Last night Council had the first of a series of meetings
relating to the troubled Shell Cove Project. I have the impression it was a
real eye opener to some of the Councillors.
It was good to hear Kevin James state that we (the Council)
are the owners of the project and Australand is but a project manager for us. We
cannot direct actions. We cannot require Australand to build the Marina any
more than we can require them to turn back the tide or stop the sun in it’s tracks.
There was a time when Council could have required that the
Marina be built, but the council of the day decided not to have that happen. I
refer to two documents from 1992, one of which is a tender matrix drawn up by Council
and the other of which is a fax from Lang Walker to Council.
The tender matrix evaluated a short list of three developers
against seventeen different criteria. Walker Corp was a distant third. Some six
hours before the Councillors were to meet to decide the successful company Lang
Walker faxed a revised offer to Council, part of which said “Walker would
undertake to provide the necessary finance for the project works including a
$2.0 million commitment to immediately commence Harbour construction.”
It will forever remain a mystery why those Councillors chose
NOT to take up Mr Walker on his offer but one thing is certain, they believed
the offer was genuine. How else would Walker have gone from last to first in a
matter of hours?
Instead of having the marina constructed first council of
the day chose to let it slide and the next year they signed a Management
Agreement which does not allow Council to direct anything. Once Australand took
over Walkers there was no chance of Council ever getting the upper hand.
Incidentally, last night I asked Mr James why Council had
not pressed for the Marina to be constructed immediately, as the fax had
offered. He seemed to suggest that with the complex approvals required for this
project, perhaps the “immediate” time frame had not yet expired.
The most disappointing aspect of the night was the attitude
of Council that this is a brilliant project that is going well. For years the
community has been told it is all about diversifying the local economy and
jobs, jobs, jobs. This is a residential development with a little bit of retail
and a bit of tourism tacked on. Tourism retail accounts for 0.15% of the land
area of the project and less than 0.5% of the jobs yet they still push it as
being a tourist development.
I asked a question about jobs and got the response I
expected. Council does not know how many jobs are being created by the project
as they build subdivisions and lay services. This seems strange for an
organisation that claims it is all about jobs. Council claimed last night that
the project will create 7200 jobs. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? I They don’t
(and wont) tell us that more than a third of those jobs were temporary
construction jobs in Shell Cove that have already been and gone. Thats right,
those jobs built the present suburb of Shell Cove and those jobs are not here
anymore. Another third of the project jobs are temporary construction jobs in
the rest of the residential/commercial development. Nearly half of the rest of
the jobs are in the Business Park. A total of 33 jobs are tourism related
retail. They should say it’s all about job, job, job.
The biggest laugh of the night award went to the comment
that a recent application to extend the life of the Bass Point quarry to forty
years would take it beyond the time frames of the Shell Cove project.
