‘Engagement’ isn’t about ticking a box

AS WE have seen in the past week, engagement and consultation isn’t about putting the reports and strategy plans up on a website somewhere, and ticking the box... job done!

Both the Victorian Planning Authority and the Bass Coast Shire Council have tried to abrogate their responsibility to successfully engage with the Wonthaggi North East Precinct landowners, in relation to the Environmental Audit Overlay debacle, by saying the information was “in the public domain”.

It was, but who knew?

As a local property conveyancer told the Sentinel-Times this week, we’re not sitting on the shire’s website or VPA’s waiting for some report to be posted that we don’t know is even coming. Dito for busy building surveyors, builders, homeowners and all the rest.

Like everyone else in this disgraceful mess, they needed direct advice about the threat of an EAO in August 2022, and ultimately its imposition from January 18 this year, and the authorities need to keep proper records of consultation, who was told, when, how and what percentage of the stakeholders responded.

If a low percentage acknowledge the advice, the consultation is a failure, pure and simple.

In its ‘Draft Bass Coast Planning Scheme Amendment C152basc Final Report’ August 22, 2022, the VPA acknowledged “Wentworth’s submission (one of the Wonthaggi developers) and the scenario where individual landowners constructing dwellings on recently approved lots might be subject to a requirement to prepare a PRSA (Preliminary Risk Screen Assessment)… as potentially onerous for home builders and likely to increase costs and delays”.

They went on to say that “the situation can be avoided if the EAO is not applied to land in the first instance” with the appropriate assessment response needing to be confirmed by the VPA in consultation with Council and affected landowners.

The VPA might have spoken to council, but there’s absolutely no way the owners of established houses or titled blocks would have agreed to the retrospective imposition of a highly restrictive, potentially expensive overlay being placed on their title after the event because of changes to the Environment Protection Act 2017 on July 1, 2021 if they had been told.

Where does that even stop? Why didn’t the VPA/EPA apply a new EAO on every home site in the state, going back 200 years, where an environmental audit hadn’t previously been carried out?

Come on! It’s just a completely ridiculous situation that could have been addressed with effective consultation.

The same with the Bass Coast Shire Council’s $106 million budget.

Five members of the public turned up at the community consultation opportunity in Cowes last Tuesday, April 30 and any wonder with the session held between 11am and 2pm. That’s not a success.

And while a similar session in Wonthaggi was slightly better attended on the Thursday, the Cowes attendees did not have the benefit of finance officer Joseph Kay to answer their queries.

Not good enough.

Why for example is the shire cutting back on capital works spending from a forecast $47.6 million this financial year to $24.8 million in 2024-25?

Spending on capital works is then projected to go back up to $39m the following year and $41m the year after. So, what happened?

And why, if the state government has capped the rate rise to 2.75 per cent, is the garbage rate going up by 4.4 per cent from $550.83 to $575.21, with homeowning ratepayers also being slugged with the cost of collecting the waste from the shire’s own bins, at their offices, on foreshores and reserves, where the owners of vacant blocks, more than 2800 of them, don’t have to contribute.

Those waste collection costs should come out of general revenue, not the garbage charge which isn’t uniformly applied, and it’s potentially illegal for the council to be taking that money from the garbage levy revenue.

Victorian Council Watch President Dean Hurlston said last week that all 10 councils which had responded to his FOI request for information on how they spend their garbage charge revenue were rorting the rate cap to some degree by opening up another source of funding, spent elsewhere, the City of Frankston he alleged, by $10 million.

Bass Coast is yet to respond to their FOI request but let’s see if they can explain where the expected $17.3 million collected from our garbage charge, if that’s even the figure, is going.

And finally, can we see a better effort to engage with the community, and more accountability on the success of that engagement, than simply putting stuff up on the shire website and hoping someone will find it and read it?