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A group of country West Australians are challenging the federal environment minister’s approval of a major road through a biodiversity hotspot in the state’s South West.
Following years of fighting by the Friends of the Gelorup Corridor just south of Bunbury, their lawyers will in December appear before the Federal Court of Australia in a bid to overturn Environment Tanya Plibersek’s approval for the southern section of the Bunbury Outer Ring Road, Western Australia’s most expensive road project.
Environmental bureaucrats say the proposal is likely to have a significant impact on the possums, which will be “shepherded” into neighbouring territories.
The approved clearing of roughly 70 hectares, which has already begun, will potentially wipe out a population of 72 critically endangered western ringtail possums as well as impact other federally protected flora and fauna: three species of black cockatoo, the black stripe minnow, and tuart and banksia woodlands.
The approval was given despite being withheld for a corresponding offsets plan from the applicant, Main Roads WA. It is a developer’s obligation under federal environment law to procure land elsewhere to compensate for, or “offset”, lost habitat or threatened flora.
The timing is significant as the Federal Court ruled last week, in a case brought by former Greens leader Bob Brown over mine tailings storage in Tasmania, that the minister must take account of the precautionary principle: that lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing conservation of a seriously threatened environment.
This is not the group’s first court challenge to the approval; another was knocked back in August, but the new case brings a new element by asking if the government complied with the offset requirement, and is a potential landmark case testing how offsets can be used.
Activists stand in the way of clearing works for the Bunbury Outer Ring Road earlier in August.Credit:South West Forest Defenders
Friends president Sue Chapman said Plibersek’s first speech in parliament was all about the dangers of habitat destruction and it was hard to reconcile with the approval of the road construction.
WA had the technology, the example and the budget surplus to do this project in a sustainable and environmentally responsible way, with conservation and development coexisting, but she said it had chosen the easy way.