Almost 10 years ago my article "Melbourne鈥檚 western grasslands: going, going鈥" was published with a photo from Faulkners Road on Mount Cottrell (south of Melton) looking east towards Naarm/Melbourne across one of the properties that was (and still should be) destined to become part of the Western Grassland Reserves.
In recent months, the grassland has been illegally bulldozed to oblivion. So, going, going 鈥 and now gone.
The destruction of this 40 hectare site is still being investigated by state and federal environmental authorities. The Age reported that, bizarrely, Melton City Council, the responsible authority, was aware of the illegal land clearing but did nothing.
The site is subject to a Public Acquisition Overlay, meaning that the government is scheduled to acquire it for the Western Grassland Reserves.
But the site was destroyed during a court case, in which developer You Min Wu was fined $260,000 after one of his contractors scraped bare another nearby 19 ha site, known as 鈥淐onservation Area 9鈥, and covered it with tons of asbestos-contaminated fill in 2021鈥22. The contractor was fined $210,000.
The developer is still to face court, in a case brought by federal environmental authorities over the asbestos clean-up costs.
Given that a 230 square metre house and land is selling for more than $500,000 in the area, I doubt the developer is going to be much out of pocket if it gets away with developing the land (19 hectares of housing sold at a low $500,000 per 230m2 is about $413 million in the final sale price).
Both sites are listed for acquisition as grassland reserves.
Once the grassland is gone, the owners probably expect they will be able to develop it, since there seems little point in the government purchasing this disaster for a grassland reserve.
Or is there?
There are two good reasons to legally confiscate these properties and turn them into grassland reserves.
First, if the developers get away with this power play, why wouldn鈥檛 every other landowner in the proposed reserves, and elsewhere, bulldoze any environmental assets on their property, pay the token fine and make big bucks selling it for development?
It鈥檚 not just the Western Grassland Reserves, but the principles and integrity of public planning are threatened by these greedy developers. You can be sure that these cases are being watched with a vulture stare by the rest of their class.
The second good reason is that a scraped-bare paddock is a good place to restore a native grassland 鈥 if it can be resown with appropriate seeds before millions of invasive weeds take hold.
It will not be as good as the original old-growth grassland, but it could eventually return to a similar condition.
The Victorian government鈥檚 grasslands management program is being implemented with good intentions by the Department of the Environment鈥檚 Melbourne Strategic Assessment team and Parks Victoria.
Yet after 15 years of assessment and five years after the reserves were to have been fully purchased, only 25% has been, and there is still no native grassland seed production strategy to be seen, let alone a seed orchard.
Will Labor let the developers get a pass with a token fine for their criminal acts? Or will they be forced to pay token fines and offset money, which they can easily recoup from developing and selling the land?
Offsets are the government鈥檚 easy way out; the whole Western Grassland Reserves are, in fact, an offset.
A very small, but much better condition grassland, is currently聽 by the government, with offsets, of course, for a new train station car park at Watergardens.
We have fifteen years of government dragging its heels while proposed grassland reserves (offsets) deteriorate from weed invasion and, now, active destruction of areas intended for conservation. This reinforces the point that conservation and planning experts said from the outset (reinforced by the in 2020): it would be more effective for conservation, and much cheaper, to purchase the entire proposed reserve area via compulsory acquisition right away.
Exactly why Labor has failed for all these years to achieve such an obvious solution is not clear, but its disdain for nature conservation is.
[Ben Courtice is a botanist and conservationist based in Naarm/Melbourne.]