had the pleasure of speaking at the Save Perth Hills rally against a really bad Satterly development. Over 1,500 people showed up to make their voices heard! I also joined several Greens members in attending the screening of The Giants, a documentary film about Bob’s advocacy for Australian forests.
In some more somber news, the clearing in the Gelorup Corridor for the Bunbury Outer Ring Road is due to resume in March. In the lead up to this, I asked a question in WA Parliament about whether the Minister for Environment had been liaising with his Federal counterparts about the welfare concerns for Western Ringtail Possums in Gelorup. As many of you may remember, the first phase of clearing occurred in August of last year and during that time at least 4 of these critically endangered possums died. That is a simply unacceptable outcome and much more needs to be done to protect the animals in Gelorup whose habitat is being bulldozed. I have requested an updated Fauna Management Plan from the Minister’s office to see what changes, if any, have been made to better protect these endangered possums.
Sustainable Cities
I spoke at WALGA’s illuminating Urban Forests Conference in mid-February. It was encouraging to see general agreement from both local and state government about the urgency of increasing Perth’s urban canopy cover, which remains the lowest in the country and very unevenly distributed across the metro area. Given this agreement I’m baffled by the State Government’s ongoing lack of commitment to greening our suburbs.
Net Zero Perth continues to take shape with our contributors building a compelling picture of a near-future metro area repurposed to avert climate catastrophe and improving quality of life for all residents. Watch this space!
Housing
Labor has unleashed a storm of hard-nosed planning reforms that threaten to bulldoze local democracy in favour of developer-led ‘planning’ for increased density. As I’ve said in the media, increasing Perth’s urban density is critical to prevent further sprawl but the government’s bulldozer approach threatens to alienate communities from that process – and we know that planning without community is no planning at all – and derail quality, collaborative density projects in the long term.
In Parliament I continued The Great SAPPR Hunt! In late 2022, the State Government announced that they would be discontinuing the Strategic Assessment of the Perth and Peel Regions (SAPPR), which is ludicrous given the total lack of planning for Perth's future and our rate of urban sprawl. I asked the Minister to table in Parliament any reasoning for this decision and turns out a report on SAPPR was published in 2017. Disappointingly the government has chosen to sit on it and continues to withhold its release, I assume because it did not recommend discontinuing SAPPR. In the meantime, Perth continues to lack a framework for development when it’s never needed one more.
Perth’s rate of homelessness continues to grow distressingly. As a member of the Parliamentary Estimates Committee, currently the only crossbench (non-government) controlled committee, I continue to work on the Parliamentary Inquiry into homelessness.
Separately, I’ve been using Parliamentary Question Time to get some figures on public housing out of the State Government. These figures used to be publicly available on the Department of Communities website but now require using the Parliamentary process to access!
The answers we got are shocking. After six years of a state Labor Government, there are over a thousand fewer public homes available than when they were elected. It’s not surprising that there are now also more public housing applications on the waitlist. Factoring in couples, families and other arrangements, nearly two and a half thousand additional applications for a house probably means over ten thousand vulnerable West Australians waiting for housing in the middle of a cost of living crisis.
How have we come to this? A failure to build sufficient new public housing predates COVID by years, and it paints a damning picture of this government’s inconsistent commitment to those needing public housing.
Youth Justice and Roebourne Prison
Tragically it has been business as usual with WA's youth justice crisis. Conditions at Banksia Hill Detention Centre and Unit 18 continue to be horrific and escalated again at the end of February. I tried to get data on suicide and self-harm attempts and out of cell hours for kids at Banksia Hill and Unit 18, and it has emerged that the Department of Corrections has not accurately recorded these figures over the past year.
I had the opportunity at the Estimates Committee to directly quiz the Parliamentary Secretary for Corrections and senior Departmental officials about serious complaints about conditions and staff behaviour made by the Aboriginal Legal Service of WA on behalf of young people detained at Banksia Hill. These include allegations of inappropriate behaviour by staff, inhumane cell conditions and other incredibly concerning incidents reported by detained children from as far back as 2021. When put on the spot the Government couldn’t or wouldn’t enlighten us about how many complaints have actually been dealt with, or why ALSWA has been left in the dark. Hopefully I’ll get some answers when Parliament returns.
In the same Committee hearing I found out that inmates in Roebourne Prison will have to endure another summer without air conditioning. The State Government dragged its feet making to the decision to install the units despite knowing how complex the process would be, and inmates are once more paying the price as climate conditions in the Pilbara continue to become harsher. The situation at Roebourne Prison is a human rights crisis – and if it’s indicative of how the government will approach future-proofing infrastructure it actually owns against climate change, we’re all in trouble.
O-Days
I had the pleasure of joining and meeting progressive (and progressive-curious) students at the Curtin, UWA and Murdoch University O-Days! As always, it gives me hope and strength to meet with people who are just setting out on their professional journeys, or are building on existing skills and want to focus their skills and energy on making a more just and sustainable future.
Animal Welfare and Trespass bill
I spoke on the Animal Welfare and Trespass Bill 2021 in Parliament as it came up for debate … if it can be called debate! Sadly, this Labor Government refuses to accept amendments to their bills. If they did, I would have proposed several amendments to the parts of this bill that create an offense for trespassing on places of animal production. In the current Parliament the most I could do was to put on record the many sensible improvements to the bill that I’ve heard from constituents and the community.
Header photo: Hana Arai, Brad and Dominic Firmager at Murdoch O-Day, Friday 3rd March