OPINION: WA’s fraught journey towards creation of a new port near Perth has continued with a split in Labor ranks.
OPINION: WA’s fraught journey towards creation of a new port near Perth has continued with a split in Labor ranks.
I have long been a backer of an expanded outer harbour at Cockburn Sound, starting with a push by the late Len Buckeridge to build a private port in the area two decades ago.
As much as I love the idea of a working port in a bustling community, I felt that Fremantle was no longer the right place for the mix of trade it had grown to deal with, especially as Perth urbanised.
Even if Fremantle was used as a general cargo and container port for many years to come, I certainly didn’t see any harm in having some healthy competition between ports to ensure importers’ costs were kept in control.
But the state Labor government of that time was no friend of Mr Buckeridge, and his proposal got nowhere.
It also worth adding that, despite my stated views, I was disappointed in the early 2000s when the same state Labor government allowed a long-held major transport reserve to be erased, making it all the more difficult to plan for future logistics out of the exiting port.
The next Liberal government didn’t exactly swing in behind Mr Buckeridge’s port plan.
Instead, it sought to overturn planning changes in the transport corridor, to a degree, by adding further stages to the Roe Highway, including a tunnel to get it to Fremantle.
Of course the Roe Highway extension through the Beeliar Wetlands became a major election issue last time around, with the McGowan government then abandoning those roadworks and promising to fix the issue with a new port at Cockburn.
To me this was a good and inevitable outcome even if the policy positions for the past two decades had been generally misguided.
But it seems somewhat premature to think that a so-called ‘election mandate’ will be enough to ensure the momentum takes us to a major development at Cockburn Sound.
The issue has created a split in the union movement, which is the ultimate source of power behind the Labor Party.
After a tumultuous state Labor Party conference, the Maritime Union of Australia, which is actually a division of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, has acted to disaffiliate with UnionsWA.
The MUA reckons the state’s peak union body has acted against jobs by supporting the government’s policy to construct a new port.
While the MUA’s vested interest is obvious and the reality of its ‘jobs’ message spurious, it is worth noting that despite this organisation representing a tiny fraction of Fremantle’s workforce (let alone the state’s), it has real clout well beyond its numbers – both in direct political links and indirectly due to the economic power it wields.
The MUA should be irrelevant. Efficient ports around the world barely need humans due to containerisation and other simple technologies that make manual intervention almost unnecessary. Militancy has only exacerbated that trend.
There’s no doubt a new port at Cockburn will need fewer workers. The question is whether the desire of the MUA’s near-insignificant membership to hang on to a lifestyle left behind in many places can actually influence a crucial state policy.
Nothing would surprise me. I hope the union’s move in this instance is an over-reach that exposes its self-interest for what it is.
Boat shed
Staying with on-water issues, a few weeks ago a friend of mine suggested the success as a tourist attraction of the boat shed on the Swan River foreshore at Crawley was becoming a danger to the very people it attracts.
It was a good tip. Dozens of people, including wedding parties, are often gathered on the bike path on the narrow strip of land between the shed’s gangplank and busy Mounts Bay Road.
Visitors run the gauntlet of that major thoroughfare with trips to the toilets and to take more distant selfies.
We certainly don’t need tourist fatalities at a popular site.
I asked our photographer to capture this when he could. I didn’t see a rush, as it isn’t a new story that the boat shed has become famous with tourists – any passing driver can see that.
Regrettably I was gazumped by local community paper The Post, which has to be credited with getting this story first. Great minds think alike is all I can say.
One answer to the problem is to introduce traffic lights and make more room for pedestrians. An alternative is to move the boat shed a bit west and allow space to have a cafe and other facilities there to take advantage of its fame.
Further to tourists and danger, the fatalities on the Indian Ocean Drive between Perth and Cervantes reminded me of a driving holiday a few years in New Zealand.
You could not go to any public space, including the toilet, without constant reminders in a variety of languages about which side of the road to drive on.
Maybe we should do that here.
