At long last, clarity on power station site — just a shame about the cost

IF any ghosts are daring to reside within the cold grey walls of Geelong B power station, they’ll be wondering what all the fuss is about.

Save for the odd graffiti artist, they’ve had the place to themselves since 1970.

The patch of dirt that separates historic Osborne House and the leafy residential area to the south from the industrial hustle of the port to the north has been untouched for half a century.

But for the last two years, it has been game on.

The Hamilton Group completed its purchase of the property in 2018 with a view to adding it to its portfolio of successfully resurrected industrial buildings that have been given new life as trendy offices.

The objectors, the nearby GrainCorp, Barrett Burston Maltings and the Victorian Regional Channels Authority, have maintained that the land needs to be set aside for port uses.

One of the key sticking points in this drawn-out saga is there appears no clarity on what those uses are.

The VRCA’s own strategic planning document only vaguely points to the site’s potential use as a truck stop.

At earlier hearings, it did seem the industrial heavyweights, not the port managers at GeelongPort I might add, were primarily concerned that the innocent eyes of white collar workers might one day get a glimpse, or a sniff, of what actually goes on down at the port.

And that might be a problem. One day.

The oddest thing seems to be that for such a little slip of land, why didn’t those who have a vested interest in keeping it as a buffer step in and secure it? Now private developers are paying a heavy and unreasonable price for doing what nobody bothered to think about doing before.

If the government wanted to make a statement about developers encroaching on the port, it did exactly that here.

Maybe it was the principle, not the actual plan, that was at the heart of this dispute.