Well after midnight on a beautiful, starlit and deserted crescent of beach on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, just 40 minutes up the coast from Zihuatanejo, made famous as the place Andy Dufresne found peace in the final scenes of the brilliant 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption, a man walks alone into the moon shadow of a thatch-roof palapa on the sand, opens a laptop and tries to connect to Microsoft Teams, calling softly into the night: “Can you hear me, it’s Tom?”
After more than six years of consultation, planning, drafting, consulting again and again, redrafting and finally being presented to Noosa Council, only to be deferred for – wait for it – more consulting, it is supremely ironic that the future of the long-awaited Noosa River Catchment Management Plan might well come down next week to the quality of an internet connection in faraway La Saladita. “I hope they keep their generators running all night,” jokes Cr Brian Stockwell, but the serious fact of the matter is that Cr Tom Wegener’s remote vote, to be called in from a long-planned family surfing holiday, will almost certainly break the deadlock and see the river plan adopted by council, ending a month of community agitation, claims and counter-claims, petitions and some absurd misinformation peddled on social media.
The fun began at council’s general committee meeting on 18 September when Cr Amelia Lorentson moved a procedural motion “that item 6.1 Noosa River Catchment Management Plan be deferred to the next round of meetings to allow Councillors and other stakeholders an opportunity to consider the details and implications of the draft Noosa River Catchment Plan and provide feedback.” Speaking to her motion, Cr Lorentson said the deferral was needed “to enable time for feedback from stakeholders, questions to be answered and for a workshop for councillors.
“This is the first time the report has come to council. A conservation park has never been raised before,” she said. Noosa Today understands that a conservation park for the river was in fact discussed at an internal workshop in June this year, in the context of councillors looking at the first draft settings of the River Plan. According to our informant, there was a detailed discussion about how a conservation park under the Nature Conservation Act, covering only the existing fish habitat areas, might work. There was no dissent at the time and the section of the draft River Plan devoted to it makes quite clear that what is proposed is “an action to consider”, implying many more rounds of community and stakeholder consultation on the proposal.
At the general committee meeting Cr Stockwell spoke against the deferral, saying: “We’ve had six years’ consultation. We’ve had multiple forms of community consultation. We should understand [the] issues and aspirations … It’s time for political leadership.”
But councillors voted 4:3 in favour of deferring the matter to this month’s round of council meetings, with Crs Stewart, Finzel and Jurisevic voting with Lorentson.
Noosa Today has learned that the River Plan deferral sparked a heated confrontation a couple of days later at a councillor briefing with Acting CEO Larry Sengstock and other council staffers, with two councillors threatening to walk out of the meeting, claiming that they were being pressured over the vote to defer the plan for further consultation. Council staff, for their part, believe they are being placed under immense pressure to redraft a plan they thought was complete, alongside numerous other responsibilities. This masthead understands that subsequently complaints were made to the Queensland Office of the Independent Assessor, but have been dismissed.
Meanwhile, within hours of the River Plan deferral, the Noosa Boating Fishing Alliance had launched a petition to “stop Noosa River turning into a Conservation Park” [with more than 2500 people signed on] and local social media was awash with misinformation about bans on petrol and diesel boats, commercial and recreational fishing and just about every other way you can have fun on the river, none of which are part of the River Plan, which is freely available for download on the Noosa Council website.
On 23 September Noosa Parks Association published a detailed discussion paper on the Conservation Park concept on its website, in which it explained: “The Queensland Nature Conservation Act 1992 allows the establishment of Conservation Parks that have multiple uses including recreation and fishing. A Conservation Park is different to a National Park. For example, a Conservation Park can allow commercial activities including fishing whereas this can rarely occur in a National Park.”
The paper goes on to outline the success of other multi-use Conservation Parks around Queensland, and says of its likely impact on Noosa River: “Noosa River and its lakes and creeks are a magnificent waterway system with remarkable biodiversity values that also underpin the Noosa economy and lifestyle including tourism, commercial and recreational fishing as well as a wide variety of water-based recreational activities. In the Noosa River and its lakes and creeks, 6,074 ha is already declared Fish Habitat Area. The same boundaries that define the Fish Habitat Area would form appropriate boundaries for a Conservation Park managed for multiple purposes including conservation, commercial and recreational fishing, and recreation generally.
“Areas of the Noosa River not covered by the Fish Habitat Area, including the busy lower reaches, Noosaville Foreshore, Canal Estates and private Noosa North Shore water frontages, would not be in the Conservation Park. It could be combined with existing Conservation Parks established on the banks of the river such as Noosa Conservation Park, Weyba Creek Conservation Park, Keyser Island Conservation Park, Sheep Island Conservation Park, and Goat Island Conservation Park.”
On 12 October Noosa councillors were briefed by staff at a councillor workshop on developments since the 18 September deferral. Noosa Today understands that councillors were walked through a timeline of every step of consultation and review since an update of the 2004 river plan was endorsed in January 2017, as well as a detailed timeline of recent “targeted stakeholder engagement” since May. Feedback since the deferral had revealed that the vast majority of stakeholders remained supportive of the River Plan, while only three opposed it. One of these, from the Noosa Boating Fishing Alliance claimed the “time frame was inappropriate and contravenes the principles of community engagement.”
Speaking after the workshop, Cr Stockwell, who has been involved in the river plan since 2003-4 as a state bureaucrat, president of Noosa Residents and Ratepayers and now a councillor, told Noosa Today: “Every time we’ve looked at it over those years I’ve felt that the vast majority of residents and stakeholders wanted to see the conservation of the natural areas of the river, so I’m not surprised to see that they are overwhelmingly in favour of the River Plan going ahead. I can’t tell you what we were briefed on at Thursday’s River Plan workshop, but I will say that from my experience and from my conversations since last month’s deferral vote, I’m very confident that the vast majority of key community groups involved in the plan and the River Advisory Group would like to see council adopt it.”
Meanwhile, as he campaigned for the Yes vote last week and researched Mexican wifi systems, Cr Wegener also found time to reflect on the larger issues surrounding the River Plan. “I feel there’s a certain irony in some of the fishing and boating groups saying they want the state to continue having jurisdiction over the river and for the council to butt out, while other community groups are screaming at the state for butting in on our local affairs with forced population growth and a failure to do anything about social housing.
“Re-kicking the can down the road endlessly, the way I see it, councillors are elected representatives of the community and we are meant to make decisions. Is endless consultation really what the community wants? I don’t think so. The reality is if the River Plan doesn’t go through on 26 October, we won’t have a plan, and that’s not in the best interests of the community.”
