Koala habitat to be redeveloped into retirement village in NSW mid-north coast

ABC NEWS (Australia)

A 20-year-old ‘zombie DA’ is making way for a retirement village to be built on the habitat of a rapidly dwindling koala population in NSW. Locals are fighting back against what they see as an obsolete and obstructive plan.

Transcript

00:00At Halliday's Point on the New South Wales mid-north coast, this koala habitat is set

00:07to make way for 100 retirement homes.

00:10But there's a catch.

00:12The original approval to do so was granted 20 years ago, before koalas here were on the

00:18brink of extinction.

00:20Habitat destruction and fragmentation is one of the major drivers of extinction.

00:25These historical development consents, which are also called zombie DAs, plague the New

00:31South Wales coast.

00:34And it's not clear just how many there are.

00:36I'm staggered that we just don't have that detail available already.

00:40And to be very, very fair to the councils, a lot of these historical development consents

00:44went through at a time when it was still very much paper-based.

00:49At Manyana on the south coast, the federal government recently upheld plans to turn this

00:54endangered rainforest into 153 homes.

00:58It was based on an approval dating back to 2008, well before the site became a refuge

01:04for animals following the Black Summer bushfires.

01:07It's like a cancer that is going to eat away the last of our precious forests.

01:13Under current legislation, overturning approvals could prove costly.

01:18The compensation could be minor, at one or two or five million dollars, but the compensation

01:23could also be 100 or 200 or 500 million dollars.

01:27Labor's Clayton Barr and the Greens' Sue Higginson are chairing separate parliamentary inquiries.

01:33Of course the government can pass legislation that says, fair and square, if a matter is

01:40in the public interest, then the law should provide for that public interest and a compensation

01:47is not required.

01:48Other options include setting up a register and stricter commencement time frames for

01:53new approvals.

01:54I would hope that we're potentially not offering up open-ended, use it whenever you want to

02:00use it sort of development approvals going forward, but I don't have a time machine to

02:06go back to 1988 or 98 or 2008.

02:10There are communities struggling now under a planning system that under its current settings

02:16is not fit for purpose.

02:19The Higginson inquiry is set to hand down its report next month.

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