By Catherine Watson

THERE’S a sign in Stanley Road warning drivers to slow down because of the wildlife.

This week the Planning Minister issued a permit allowing a sand quarrying company to clear vegetation to widen the road for a sand haulage route to its new quarry.

The permit allows 0.738 hectares of roadside vegetation to be removed from Stanley and McGrady roads, including four large trees.

It doesn’t sound much. Indeed, the standing advisory committee that considered the application described the removal as “relatively minor”.

But Stanley Road is a natural bush arbour, a continuous corridor of native vegetation and a busy wildlife corridor in the Western Port Woodlands.

“It’s their road as much as ours,” said Janet Grimes, a resident of the adjoining Adams Estate. “We’ve already lost the koalas and the lace monitors. Turn Stanley Road over to the sand trucks and we lose the kangaroos, wombats and echidnas too.”

And those four large trees that Heidelberg is allowed to remove? Large is a technical planning term. It means trees with a diameter of 70 centimetres at breast height. None of the trees in the photo at the top qualify for that description, though most of them will be removed for the road widening.

The committee acknowledged the conflict between protecting biodiversity and exploiting the Western Port Woodlands’ sand resources. It said the proponent was not required to achieve an “ideal” outcome, only an acceptable one, and that the benefits of the proposal had to be weighed against its environmental costs.

Faced with this dilemma, the committee voted for the sand, of course. 

The sand resource, it said, is of state significance and is needed to supply Melbourne’s construction industry and support more housing as metropolitan sand deposits gradually decline.

The fact that coastal woodlands are rare and diminishing didn't rate against that.

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On the map below, that strip of green in a largely cleared landscape is the Western Port Woodlands, the last significant forest in our region.

Not much, is it? You’ll see it’s pockmarked by sand quarries. 

Our community has fought for decades to protect it. Government ministers and MPs told us that we needed to look to the Distinctive Areas and Landscapes (DAL) process for permanent protection.

We believed them. More than 500 people made submissions about the woodlands to the DAL hearing in 2023, making it the single biggest issue raised.

A panel of ecologists, including the Minister’s own expert witness, concluded that the Western Port Woodlands are nationally significant and provide irreplaceable habitat for many common and threatened species.

They recommended an Environmental Significance Overlay (ESO) across the entire woodland corridor, covering both public and private land.

The final Bass Coast Statement of Planning Policy recognised the woodlands as an area of “outstanding environmental significance” and “a distinctive attribute” of Bass Coast. It also acknowledged long-standing community concerns about the impacts of sand quarrying on biodiversity.

But rather than resolving the conflict, and despite the expert evidence presented to the hearing, the policy called for further work to map the woodlands, assess their values and evaluate existing protections.

Under the Planning and Environment Act 1987 (Vic), the SPP carries a legislative obligation to protect and conserve the declared attributes of the DAL. At this stage, however, the State Government washed its hands of its own planning process and said any further work was up to the Bass Coast Shire Council.

The council committed $500,000 and is now preparing an ESO for the woodlands. The aim is not simply to preserve what remains but to rebuild habitat links between the major reserves so threatened species can move through the landscape.

In June, the council asked the State Government for an interim ESO to protect the woodlands while the work is completed. It took three months even to get a reply, and then it was the Department of Transport and Planning asking for more information.

The clock is ticking. The election is less than two months away and caretaker provisions begin on November 3. If an interim ESO is not in place before the election, the opportunity will almost certainly drift away under the next government.

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While coastal woodlands are diminishing, there is no shortage of sand.

Major resources were gazetted this year on cleared farmland in Cardinia and Baw Baw shires, avoiding the environmental conflicts found in areas such as the Western Port Woodlands.

We had been assured that the gazetting of these new sand areas meant the Extractive Industry Interest Area (EIIA) designation that has hung over the woodlands for decades would finally be removed.

In July, Resources Victoria did remove the EIIA from the former Holden proving ground but retained it over virtually all the remaining woodland on private land in Bass Coast. 

The overlay includes a 500-metre buffer around existing quarries to discourage incompatible use or development. In places, the woodland corridor is less than a kilometre wide, so the buffer effectively covers it.

Then last month, without consultation, the Planning Minister gazetted changes to planning schemes across Victoria, including Bass Coast’s, requiring councils to facilitate resource extraction in Extractive Industry Interest Areas.

So on one hand, the council is doing the work to protect the woodlands. On the other, the State Government is requiring it to facilitate sand quarrying within them.

We were told the Distinctive Areas and Landscapes process would resolve the land-use conflict between protecting areas of high biodiversity and extracting sand.

We were deceived. Despite years of promises, the nationally significant Western Port Woodlands remain as vulnerable as ever to sand quarrying.

Ed Thexton, president of the South Gippsland Conservation Society, puts it this way:

“We struggle to retain or rebuild our natural heritage by reproducing pale facsimiles at great effort and expense. The utter irony is that here intact is a place with the lot. The Woodlands retain not just the flora but the fauna – the goannas, the bandicoots, the antechinuses.

“Come on, Victoria. If at this time in this place we cannot adjust our priorities to retain these woodlands then nothing we do in conservation has any real meaning.”

Save Western Port Woodlands is calling on the Planning Minister to honour the intent of the Government’s own Statement of Planning Policy for Bass Coast: sign off on an interim ESO over the woodlands and remove the EIIA.

The community has done its part. The council is doing its part. This Government needs to finish the job before the election.

Catherine Watson is a member of Save Western Port Woodlands.