BRUTAL, very stressful and very unfair. 

These are some of the terms many East Fremantle residents use to describe their fight against the might of the WA government planning juggernaut and its favoured disposition towards preferred developers. 

Jesse Searls, who lives opposite the proposed Hall & Prior development of the old Woodside hospital, says he felt the unfair planning process was akin to “being invaded”. 

He described as “brutal” the immediate impact on two former neighbours completely overshadowed on their north side by a towering wall on the south side of the proposed development. 

As soon as the shocking scale of the plan was announced those neighbours felt they had no choice but to take up an offer from the developers to sell. 

The developers unabashedly swallowed these two acquisitions into their already overarching development.

Others told the Herald it was a badly-flawed, discriminatory government planning system where local residents in their own time had to start from scratch and spend hours of research – often after-hours – up against very well resourced and experienced architects, town planners, heritage experts and planning bureaucrats who all played their part in well-paid day jobs. 

Discrimination

And this was made worse by a politically neutered East Fremantle council, stricken into silence by a powerful WA government and overly keen to help the developer, making clear it would not help help its residents. The council only responded to residents when 149 signed a petition a year ago to force the council to host an electors meeting. 

And then, it largely ignored all the residents’ motions passed unanimously by the meeting.

Some residents simply cannot see why the government is so one-sided, preferring a single developer for their economic value and potential when, as more than 700 residents in the Woodside Ward, they are custodians of over $1.5 billion in home values, eclipsing the scale of the proposed developer by hundreds of millions of dollars. 

This does not take account of the tens of millions of dollars spent every year on improving many of their homes for the future.

Aged care provider Hall & Prior emerged five or six years ago as part of the successful consortium who snapped up the former Woodside maternity hospital site in Dalgety Street, originally the home of the late 1800s Goldrush entrepreneur William Dalgety Moore.

Importantly, the critical part of the group was the WA government-owned superannuation fund for fire and emergency services employees who are shown on the title as owners of the historic site. 

The super fund reports officially to WA treasurer Rita Saffioti who is also deputy premier and formerly a very powerful and determined planning minister; prior to that, it reported to the then premier and treasurer Mark McGowan, also full of rugged determination to get his own way. 

Hall & Prior with the super fund as a major investor, could not have come with better credentials in the eyes of the WA Labor government. Especially with the message this consortium initially bore: all they wanted to do was help solve the shortage of aged care beds in WA, especially for dementia patients. =

Apart from the odd cynic who might have thought there was a potential conflict of interest with the most powerful government figures actively involved, who could say no. So most people, initially, said yes. 

The only trouble was, under the East Freo council’s town plan the historic site is zoned R15, permitting uses restricted to two storeys – like all the surrounding homes. None of the developers’ uses complied with that scheme, and all buildings, including the maternity wards where more than 50,000 WA babies were born, were heritage listed.

Well, not to matter, it wasn’t long before the development applicants were working closely with the WA Heritage Council and East Fremantle council to work it all out. 

Conflicts?

What a disappointment that was; they really rolled out the red carpet, taking their lead from the WA government’s ill-considered desire to maximise economic development at the expense of the larger scale, ongoing vibrant economic development going ahead in hundreds of East Fremantle homes surrounding the site.

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Neighbours speechless

WHEN plans were published with a Baronial-style castle, five or more storeys high and smothering the site, with historic Dalgety house diminished, maternity wards demolished and fill bringing the ground level to the gutters of neighbours, the community was speechless. 

Not for long. It broke all the provisions of the town plan, towering over and overshadowing neighbouring homes.

A massive development; part nursing home and part out-patients care with ancillary medical consulting facilities (which should be based in Fremantle),  it was way beyond the initial expectations of a low-scale, low-impact facility. 

What many residents were expecting was a modern residential proposal as recommended by the Royal Commission into Aged Care, which was quite scathing about the general provision of institutional-style aged care in Australia.

All East Freo residents worried about the proposed development of the historic Woodside site are advised to follow the link and get your submissions in by close of business on Friday August 18, 2023. 

To make it easy you can cherry-pick your concerns from our reporting in this and next week’s editions of the Fremantle Herald.   

Head to: consultation.dplh.wa.gov.au/reform-design-state-assessment/woodside-residential-aged-care-facility/

by ANDREW SMITH