Dear Team Toondah 

Thank you so much for your support, you're amazing :))

I wanted to share my letter to the new Australian Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water Minister, the Hon. Tanya Plibersek MP with you. I'll keep you posted on any response from her office. 

As I've shared previously, this petition is about persuading the decision-makers (now Labor at federal and state level) to find their environmental conscience and to hold them accountable for their actions on Toondah.

Our community movement unites people from all political persuasions. Together we will fight until our elected representatives do what's right. 

Subject: Please Save the Bay, Minister Plibersek

Dear Minister 

Congratulations on your return to government and appointment as Minister for Australia’s most important portfolio, Environment and Water.  

I’m very grateful for your quick actions to introduce and pass the Climate Change Bill 2022 and your proposed rejection of Clive Palmer’s Styx Valley coal mine 10 kilometres from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

I’m also encouraged by your commitment to strengthen environment laws and protect 30% of Australia’s land and 30% of Australia’s sea to help reverse the State of the Environment Report findings.

It remains to be seen how words translate into actions under an Albanese-led government. A fundamental test of Labor’s credibility and integrity lies in whether you will act to protect Toondah Harbour’s critically-endangered Eastern Curlews and endangered foreshore koala colony from extinction.

Please use your powers to honour our international Ramsar obligations and save this internationally significant (including to First Nations people) wetland on the South East Asian Flyway inside the Moreton Bay Marine Park from destruction. If you can’t protect a Ramsar wetland inside a Marine Park what will you protect? 

If you save this wetland on public land, you will prove the ‘environment is back’ and that the Albanese Government is serious about responding to the alarming State of the Environment Report. You will be able to keep, not lose, Toondah’s blue carbon assets, your 30% sea target and Moreton Bay’s precious biodiversity. 

If you don’t, Walker’s Corporation’s private 3,600 unit and marina development will wipe out healthy seagrass beds (dugong and turtle habitat), rich intertidal and sub-tidal feeding grounds (shorebirds) and important mangrove forests (fish nurseries, kidney-like filters and erosion barriers). This biodiversity next to, and within, the Marine Park and the community passion to save it is real not imagined. (see photos)

The thought of losing Toondah’s Ramsar wetland through greed not need keeps me awake at night and deeply upsets me and thousands of others.

Fortunately, an enormous community movement from all walks of life and political persuasions has united to form a powerful people alliance determined to stop this environmental catastrophe. It’s unacceptable we’ve had to wait since 2017 to comment on the developer’s EIS to have our say. 

To give you some perspective on the community anger over losing Toondah and government actions to exclude the public from genuine involvement in the decision-making process, my local save Toondah petition has over 53,400 signatures. . www.change.org/SaveToondah

Together, through determined grass roots community action, our movement has turned the tide of public opinion against this development. Recent election results prove Labor and LNP supporters are switching to the Greens, who oppose it, including in the senate and my seat of Brisbane. I believe Terri Butler’s failure to declare a position on Toondah gained media coverage and contributed to her loss. 

I’m shocked Labor would allow the destruction of this ecological paradise. Even the National Party government of the 1980s listened to the community and rejected a canal estate development in the same location.

Instead of protecting the Marine Park and Ramsar wetland, the Palaszczuk Government has kept the Newman Government’s Priority Development Area (PDA) zoning for Toondah Harbour and has championed a substantially larger 3,600-unit development proposal. Proceeding via the PDA approval process, they established a ‘confidential’ joint agreement with Redland City Council to appoint Walker Corporation as ‘preferred developer’. 

This deal facilitates private ownership of public land, an ‘asset sale’ that involves taxpayer money yet remains hidden. In 2016, Labor’s former and current Deputy Premiers, Jackie Trad and then Environment Minister, Stephen Miles, even arranged for a letter to be sent to the Federal Government requesting it to use its powers to change the boundaries and revoke Toondah’s internationally significant Ramsar listing in the ‘urgent national interest’. 

While Labor and the LNP’s political donor and Toondah developer, Walker Corporation, enjoys access to Ministers and the Queensland Premier behind closed doors, the public is still waiting to comment on an EIS created by Walker before we can input into the approval decision-making process. Concerns around this level of influence were raised on ABC Radio National’s ‘Background Briefing’ in 2018.  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-09/the-developer-the-whistleblower-and-the-minister-toondah-harbour/10487806?nw=0&r=HtmlFragment   

Our grass roots community actions against this development are not about opposing all development in the area near the existing ferry terminal or upgrading it. Our desire is to see a smaller scale on-land development away from G.J Walter Park’s koala colony and out of the Marine Park. Moreton Bay is south-east Queensland’s harbour, how would the same development be viewed if it was on Sydney Harbour?

There’s no shortage of nearby concrete and asphalt real estate in the existing ferry terminal footprint and adjoining disrupted land to build a more appropriate and sustainable development. This could still accommodate a mix of retail, commercial and residential development with developer fees and government support paying for an upgraded terminal everyone could enjoy.

I believe the Redlands doesn’t have the education, health, transport, community or infrastructure services to support a development of this size in that location. Even the massive new Star casino multi tower development in Brisbane’s CBD only has 2000 units. Toondah is also vulnerable to storm surges and flooding.

I believe if this ‘clearly unacceptable’ suburb in the sea development is approved, it will ‘result in as much permanent and irreversible damage’ to Labor’s environmental reputation as it will to the ‘ecological character of the Moreton Bay Ramsar wetland’.

As guardian of our nation’s environment, I hope your legacy will be to stop extinctions and ensure future generations and migratory shorebirds can still flock to Moreton Bay to enjoy this irreplaceable environmental paradise and its picture-perfect bay and island views. Once it’s gone it’s gone, please stop this today and save the bay. . . 

Yours sincerely 

Dylan