Dig it up, block it out!

Why do they think they can turn Bass Coast  into a wasteland?

HOW would they go trying to put a line of 350-metre-high wind turbines off the beach at Sorrento?

What about turning the Royal Botanic Gardens in South Yarra into a sand mine?

Of course, it’s laughable. The powerfully connected people of the Mornington Peninsula would never allow their sea views to be destroyed by one or more of Chris Bowen’s huge offshore wind farms, even for such a compelling cause as a “climate change emergency”.

Let someone else do the heavy lifting, they’d say.

And where’s the best place to put a sand mine? Certainly not South Yarra, even if the sand is strategically important to the construction effort in Melbourne, for concrete, including for Melbourne’s $13 Billion Metro Tunnel Project.

So, where would you put it?

You put it somewhere in regional Victoria where, no matter how much the locals jump up and down and say it’s an environmental disaster, you think no one will notice.

That’s the situation with the sand mines at Grantville, where they are turning one of Victoria’s ‘most distinctive environmental landscapes’, the Western Port Woodlands, into a moonscape.

The issue took centre stage last week, locally at least, at the Distinctive Areas and Landscapes (DAL) Standing Advisory Committee’s planning hearings, and will do so again today, Wednesday April 12 when the Save Western Port Woodlands Group take their case to the panel, if not to save the woodlands, at least to have the area declared as “a distinctive landscape”.

There could hardly be a more distinctive landscape in the Bass Coast region, or an area of bush so important to what’s left of the ecosystem of Western Port.

Honestly, they couldn’t give a toss what disasters they inflict on us down here, away from the city lights. We saw that with the recent decision to go ahead with the 33-turbine Delburn Wind Farm near Mirboo North, starting as early as next year (24 on-going jobs, big deal).

If they can’t stop the sand mining in the areas at Grantville already turned over for the purpose, then the State Government must at least buy the old Holden Proving Ground, with its important native bushland areas, and preserve it in perpetuity, at least for some sort of payback.