Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is in the nature of campaigns that fire up to protect the local environment that the defensive effort has to be maintained over a long period in which the intensity of a particular threat can surge and abate and surge again. With the release of the budget on Tuesday night, there are now thousands of people in my electorate who know the long fight to protect the Beeliar Wetlands is about to enter a critical phase. With the Abbott government's announcement that it will provide funding for the construction of Roe Highway stage 8, a large and hugely expensive road, the Save Beeliar Wetlands campaign will again become the only thing that stands between the Barnett and Abbott government's destructive proposal to wreck precious wetlands and cut local communities in half.

North and Bibra lakes form part of a chain of wetlands that runs north-south along the Perth coastal plain and is recognised for its importance to threatened local and migratory birds, as well as for the Indigenous heritage and wide community value. The environmental campaign to protect these wetlands dates from the 1980s, with the Farrington Road blockade. The battle to resist the cleaving damage of the Roe Highway extension began as far back as 2001. Through community engagement and contributions to the environmental assessment process, the campaign had a strong influence on the WA Environmental Protection Authority's 2003 report, which concluded:

… any proposal for the construction of the alignment of Roe Highway Stage 8 through the Beeliar Regional Park would be extremely difficult to be made environmentally acceptable.

The report went on to say:

… the EPA is of the opinion that the overall impacts of construction within the alignment, or any alignment through the Beeliar Regional Park in the vicinity of North Lake and Bibra Lake, would lead to the ecological values of the area as a whole being diminished in the long-term. Every effort should be made to avoid this.

Yet despite this categorical finding, and despite all the common sense that argues for an approach to freight planning that moves beyond the old and broken paradigm of building more and bigger roads, the Barnett government has resuscitated what many had hoped was a dead piece of freight network planning. As the member for Fremantle, I have argued against the construction of this road to nowhere since my first election campaign in 2007, at the time with the great counsel and support of Joe Branco. I was pleased to help achieve the removal of the Howard government tied grant funding conditions, which prevented the deletion of Roe 8 from the Metropolitan Region Scheme, and I am very disappointed that this did not occur before the election of the Barnett government.

I want to take this opportunity to recognise Kate Kelly, Felicity McGeorge and all those who play an organising role in the Save Beeliar Wetlands effort, an umbrella campaign that now comprises 12 local community groups and in excess of 2,000 signed-on members. I want to say to them that their work so far has been of great importance and impact and it is enormously valued within our community. I want to say to them that, in the fight ahead that will determine the fate of the ecosystem, the lakes and the parkland we love, I will be standing with you, with our community, to save Beeliar Wetlands.