ENVIRONMENTAL activists in the Surf Coast Shire have urged Labor to take another look at its policies on growth and sustainability if it wins the coming federal election.
\nRepresentatives from groups including the Surfrider Foundation, Surfers Appreciating Association and the Surf Coast Energy Group met last week with shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water Mark Butler and Labor candidate for Corangamite Libby Coker at Ashmore Arts in Torquay.
\nAshmore Arts is near the planned development for the Spring Creek valley, and SANE chair Graeme Stockton said this precinct and others should be explicitly drawn up to take account of the growth in the region.
\n\u201cIn all the planning, it just keeps going on and on ad nauseam about how we are a growth zone and we need to have 15 years of land supply, so we keep mowing down our assets. Then on top of that we\u2019ve got this huge growth \u2013 according to all the planning, there\u2019s going to be 250,000 extra people in Geelong, 60,000 of whom will be in Armstrong Creek, and that\u2019s already showing up in terms of road rage, parking rage, surf rage.\u201d
\nMr Butler said he had spent the past two-and environmental and climate policies when it was in power.
\n\u201cI\u2019d like to think if we\u2019d been better behaved, we would have been able to get through and have this policy settled down and accepted as a matter of consensus, as you see in places like the UK where this wasn\u2019t an issue in the general election.\u201d
\nHowever, he said attitudes were changing. \u201cThe stuff we\u2019ve had around mining approvals and exploration licence approvals \u2013 frankly, in both parties \u2013 in New South Wales has brought our whole thinking about environmental protection and biodiversity protection into question. The next Parliament\u2019s got to deal with this. Whoever wins has got to engage the other party to get some sort of durable position to take more renewable energy projects, to start shutting down coal and all those things.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ENVIRONMENTAL activists in the Surf Coast Shire have urged Labor to take another look at its policies on growth and sustainability if it wins the coming federal election. Representatives from groups including the Surfrider Foundation, Surfers Appreciating Association and the Surf Coast Energy Group met last week with shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and […]<\/p>\n