The current battle:
URGENT! Save World Heritage Shute Harbour
The Save Our Foreshore organisation is totally opposed to what it sees as nothing more than yet another public waterfront land grab for high end residences - using a marina as its justification.
If this development on our public foreshore is approved, many thousands of locals and visitors will lose an irreplaceable environmental and scenic treasure, primarily so that a private developer can on-sell reclaimed blocks of World Heritage seabed land to third-party developers.
Have your say: submissions to the Supplementary EIS for the Shute Harbour Marina development close on the 29-04-2013.
Go to the Shute Harbour page to find more information and complete a Supplementary EIS submission.
Battle 2011
History - 2004
When Save Our Foreshore was founded in 2004, beautiful Airlie Beach was the latest coastal town to join the nation-wide and now world-wide fight against government give-aways of public land for private development
The town is the heart of Whitsunday's tropical coast and its public foreshore land was being literally given away to development firm FKP to build a 4-storey, 125 room budget Outrigger hotel with, pub and gambling right next to public parkland.
FKP wouldn't have had to buy the land - the State government was giving it to them.
Locals simply wanted to preserve the public foreshore land for public use. They had lobbied and worked for years to fund and build the foreshore lagoon, and felt they could lose both that and the parkland along the foreshore whether through the Outrigger project or future deals cut by council once the precedent was set.
The tender process was complex and people were suspicious. But, the development did not comply with the Town Plan and therefore should have been rejected.
Councillors were told they would be responsible for one of two futures for Airlie Beach:
1. Seaside slum like every other seaside slum, or
2. Beautiful and unique destination to match our magnificent Whitsundays.
The community gained promises from State and local governments that the land would not be used for private purposes, but clearly we must be ever vigilant. A new, identical, threat is here.
Please contact us at saveourforeshore@whitsunday.net.au if you need any more information We want to stop the give away of Queensland coastal public land and the homogenization of our towns.
We still have not found out why everything in relation to this development was "commercial in confidence" and what there was to hide. Save Our Foreshore Inc is the community group formed by locals to stop this kind of development and to get to the bottom of what happens here so we can prevent the loss of other public lands in the Whitsundays.
