Thirty minutes east of Hobart, at a nondescript shopfront in Lauderdale, the Sydney-based Walker Corporation looks out through glass windows at the bay it would destroy.

If Walker gets its way, the Ralphs Bay Conservation Area will be revoked and bought (we suspect) for a song.  Ralphs bay will be dammed, and around  two and a half million tonnes of material excavated and in filled for 800 waterfront homes and a 200 berth marina.
   
As part of the deal, the never-functional Lauderdale canal will be opened, connecting the Derwent’s heavy metal and introduced pest-ridden waters with the clean and clear Frederick Henry Bay.  Roches Beach will be cut in half by rock training walls hundreds of metres out to sea, erosion of the foreshore will be inevitable.  

So we will have lost a bay and a beach, a designated Conservation Area and internationally significant bird habitat.   Ralphs Bay is a tragedy waiting to happen if we don’t fight the Walker plan with every cell of our beings, every breath. 

It is an understatement to say the community is appalled.  We are seething.  This proposal should never have got past the first closed-door meeting, and now we are being put through a sham community consultation process – driven by Walker – while the State Government sits back and watches the spectacle.

Who is being conned here?  Walker, going through a consultation process for a proposal the State Government knows full well the community will reject?  Or Us – stressed and distressed, juggling family, study and work while we try to fight a corporate giant in a bout where no one has told us the rules. 

There are plenty of people in the peninsula community who fear the winner has already been decided.

We have the repeated assurances of Paul Lennon and Judy Jackson that nothing is signed and sealed on this one – and we will take them at their word.    But we’re not happy…

What’s the point of paying all those highly qualified public servants and experts to produce the State Coastal Policy, the State of the Derwent Report and the State of the Environment Report if our government will not act on their recommendations?  In theory, all the legislative and policy weight is there to kill off this proposal before it takes breath.  In theory, a designated Conservation Area should be sacrosanct.  In fact, the theory changes subject to economic convenience and political whim.  It’s not good enough.

No coastal community should have to go through this trauma again.  Save Ralphs Bay Incorporated is pushing for a complete overhaul of the State Coastal Policy, to sharpen its teeth, and for the passing of anti-canal estate legislation modelled on the NSW example as a matter of urgency.  The Tasmanian Greens have taken the first step in this process and we urge both the State Government and the Liberals to put aside their own political biases, to support the anti canal estate bill.

You only have to go to the Gold Coast to see why such legislation is necessary.  Canal estates are like a disease – recognised as such by the NSW Government which has prohibited them, and the Queensland, Victorian and Western Australia Governments who are moving in the same direction.   

The list of environmental consequences includes wetland habitat destruction, wildlife mortality, declining fisheries, erosion damage, loss of public access and on it goes.

The Walker Corporation doesn’t like it when we describe their concept as a Gold Coast canal style development – but there is no other name for it and there is only one way to respond to it.  Walker must be stopped before it makes any tracks.

The threat to Tasmania is real.  If a precedent is set, it will be hard to go back.  Ralphs Bay, Dunalley, Triabunna, St Helens, Binalong Bay, Port Sorell – so many possibilities to feed that voracious appetite.  And it’s so cynical; so transparently about greed.  Our real estate values have gone up and now we’re suddenly very appealing indeed.

Guaranteed, there are development speculators who are studying the map of Tasmania in great detail and making plans for the next 10, 20 and 50 years.  Other than in passing, the lines they won’t necessarily acknowledge are those around our protected places. 

Too many developers see a thing of great natural beauty only for what it can do for them.   It’s the ‘gimmee’ factor where nothing is sacred.  They didn’t really see Tasmania before the boom, didn’t appreciate her wild beauty and unspoiled places.  They sure do now.

Like a virgin bride, our Conservation Areas, National Parks, World Heritage Areas have that tantalising appeal of untouched exclusivity – and the opportunity for monopoly if you make the right arrangements with the caretaker.

Sadly, this State Government is flirting with development interests who just don’t get it. Instead of putting conservation values first in our protected places and along our coastline, there has been a strong trend towards a much cruder value construct.

This was no better demonstrated than a week ago today when that maestro of ‘whatever it takes’, the incorrigibly shonky Graham Richardson flew into town with his multi-millionaire mate, Lang Walker, and walked straight into the Premier’s office.  What a trio they must have made up there on the eleventh floor, looking out over our harbour: Paul Lennon, Richo and the developer who says, “To understand me, look around you.”

I wonder, did Lang Walker have a good look around him during his Tasmanian visit?  Does he understand what makes this place so precious to us, a place we’ll fight to protect again and again from the forces of greed? 

If he had, surely he’d recognise how toxic his project is to our sense of place and community, and say “Sorry Paul, I see the error of my Corporation’s ways in seeking to trash a Conservation Area, and rob Tasmanians of a piece of their coastline.  We’re pulling out.”

Don’t we wish.

A government spokesperson said the meeting was to brief the Premier on the community consultation process.  Yeah, right.  As if these wealthy men from Sydney would know what’s happening down in Lauderdale.  A spokesperson for Walker said the Ralphs Bay project was only one part of the discussion between the threesome.  Now we’re really scared!

Our group, Save Ralphs Bay Incorporated, represents the community.  Most of us are the Premier’s Franklin constituents.  While we have been to see Environment Minister, Judy Jackson, we have not yet been granted an audience with Paul Lennon.  And, we have asked.

It’s an interesting set of priorities.

The consequence of these machinations over Ralphs Bay is that people in our community feel disempowered, as if big business and politics are colluding to trample their wishes.  They feel they’re about to be robbed. 

Save Ralphs Bay Inc has a stall outside the Walker office in Lauderdale.  It is staffed by volunteers every day weather permitting and we are in direct contact with the local community.   People are leaving the Walker office angry and coming to talk to us.  They want to sign petitions, write letters, deliver newsletters, hold placards… whatever it takes… to register their protest in a tangible way. 

The vast, vast majority just loathe the Walker proposal.   It’s coming straight from the heart, straight from the love of our beautiful bays and all that they represent.

The politics of it all gives us cause for hope.  The State Liberals do not support the Walker plan, nor does Harry Quick, and the Greens Nick McKim  has condemned it from the start.  And we know there are Labor MPs who share this common view.  We look forward to their ‘coming out’ in the not too distant future…

Picture the scene if Walker – against all morality and logic - gets the go-ahead.  It is Election year 2006 and our elected State Parliamentarians are up for their four yearly review.

Ralphs Bay is a giant mudhole full of trucks and dozers.  The jarring noise of construction fills the day, the two lane road is clogged with heavy machinery traffic and the birds are gone.   Our elected ALP Franklin representatives – Paul Lennon, Lara Giddings and Paula Wriedt – must surely grasp the potential for their own suffering.

Hopefully, they will save themselves the anxiety and take speedy action as soon as Walker Corporation reaches its June 22nd deadline for the end of community consultation.

Cabinet must decide without argument or delay, to reject this aggressive and destructive proposal.  The State Labor Government should have the courage and the heart to say No to Walker.  It should refuse to accept a development application for the Ralphs Bay Village project.   It should say, Tasmania deserves better.  

We are in a position to demand the best - environmentally and aesthetically sustainable developments.  Good developments – IN THE RIGHT PLACES. We must never trade our treasures for trinkets.  To do so would be a betrayal of this island and our future.

The community has already made up its mind.  Our view is as clear as the waters of Frederick Henry Bay.  Our Conservation area is not for sale, our bays, our beaches and our lifestyle are not for sale. 

We will fight them for our beaches…