By Anthony Brown
BRISBANE — Lost in all the rhetoric of the federal election, an important event occurred at Griffith University here in mid-February.
On February 18, 50 people, representing some 220 of south-east Queensland's local environmental groups with a combined membership of 250,000 members, met to discuss what to do about the massive environmental problems facing the this corner of the State.
Concerned about the rapidity and scale of human impacts on the region over the past decade, the forum called on all levels of government to cough up $1 million to support and resource the community as the most effective agent for dealing with these problems.
The forum for the first time in south-east Queensland brought together local grassroots conservation groups independently of the larger national conservation organisations, to focus their energies on a regional basis.
Organised by the Sunshine Coast Environment Centre, the newly formed Southern Regional Alliance (an alliance of some 50 local conservation groups in and around Brisbane) and the proposed Brisbane Regional Environment Centre, the forum agreed that the greatest hurdle to environmental preservation in the region was uncontrolled planning.
Nick Petter, Queensland Conservation Council community liaison officer and one of the forum organisers, said south-east Queensland had one of the fastest growing populations in Australia, mainly due to interstate migration.
He said the dramatic rise in population in recent years, especially in and around Brisbane and the Gold and Sunshine coasts, had resulted in the mushrooming of large housing estates, more roads and shopping centres, with a consequent drain on limited water and energy utilities.
He said the Goss state government allowed "new cities like Springfield and Mango Hill to pop up away from public transport and away from industries, thereby necessitating dragging freeways to them and having to provide some sort of social infrastructure.
"The forum identified that planning was driving the rates of environmental destruction: our zoning of large tracts of bushland as future urban; our planning inability to do anything about this; not taking into account the needs of nature in the planning schemes."
Petter told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly that the consequences of all this are that the region is now experiencing some of the worst environmental destruction in Australia.
"We have 60% of the state's threatened plant species in south-east Queensland, and less than 4% of the region is protected by national parks. It's equivalent in biodiversity to some areas of the north-east tropics, but under far less protection and far more threat", he said.
"Within the next 20 or 30 years, we'll have no lowland forest left. We will have no wetlands on the coast. It'll all be taken up by roads, freeways, car parks, houses and shopping centres.
"We're already experiencing serious environmental degradation. The upper catchment [of the Brisbane River] has been largely over-cleared in certain Â鶹´«Ã½. We've got large amounts of landslip, erosion, lack of vegetation.
"The vast urban sprawl is already causing serious road and air pollution problems. The disposal of hazardous waste from industry is already building up to a level where it's becoming a problem to deal with."
He said for far too long now all levels of government had ignored what was happening in the region.
And he gave this warning to the new Borbidge government if it did not listen to the demands of the regional conservation groups: "They can suffer the same fate as the Goss government very quickly".
In the July 1995 state election, the Goss Labor government lost several key seats due to community anger at its unwillingness to listen to concerns over a number of controversial developments.
"For far too long all governments have either under-consulted the public about planning schemes and the environmental impacts or, as under the Goss government in the past 5-10 years, there'd been over-consultation with very little substance behind it and people having to spend large amounts of time and their own money participating in these regional planning processes."
Petter said the forum agreed that the only way to tackle these problems seriously was by having local community input into regional planning. He said that to do this, community groups needed to be adequately resourced.
So the forum called on all levels of government to fund community organisations to the tune of $1 million per year.
This money, he said, would be used to establish new environment centres in Brisbane, Pine Rivers, Ipswich and the Albert Growth Corridor and Redlands, as well as to upgrade existing centres in the Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast and Toowoomba.
In that way, community groups could access local environment centres with the resources and expertise necessary for adequate participation in any regional and local planning programs.
Petter said the groups would probably hold another forum in May as part of an ongoing commitment to consult and work together on a regional level.
If people or groups are interested in attending, they can contact him at the Queensland Conservation Council on (07) 3221 0188.