24th September, 2024.
While I am no longer a councillor, I care deeply for my community and that means caring about the effect of any decision that is made by the council. The Douglas Park community is fighting an uphill battle over the expansion of an approved cemetery that was rushed through the Parliament by the previous Government in 2020. Councillors objected and the mayor of the time spoke at the panel. The doors of the meeting were closed, and the outcome was the approval of a cemetery on a rock shelf that would require milling of the stone before any bodies can be buried. The plot is accessible through a gorge cutting, and the roads are not appropriate for this sort of development. Naturally, the developer has taken those restrictions and made an amendment to the application.
The issue is that the community feels it is being left out of a decision and is willing to help the council fight the proposal. I note in particular Tracy McConchie and Sam Davis of the Reject Douglas Park Cemetery community group. They have in good faith reached out to the mayor who, for a number of weeks, has said he is unavailable. Meanwhile, the exhibition period has begun for the amended proposal and is due to end in the first week of October. A resolution of the council was in place for council to form an objection to the proposal with the support of the community. Community members have been told that to access the information for the development application, they need to fill out a GIPAA request. I am aware of how processes should and can work. The restrictions on the community in this case are unnecessary.
The reality is stark, and we must act together as a community to oppose anything that is not beneficial or in keeping with the area. The best consultants have been employed by the developer to sell the proposal. There have been claims of providing for the community. The consultants have glossed over multiple and serious logistical impediments, and offered mere tokenistic consideration of the land, people and heritage. They are all poised precariously on a shaky spire of promises that problems will be dealt with at some mythical time in the future. Residents do not have the luxury of indulging in marketing fantasy but must face the reality of sustained and insufferable gouging of sandstone to enable rock crypts; gushing and potentially contaminated overflows through their homes on route to the river behind them; reeking plumes—perhaps carcinogenic—from a crematorium; and long processions of hundreds of visitors daily, with two out of three access routes involving travel over winding, one-way river causeways.
It is not just the human residents who are impacted but also the glorious flora and fauna that are earmarked for protection in the Cumberland Plain Conservation Plan and protected by a regulatory control that the developer has spent decades flagrantly disregarding. Fast-forward four years and the proponent, having failed to sell the site in its current form, has increased capacity to almost 70,000 plots, ludicrously suggested triple‑decker coffin placements in terrain that is unable to support single depth, added a crematorium and had it stamped "State significant". With his continued pursuit of this development that residents do not want or need, they are asking why his profit should take precedence over the rights of ratepaying residents who call Douglas Park home.
Some of the people involved in the effort to stop the development in 2020 have been made ill by what they think is a crushing David and Goliath process unfairly stacked against them, but many others remain, choosing to believe that those at the highest level will step in and do the only right thing and prevent the facility going in entirely the wrong place. To that end, we need the mayor to step in and meet with residents. They deserve not only an ear of the elected council but also to be assisted in their battle for their community. The process needs to be transparent for the best outcome for my community.