Wednesday, 19 February 2025

 Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:29): I rise today to speak on the petition that I tabled in this house earlier today that was signed by over 3000 concerned residents from Lynbrook, Hampton Park, Narre Warren South, Lyndhurst, Cranbourne, Cranbourne North, Endeavour Hills and surrounding suburbs. I want to acknowledge that this petition was supplemented by a number of signatures that have just arrived in my office and were not here in time to be part of this petition and its tabling, and also acknowledge that there are over 1415 residents that signed an e-petition calling for action. The number of people that are extremely concerned about the issues that this petition is about is rising every day as people become aware of what is at stake. It is not just a small group of concerned residents; it is an entire region that is making it abundantly clear that the project does not have social support from the community.

What is this project that I am talking about? It is in fact the City of Casey’s approval for the largest waste transfer facility in Victoria, and it is going to be around local residents. From what I have been able to see in my research, nowhere in a First World country can I see a waste transfer facility like this anywhere near residential homes. There are laws that protect that in some places, to say that it needs to be a minimum of at least 500 metres from residential areas for public safety reasons. But this particular one is going to be, potentially, from the City of Casey’s meeting last night, 54 metres from the residential zone – 54 metres from where people live, where people breathe, where they are raising their families. This is not to overlook the fact that there are also a number of underground springs in this local area where water can easily be contaminated, and the facility borders a number of lakes in the area where homes are built. So you can imagine the turmoil and trauma of the number of residents that live in the area, many of whom have bought or built their dream homes. Others are living there because that is just the area that they have grown up in and they are in one of the older suburbs. We have got a mixture of new suburbs, old suburbs and everything in between, and that allows us to understand the nature of the diversity of the people that live in the area, and yet there has not been proper consultation of the residents. You can imagine for people who are raising their families what this is doing to them – the thought that they might be putting not just their own lives and their own health at risk but also risking danger to their own children.

This is an issue that people are trying to raise awareness about. They are genuinely concerned, and they do not feel that people are listening. They feel abandoned by the City of Casey, which signed off on papers before we had any local councillors. Days before the local councillors were brought in, they signed off on it, and of course council was under the administration of the state government. They feel abandoned by the state government, because it is not listening, and they feel that they are taking on a giant here, a goliath, and that they are the little people simply trying to speak out. I think that in many cases they have been completely overlooked because people thought that they could get away with it. The residents want you to know that you simply cannot get away with it. They are going to speak from every corner of their residential areas and beyond so that you can understand as a government how incredibly important it is to listen to these people and to move this waste transfer facility.

It is going to be the largest waste transfer facility in Victoria and also perhaps in many other parts of Australia. We do not have anything quite like what this is going to do. The proposed site appears to be in clear breach of the EPA’s 500-metre separation guideline, which they made, and so I think that it is really important that we understand the safety risk. It is posing a risk of air pollution, noise, odour and hazardous waste management which is going to far exceed what any residential community should be expected to tolerate. And yet despite these clear violations we find that they are not getting heard by anybody, and so we will be debating this in this house, and I am looking forward to that.