Melbourne's western grasslands: going, going…

This 40-hectare site is still being investigated by state and federal environmental authorities, although The Age reported that, bizarrely, Melton City Council, the responsible authority

Almost 10 years ago Melbourne’s western grasslands: going, going… 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 … and now gone.

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The destruction of this 40-hectare site is still being investigated by state and federal environmental authorities, although 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 government is scheduled to acquire it for the Western Grassland Reserves.

But this 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-hectare site, known as “Conservation Area 9”, and covered it with tons of asbestos-contaminated fill in 2021-2022. 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 220–230 square metre house and land is selling for more than $500,000 in the area, I doubt the developer is going to be very much out of pocket if it gets away with developing the land (19 hectares of housing sold at a low $500,000 per 230 square metres is about $413 million in the final sale price).

Both these 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 grassland reserve.

Or is there?

There are two good reasons to legally confiscate these properties and turn them into grassland reserves.

First, if these developers get away with this power play, why won’t every other landowner in the proposed Western Grassland Reserves, and elsewhere, bulldoze any environmental assets on their property, pay the token fine and make big bucks selling it for development?

It’s 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, 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’s grasslands management program is being implemented with good intentions by the Department of the Environment’s Melbourne Strategic Assessment team and Parks Victoria.

Yet, after 15 years of the assessment, five years after 100% of the reserves were promised to be purchased (but only about 10% have been), 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 and 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’s easy way out; the whole Western Grassland Reserves are, in fact, an offset.

A very small, but much better condition grassland, is currently being bulldozed by the government, with offsets, of course, for a new train station car park at Watergardens.

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, is rolling up the point that conservation and planning experts said from the outset (reinforced by the Auditor General 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.]