Toondah harbour wetlands: developer accused of not being honest about its plans
A property developer has been accused of misleading an international environment body about the true nature of its plans for an apartment and retail complex at the Ramsar-listed Moreton Bay wetlands in Queensland, after new documents shed more light on its lobbying efforts.
The Guardian has obtained notes under freedom of information from a September 2017 meeting in Switzerland between Walker Corporation and the secretary general of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, Martha RojasUrrego.
They suggest company executives reassured the Ramsar secretariat that it would change its proposed Toondah harbour development if it was going to damage the Moreton Bay wetlands, while at the same time lobbying the Australian government with plans to build inside the internationally listed site’s boundaries.
The documents have been released as the federal government considers the environmental impact statement for Walker Corporation’s proposal to build more than 3,000 units on top of about 40ha of the protected wetlands.
They show the secretariat warned Walker Corporation executives that the “starting point” for the project should be to avoid any impact on the Ramsar site, rather than causing environmental damage and trying to compensate for it later.
The notes, which the secretariat sent to the federal environment department, state Walker Corporation “mentioned that they would not press on with their plan if there were going to be impacts on the Ramsar site”.
The secretariat wrote that Walker Corporation said it could potentially reconfigure its development, including by restricting construction to an area outside the wetlands, or by looking “for other suitable development areas nearby”.
Emails show the statement took federal environment officials by surprise, given no such proposal to avoid construction inside the wetlands had been raised with the federal government.
“I wonder whether that is an error of what was discussed, given that it is at odds with Walker’s discussion with us to date, and the referral (which states that there are no alternatives to the proposal),” department official James Barker wrote to colleagues on 3 October 2017.
Tarquin Moon, nature campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the documents appeared to show the company had told the international Ramsar convention “a nice story”, while continuing to lobby to destroy a substantial part of the wetland.
The ACF has launched a legal bid to
try to gain access to documents related kept secret by the federal government related to its meetings with Walker Corporation.
“It is astonishing that an Australian property developer would fly to Switzerland and tell the secretariat of an international convention that the company would not proceed with its plans if there were going to be impacts on the Ramsar site, then come home and continue pushing state and federal governments to approve its wetland-wrecking project,” Moon said.
Moon said even though the documents show the secretariat had explicitly advised the company it should avoid any impacts to the Ramsar site, Walker Corporation “came home and kept lobbying the Queensland and federal governments to allow its proposed marina and apartment complex to be built on the wetland”.
The company maintained it went to the Switzerland meeting with the best of intentions to get advice from the Ramsar secretariat about the best approach to the development.
Walker Corporation said its executive team “travelled to Switzerland proactively to ensure the Redlands’ new Toondah harbour integrates with and enhances the physical and ecological characteristics of the Queensland government’s priority development area”.
It said the company had worked hard to meet stakeholders to ensure the project “would benefit the entire community”.
Guardian Australia has previously reported that Walker Corporation, which has been a major political donor, lobbied the federal government to remove protections from an area of the wetlands as a matter of “urgent national interest”.
In August 2017, the former environment minister, Josh Frydenberg wrote to Steven Miles, who was then the Queensland environment minister, to suggest the two governments create a proposal to delist part of the Moreton Bay Ramsar wetland.
In May of that year, the Ramsar secretariat wrote to the federal government warning that the loss of wetlands for the development would “set a precedent for other developments in future”, not only for Ramsar sites within Australia but “also elsewhere in the world”.
The new documents show the pressure the federal government was under to consider a change to the wetland boundary.
In an email dated 22 June 2017, department officials discussed a letter they were drafting that would put the “ball firmly into Queensland’s court on how they propose to deal with the Ramsar related issues of the Toondah harbour project, while mapping out the sorts of issues they’d need to consider in any proposal for boundary change”.
Later that day, Walker Corporation’s adviser, Stephen Davis, said in an email to the department it was not clear to him if a boundary change was necessary, but he wanted to know “what is the status of thinking around the proposed Ramsar boundary amendment discussion”.
He added that one argument in favour of removing an area from the wetlands could be that the boundaries drawn up for the original listing were “somewhat arbitrary” and “since then a more detailed study has clearly demonstrated that lower value habitat was included at the expense of high value habitat”.
Several documents Guardian Australia sought access to were withheld by the department, which said they were subject to legal professional privilege. The department has refused to answer questions about what the legal advice was about.
Both the environment department and Walker Corporation have said no change to the boundary is being considered. Walker Corporation submitted a revised proposal to the department in 2018 that the company has previously said made improvements to better integrate the development with the Ramsar wetland.
The department said a boundary change had not been suggested as part of this proposal and the discussions that occurred in 2017 had no bearing on the new proposal, which was being considered by the environment minister, Sussan Ley.
The department said it had not had any further correspondence from Ramsar.
The department is considering Walker Corporation’s draft environmental impact statement, which is expected to be placed on public exhibition soon.