We should all be thankful that the Greens council which makes the decisions at Byron Shire isn’t in charge of Venice. Or New Orleans. Or London. Or Holland. All of those places would be flooded or submerged if they followed Byron Shire’s environmental policy of “planned retreat”.
This is a policy created by the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change. If and when, perhaps sometime later this century, the sea begins to rise around the coastline of Australia, DECC says we should give up and walk away from things we have built up since 1788. Low-lying coastal towns, large parts of our cities, roads, bridges, beachfront houses — they should all just be abandoned to the waves.
None of that has happened yet, but here in Byron Bay we’ve just had a little taste of what might occur when it does. The local Greens and some sympathisers who dominate Byron Shire Council rushed enthusiastically into the climate change fray during the recent east coast storms.
Beaches were chewed away and the erosion left some houses in the suburb of Belongil rather closer to the waterfront than their owners would have preferred. They were to be disappointed when they sought help from their Council. You’re on your own, they were told. Didn’t anyone tell you about planned retreat?
Being a self-reliant bunch and determined to protect their property, several of the residents arranged for deliveries of big sandbags known as geobags and the machinery to put them in place. That was when they found that Byron Shire Council was actually batting for the other team. They did their absolute best to hinder and oppose the residents of Belongil. Council enforcement officers arrived to force them to stop all protective measures.
One owner found himself in the NSW Land and Environment Court, where he spent several hundred thousand dollars fighting the Council for the right to stop his front yard falling into the Pacific Ocean. Lawyers’ letters from other beachfront residents have since been flowing into the Council, demanding the right to protect their properties. Mayor Jan Barham was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald last Monday as saying “each day we get a new legal threat.”
While other councils in the region have done their bit for residents all along the coast, Byron Shire Council has been sitting on its hands for weeks. Large chunks cut from the faces of dunes have left massive sand cliffs suspended perilously close to collapse, posing serious danger to children playing on the beach or people strolling by. The only road into the suburb is close to the brink.
Byron Shire Council claims their policy of planned retreat from rising sea levels is behind their opposition to permitting Belongil residents to protect their properties. Professor Ralf Buckley, Director of the International Centre for Ecotourism Research, Griffith University, Queensland, disagrees. In a paper published in Tourism Review International in 2008, he argued that the Council has “consistently and insistently acted against available evidence on climate change and related processes, and in the process has caused significant social and economic damage to the tourism industry and investment”.
In contrast to the Tweed and Gold Coast areas, and other coastal shires further south, he believes the Byron council has taken “an almost panic-stricken and highly politicised approach to potential sea level rise. In the process, it has caused damage to its tourism industry and its property values, undermining the town’s major source of employment and the Council’s own rate base”.
Byron Shire Council has just voted to put its “coastal management zone plan” on exhibition for public comment. It describes planned retreat as “a coastal management approach that acknowledges coastal processes and hazards as ongoing natural phenomena”. Under the scheme, property owners whose homes are within 20 metres of the ‘erosion escarpment’ will be required to demolish them and remove the debris at their own expense.
So keen are the Byron Greens to get moving that surveyors have already been at work at Belongil, checking out houses that might be the first to receive demolition orders. These could include the homes of a few fairly well-heeled citizens, but also a lot of less affluent residents such as the widowed lady in her 80’s whose home is her only asset. The fact that she lost her previous home in the Victorian bushfires of 1983 cuts no ice with the Council’s Green clique.
Community losses as a result of this folly will be huge: goodwill, millions in rates to the Council, affordable housing stock (of which Belongil contains a significant quantity) and employment. The small businesses at Belongil employ around a hundred people. The waste of resources in the destruction of homes and property will be enormous.
Unless the NSW Minister for Planning, Kristina Keneally, and Minister for Local Government, Barbara Perry, fail to prod Byron Shire Council into taking some sensible action over this issue, several hundred million dollars of prime real estate will be rendered worthless. An iconic Australian holiday town is in danger as a result of a conflict that will scar the social fabric of this area for decades.
*It’s time to declare an interest in this whole sorry saga: my wife and I have a townhouse at Belongil. Before the current drama began it was worth around $650,000.
While I don’t necessarily agree with the policy of planned retreat, when most of the current Belongil owners bought their properties the policy was already in place, controversial and well publicised. They purchased notwithstanding.
Clearly this is a complex issue and not quite as simple as those with a current vested interest make out.
DISCLOSURE: I am a former resident of Byron and didn’t chose to purchase at the Belongil based on advice from locals, my architect and the council as to the planned retreat policy and the strong probability of serious on-going erosion. I purchased on the beach at Suffolk Park, built a council-required demountable home and accepted that in certain circumstances the house would have to be removed
With sea level rise already underway, and an economy that will soon be focused on dealing with curbing carbon emissions the most sensible response in low lying areas is to gradually abandon them, and refuse point blank to approve any further building in such areas. People need to wake up to the fact that insurance companies are already refusing insurance in such low-lying areas – so people who choose to live there without insurance should get minimal community upport when the inevitable disaster occurs. If we are not prepared to plan our lifestyles around the predictable, ongoing sea level rise then forget Homo sapiens and welcome to Homo stupidity.
The catch is that in this case it is the sea which is rising, not the land which is sinking. In each of the examples you quoted, there is an entire nation which can dig deep to build seawalls etc to delay the inevitable. In the decades ahead we will watch the encroachment of the sea into every seaside city in the world. Here the sensible policy is not to waste resources on the indefensible, but to plan deep into the future for a “retreat from the sea”.
People may argue that it is “only 3 mm per year”. But that estimate by the IPCC did not include incalculable surges of the ice caps of Greenland and West Antarctica. It is wise also to remember that deeper water will deliver bigger waves and this worsening climate is sure to generate them.
While we’re all declaring interests, mine are that I own no property in NSW at all, am a rusted-on Labor voter and generally believe in the scientific evidence that climate change is occurring and sea levels may rise accordingly. That said, the council has no business preventing people from protecting their properties to the best of their abilities. To the extent they have a ‘planned retreat’ policy, this should simply be a declaration that if sea levels rise and root property values, then the council’s arse is covered because they predicted this would happen. If they have a political vested interest in actually wanting this to happen (which would be appalling if it were the case) then this still gives them no reason to prevent preventative action, if you’ll pardon the grammar there.
isn’t this the same complaint we had a couple of months ago which was rebutted immediately by people from the opposite side mentioning that the people who bought these blocks were informed that the degradation was going to happen but still made multi thousand dollar improvements to shacks? Now these people want to make major adjustments to the environment to save their homes?
Is it the same story?