Rees wipes out on rockwalls – respect the ocean Nathan or you’ll drown in 2011 - 19 October 2009

Greens MLC Ian Cohen is labelling Nathan Rees’s decision to give shoreline property owners more rights to build rockwalls at the expense of community beach access as environmental vandalism and economic suicide for the State.

“Instead of adopting internationally supported coastal strategies such as planned retreat, Rees has caved into pressure group politics and has ignored coastal science. Planned retreat prioritises the continued public access to the beaches for the whole community of beach users consistent with the New South Wales Coastal Protection Act,” says Mr Cohen

“Defending the coastline for the benefit of property owners, who willingly purchased shoreline properties will full knowledge of coastal erosion risks, will bleed local council of essential community service funds. Rees’s promise of ‘stringent environmental assessment’ if enacted to the full letter of the law will never support individualised, scientifically unproven coastal protection works such as rockwalls.”

“In 1996 Byron Shire Council refused a DA for a rockwall on Belongil Beach on the basis that it would significantly reduce public access to the beach. The council’s decision was upheld in the NSW Land and Environment Court case of Scott v Byron Council where Commissioner Hussey stated that the interests of the property owners needed to be "assessed against the wider public interest in terms of future beach amenity”.

“The NSW Labor Party has actively morphed in the NSW Liberal Party as the principal defender for private property rights. Nathan Rees’s decision will erode one of the most important elements of Australian culture, the Australian coastline. Rees simply does not care about young families, fishermen, surfers, swimmers and tourists and their continued public access to NSW’s beautiful coastline. This represents the sacrifice of the Commons for vested interests.”

“This poor and ill-conceived decision is a direct result of NSW Labor dismantling the NSW Coastal Council. Rees’s ignored international and national support for planned retreat in government bureaucracy, the judiciary and the scientific community. Its just another Rees Government decision that is more concerned with cheap political optics than demonstrating real leadership.”

Professor Thom, former chairman of the NSW Coastal Council advised the current Federal Government Inquiry into Climate Change and the Environmental Impacts on Coastal Communities that in order to achieve coastal sustainability in Australian we should consider “the need to maintain as part of Australian coastal culture access to and along the foreshore often at the expense of private property interests”

“The current Federal Government Inquiry is investigating management options for coastal erosion and if this Inquiry supports the implementation of ‘planned retreat’ as the most equitable and economically viable solution, Nathan Rees will only add to the embarrassment that NSW Labor represents to Rudd’s Labor Government.