Many questions need answering about whether Major Road Projects Victoria (formerly VicRoads) is acting with integrity about the Western Highway’s disputed route at Buangor.
A “photo-shopped" video was shown to the Ararat Council to discredit an alternative route. VicRoads belatedly withdrew it when its CEO was threatened with deceptive conduct. A staff member was abruptly sent off the project after they commissioned drawings showing an alternative route can be built with minimal impact. VicRoads attempted to defend the planned route using a report that overlooks impacts on the planned route, and exaggerates them on the alternative route, with an unnecessarily wide disturbance zone there.
There are big differences between the routes. MRPV’s planned route hits four times as many ancient trees including Victoria’s second largest Yellow Gum, 8-fold more rare Golden Sun Moth habitat and 4.3 hectares of previously unreported endangered grassy woodland. It devastates an Aboriginal precinct that is life-affirming for Djab Wurrung people and acknowledged by Susan Phillips, independent Reporter to the Federal Government. MRPV’s deviation-route becomes another country-splintering barrier, extra wide due to hills and not using the existing
roadway. Fragmenting the land is the biggest cause of extinctions. New streams of traffic spilling off the deviation add to the damage.
MRPV’s route is far more emissions-intensive, with major earthworks similar in scale to Box’s Cutting. Longer, hillier and needing an extra bridge, this route also consumes much more taxpayers’ money.
MRPV’s has slimmed the road’s design on the planned route. The refinements reveal engineers’ significant scope to improve any route when the design brief focuses on protecting environment and culture. This scope means that wide impact swathes on the alternative route, the “Northern Option”, are unnecessary. The alternative route is feasible. The design effort has so far been applied to the wrong route, like lipstick on a pig.
Perhaps without awareness of all this, some community voices favour the planned route for its claimed lower impact. They emphasise just two factors. One is MRPV’s recent realignments to save trees including two revered culturally hollowed trees. Djab Wurrung people were not consulted on these realignments that still dismember the precinct. The second is the high quality highway-side vegetation protected, according to MRPV, by deviating south through hills. But the alternative route running near the current highway need not seriously threaten the roadside vegetation if proper design-effort is applied.
Our group members have provided Government with independent experts’ reports overturning its assessment of the overall least-impact route. The reports, unacknowledged by MRPV , underpin a much delayed Victorian Supreme Court case, to challenge the standard of environmental assessment used for route selection in 2012. Is MRPV putting more effort and taxpayer dollars into hiding problems than fixing them? This would have ominous implications because projects like this aggravate climate disruption and extinctions, 15,372 scientists warn in BioScience (Dec 2017). Closely linked to many other impacts, it is laying the groundwork for “vast human misery”.
Our group, KORS Inc, with thousands of supporters, urges the Andrews Government to instruct MRPV to capture all the available benefits from well-intentioned design effort on the better route.Neil Marriott, President, KORS Inc, Black Range
Comments or moral support welcome at
fixfreewayfiasco@gmail.com
Financial support welcome at
gofundme.com/Don't-route-around-Duplicate-the-highway