CARL PAYNE is a retired architect and White Gum Valley resident who says developers are having a pernicious effect on Fremantle’s heritage, aided and abetted by all tiers of government.

THE Thinking Allowed article by Ian Ker some weeks ago explored troubling financial issues at Fremantle council. 

It got me thinking again about deeply disturbing broader issues within WA local government administration circles. 

I’m broadly familiar with most aspects of local government, having dealt almost exclusively with local government clients over the past 30 or so years. 

I’m now retired and feeling frustrated enough by recent trends to want to make a few salient points on the sorry circumstances.

Political invasion

Over 40 years ago, the WA Labor Party launched its push into Fremantle governance.

I recall I wasn’t too focused on this, despite my always voting federal and state Labor at the time. I mostly still do (unless a Greens or Independent candidate is promoting a better progressive policy). 

And on the subject of the Greens – and training grounds – Freo’s former mayor Pettitt is now a state MLC for them. 

When Labor began its local government moves – and this still applies today – the sector was seen as a training ground for aspiring state politicians; Norm Marlborough, Clive Hughes and Geoff Gallop and a little later, others like our current Federal member Josh Wilson. 

At this time, Labor was not locally associated with property development. 

This is not to suggest they were supportive of heritage retention, but I don’t recall them energetically encouraging destructive development either.

Ripe for plucking 

Not too many years ago, this changed.

There was a shift, seemingly a new and more strategic step. 

Wheels within wheels started mysteriously to turn. 

Fremantle property and land had become very valuable. 

Little old Freo – activated in the mid-late 80s by the Americas Cup circus – was now being jealously viewed as ripe for development plucking. 

At state government level, new council administrative/planning structures were being planned and written. 

Both Labor and Liberal governments were on board the Develop A New Fremantle train, with revised routes to ensure development control was tightly held by state planning, rather than local planning. 

These “progressive models” were sold to the hoi polloi as “good for local government efficiency”. 

We were told they would allow councils “to cut through the red tape”.

Both State and local government representatives assured us they would “guarantee we weren’t blocked in a log-jam of development applications”.

In reality, many of the so-called ‘log jams’ were the result of the enormous increases in often pointless middle-management practices, plus staff shortages. 

Go on-line to almost any WA council website and check out the DA reports produced by LG officers. 

For the sheer number of words, most would compete with anything written by Leo Tolstoy. 

This reality was skated over. 

‘Ducks in a row’ was and remains the new religion. 

We now genuflect to the new holy order of so many absolutely essential reports being now required. 

These ensure that all short-neck, web-feet water birds are indeed positioned according to best practice methodologies within the constraints of a single-file orientation… blah, blah, blah.

Thick as thieves  

But this new approach didn’t promote better planning policies, it simply created the required pathway for developers to avoid delays and hold-ups. 

Community was jettisoned. 

Magically, developers – and the bureaucracies charged with assessing and controlling the plans and ambitions of these developers – were all suddenly singing from the very same songbook. 

“As thick as thieves” my grandmother might have muttered. 

Great mates. Brothers in arms. Collective saviours even.

At a more micro level, we saw specific changes in the practice of some consultants with years of commendable experience in offering strong and informed advice to protect Fremantle’s fragile townscape. 

Design/planning professionals who had traditionally been retained by local governments as a bulwark against excessive development pressures, were now being enlisted as members of the developers’ design teams. 

They were now cleverly and persuasively arguing in favour of heritage dilution. 

A form of transformative magic had fallen from the heavens. Or from Harvest Terrace. 

We were now hearing familiar words and phrases being carefully recycled in new and inventive ways, turned upside-down, inside-out, and this time to argue in favour of designs previously questioned and opposed, sometimes in the context of formal planning hearings with all the heavy-hitters.

Anti-social media

Then social media came along to play its part. 

On-line Fremantle community chat forums were trolled by close confidants of those within our local political and property development system. 

Their rapid-response teams quickly tore into dissenting or questioning ratepayer voices with the speed and grace of a junk-yard doberman.

It seems that this was only done “to ensure that an informed and balanced perspective is being fully appreciated by ratepayers”. 

On these forums, alternative voices were quickly shut down, drowned, dispatched. 

Heritage attacked

Inevitably, inexorably, the combined weight and gravity of state and local governments both arguing in favour of the dilution – read destruction – of Fremantle’s precious and fragile heritage, won the day. 

The results are plain to see, for those who bother to look. 

The outcomes are a range of new buildings and additions that fail to meet many of the critical planning guidelines that many had worked so hard for several decades to bring to our town. 

Nothing is now safe. 

The Fremantle Oval precinct planning process is a current example. 

It is my guess that the wheels-within-wheels nature of how we now do planning and development in Fremantle is working hard on an Oval precinct plan entirely outside the realm of considered community consultation.

Possibly also entirely outside the parameters of current density and height limitations. 

I say this because this is how it now works in our town.   

Another example of the above regrettable marriage will soon begin to rear its ugly out-of-scale head in Henderson Street. 

At a council planning presentation before Christmas last year, I watched in amazement and disappointment as a well-respected WA design professional favourably compared this coming behemoth to a modest, well-scaled and well-detailed new civic building in Murcia, Spain.

I find it difficult to make a reasonable aesthetic and streetscape comparison between the two examples, if this were fully to take site and context into account. 

If this were to address the existing streetscapes and public spaces, and the full spatial realities of both sites. 

The very real negative-streetscape impacts on Henderson Street – height, scale, massing, bulk, of the new Fremantle building were hardly covered. Hugely disappointing to me. 

More recently, to their credit some in council have resisted some of the more outrageous and misplaced judgements of state government panels. 

However, it’s a hopeless position for individual councillors who may not be part of the “new deal”. 

Majority voting numbers are deliberately skewed so that power doesn’t rest with council.

The pretext of democracy is now dead, individual ratepayers have NO power or influence whatever. 

Profound mediocrity

These days, in so many developed nations across the world – nations with well-established traditions of discourse and debate – we are witnessing profound mediocrity, confused bureaucracy, unbridled bullying, corruption both petty and large, stupid waste, and many more negative aspects spilling from the Fake News model. 

Aspects of this ‘brave new world’ now exist at government level – and at corporate level – within Australia. 

The odour can also be detected on the streets of Fremantle. 

We see vested interests trample and prosper; prosper and trample. 

It’s a heady game for those who hold all the cards. 

Ratepayers are given mostly short shrift at council meetings; speaking times are rigidly inflexible. 

We ask questions about why, when, how, and WTF?!!!

Despite all the heritage battles fought in the 1970s and early 1980s – before we arrived at a broader general recognition that heritage conservation was a critical part of Fremantle’s planning and economic future – it now feels like we have never been more divided. 

In global terms, cynical and nasty division-politics works. 

Fremantle is not immune. 

Opposition forces now seem more powerful, more imbedded, more persuasive.

The polarisation feels very cynically applied.

Fairly recently, I even had a past city councillor warn me personally about associating with a leading heritage figure in town, based on his political leanings being fundamentally different to mine. 

Polarisation personified. 

This was never a factor in past days.

Power, greed, deceit 

If we are fully to understand the negative aspects of the current development dynamics and operations within Fremantle, we need to know the how and the why. 

We need to recognise and understand that we are not immune from some of the world-wide negative practices associated with power, greed and deceit. 

We need to wake up to the reality that clearly, something is broken in Fremantle.

Unless urgent changes to planning, auditing and procurement processes occur at both state and local government levels, recent poor outcomes delivered by robber barons and compliant foot-soldiers charged with implementing the formal development procedures, will increasingly surround, dominate and destroy the cohesive integrity of our city. 

Got a burning issue to get off your chest? Get cracking on the keyboard, then send it to news@fremantleherald.com