Plans to build a wildlife park in the Blue Mountains to lure more tourists would result in an environmental disaster and need rethinking, writes Rosemary Sorensen.
A FEW YEARS AGO, plans to build a Blue Mountains Wildlife Park at Wentworth Falls in NSW would have read like a plotline from Working Dog Productions’ satirical TV show, Utopia.
With its five-star hotel, enclosures for dingoes and penguins, toboggan track, chairlift and – a nod perhaps to another popular TV series – an animal hospital, it certainly sounds both fanciful and disastrous.
The Blue Mountains are awesome. Majestic. Fascinating. But no, according to the president of an organisation called Blue Mountains Tourism, “The mountains need more attractions” because ‘interest in the region had skyrocketed as local landmarks were shared on social media’.
Such sharing and the tizzy excitement it generates were possibly behind the unfathomably stupid decision by a tourist to snatch up a baby wombat and dash off with it, hilariously filming the encounter so she could post it on social media.
Remember when a Sydney suburb was having trouble dissuading tourists from feeding carrots to kangaroos on account of it making them sick? (The kangaroos, not the tourists.) Well, that’s tame stuff. Grab a baby wombat. Or a young crocodile. Makes a terrific fun video to post on your social media account.
The folk in the Blue Mountains must be thinking, here we go again. And frankly, their tolerance and patience are commendable.
An ABC story from June 2023 summarises the saga up until then:
- the 1989 Supreme Court overriding of a council decision to reject a “crocodile and wildlife park” on a Bodington Hill (Wentworth Falls) site on the Great Western Highway;
- the announcement in 2019 that construction would soon begin; and
- the revival and variation of those plans in 2021 by a group called “Blue Mountains Wildlife Trust” which is described as “experienced property developers and high net worth individuals with connectivity with the Blue Mountains”.
The latest ten-hectare Wentworth Falls proposal is costed at $83 million (slated at $30 million back in 2019) and has the support of member-based organisation Blue Mountains Tourism, whose President, Jason Cronshaw, says: “The mountains need more attractions.”
The spokesperson for the company behind the proposal (the unnamed “high net worth individuals with connectivity”) is lawyer Farshad Amirbeaggi, who told the ABC:
“It does offer a zipline and a luge because not only are they joyful and bring a smile to the face, but they will travel through the flora and/or over fauna and a skyline that is pretty spectacular.”
Oh, and there’ll be a First Nations cultural centre, apparently.
How wonderfully determined these developers have been, sitting on the original wildlife centre approval for 30 years. It’s a pity we only know the company name (Aesthete No.14 Pty Ltd) and not the individuals who are keen to provide “interactive experiences with wildlife” to visitors who they hope will arrive via the new Badgery’s Creek Western Sydney airport when it opens in 2026.
There’s an environmental impact study now underway which, I’m sorry to say, brings us back to having to confront the world today and the impact of the United States’ Mad King Trump on how things are done, and who gets their own way. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced the ‘biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history’, removing rules so that, according to the EPA administrator, the agency can ‘drive a dagger straight into the heart of what he calls climate change religion’.
Australia, you’d like to think, won’t copy the U.S. (stop laughing). Australia has robust environmental regulations in place and a transparent legal system where decisions can be challenged. And, you’d like to think, governments that understand climate change.
Just because Australia ranked last out of 193 UN member states for climate action in 2021, just because the Coalition is promising to ‘Turbocharge our mining and resources sector by accelerating approvals and cutting red and green tape’ if they win this year’s election, just because they also want to ‘Ensure government regulation is balanced and genuine, not used for activist causes or obstructing our regional industries’ – the Australian EPA’s Nature Positive Plan proves this government’s ‘commitment to reform Australia’s environmental laws to better protect, restore and manage our unique environment’. Right?
Except, of course, that Nature Positive Plan was shelved in January, so the EPA stays as a government department, not a statutory authority. And, frankly, if certain anti-environment lobbies have the power to diminish regulations now, that power is set to boom, baby, boom, if a Coalition government is voted in.
So, it’s back to the waiting game, for people like Aesthete No.14 Pty Ltd, those “high net worth individuals with connectivity”. It might not be long, people, before you can get to work on that luge, taking tourists “through the flora and/or over the fauna” – educationally – in the under-developed lands of the Blue Mountains.
It won’t be just the kiddies whizzing down the luge track who have big smiles on their faces.
Rosemary Sorensen is an IA columnist, journalist and founder of the Bendigo Writers Festival.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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