We have now had a response of sorts from Westpac and NAB. As expected, they have not addressed many of our concerns, and they have relied on the State Government’s poorly scoped and inadequate EES. Stay tuned for more on this!

Gross negligence in funding the desal plant against their own ‘Equator Principles’. Looks like we may need to organise small groups, 2 or 3 people in your suburb, to let the public know in front of Westpac and NAB branches. Watershed can supply leaflet material (by post or we could make it available off the website for you to print). If you would like to participate, should we need to do this, please leave your details with an email to answers@watershedvictoria.org.au

Past event - Monday 23rd November, 11.00am

Well it’s been nearly three months now and the Banks haven’t given us any indication yet that they are following the corporate responsibility principles that they say they are. To their credit they did send a reasonable delegation of their representatives to meet with Watershed Victoria, but they provided nothing to indicate that they had met their obligations under the ‘Equator Principles’. More than a month later they have still not answered any of the many questions we left them with. Time to start spreading our concerns again, so we leafleted City branches on Monday, starting with the Westpac branch on the corner of Swanston and Collins St. at 11.00am. Join us now by writing to the banks to try to convince the banks that they have to do more if this investment is to come anywhere near being acceptable, both socially and environmentally. Further more diverse leafletting to follow if we don’t get responses soon.

This is the leaflet we handed out -

feel free to copy and distribute.

Click on the image, or here, to get a good copy

of both sides of the leaflet.

Questions, contact:

Stephen 0407 811778 or

Jessica 0407 307231

As requested both Westpac and Nab sent representatives to a meeting with Watershed representatives at Kilcunda on Wednesday 14th October.

Results of our meeting with the banks in relation to our concerns about them not meeting their ethical investment guidelines:

• A presentation was given by Watershed pointing out our concerns and some background to the issues. The banks filled us in on various aspects of how they see their obligations and how they assessed the project.
• The banks have assessed this as a B-grade environmental and social risk project (from an A to C or no ranking range). Our fears were well founded, in that they admitted they largely relied on the proponents environmental assessment (as poorly scoped and resourced as it was), to give the project an acceptable risk assessment.
• Both banks used a consultant firm, originally employed by AquaSure, to “do their assessment”.
• The banks agreed that ongoing assessments would be required, although the scope or scale of this was not available.
• They claimed ‘confidentiality’ as their reason for not previously consulting Watershed, and for not immediately being able to address some of our concerns.
• The consultant, who was present, said he believed that alternatives were not available, based on previous work he had done for Government, and an unspecified document he did not name or indicate availability of.
• Watershed pointed out that by relying on a flawed EES and failing to consider all issues the equator principles 2 and 3 in particular had been inadequately addressed. After our presentation there was general agreement that the issues around using desalination to secure Melbourne’s water supply were many and varied.
• Watershed have left the banks with a list of issues that we feel have been inadequately addressed including some of the above and also the following; we have requested they furnish us with responses to these concerns in a timely fashion:
  • Why was the project given a category B status given the scale, implications for future water policy, location, multiple areas of impact, unresolved concerns and unaddressed issues involved?
  • How can their environmental assessment be adequate given that it either did not, or only inadequately addressed issues such as the need for baseline studies, choice of site or processes, climate change implications, social issues and cumulative impacts of this project over time and with existing and future projects?
  • What do the banks see as ‘consultation’, what will the following plans contain and when will they be available:
    • ’social environmental management plan’
    • ‘borrower’s grievance mechanism’
    • ‘works environmental management plan’
    • ‘ongoing environmental monitoring plan for compliance’ ?
  • What degree of public transparency will the banks require of the above, and when will they be required?

Stay tuned to see whether the banks reassess their involvement in this project or whether we get satisfactory responses to these and other concerns.

• Please continue to send letters with your concerns to the banks, click here.
• Should you be prepared to take action if we do not get satisfactory responses please contact us, click here.
• Click the ‘BANKS’ tab at the top of the page for more information on this issue.

Housing Hardship on the Bass Coast - more desal impacts

If you know anybody in this kind of situation please call Jessica on 0407 307231,

or if you have evidence of specific locations where people have been dislodged from their accommodation, and replaced by desal workers please call Maurice on 0419 552385.  Maurice is also looking for a copy of the EMP (Environmental Monitoring Plan) that is supposed to exist for the works underway at present, should you happen to know where a copy could be found.

How much will it cost? - Dispite the State Government claiming $3.5 billion, the chairman of the company building and operating the plant says $ 4.8 billion, all from our water bills and taxes. This means water from the plant must cost at least five times what we get from Melbourne water now! (link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UsEFhl_DdI)

Results of our Annual General Meeting held on 20th October:

The following nominations were unopposed and duly elected:

President - Stephen Cannon
Vice presidents - Col Truman & Mark Robertson
Secretary - Neil Rankine
Treasurer - Kaye Craddock
Public Officer - Roger Thorrowgood

Contact details for the above if you click on the CONTACT tab above.

We invite further volunteers to the Committee to assist all activities of Watershed in seeking sustainable water solutions for Victorians - use the contact button above if you would like to be involved in a more sustainable future.

Still concerned about a healthy future for our children & their children, about caring for the environment, about sustainable water solutions? We are. We met once again in the Wonthaggi Town Hall where it all began.

Great article in the Age, 5th October

Check it out here:

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/economic-rationalists-have-hijacked-water-policy-at-our-peril-20091004-ght2.html

Think about writing a short letter to the editor, or your local paper about these and related issues!

The government now owns a land easement from the Bass Coast to Melbourne’s suburbs.

Around 125 farmers and other landowners have had parts of their properties compulsorily aquired, and this has happened without the usual 5 month notice. The government have kindly told the farmers that they won’t have to pay rent on this land (at least not yet). Read the story in ‘The Weekly Times’ newspaper at the link below:

http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2009/09/25/116381_latest-news.html

Sustainability - what is it?

Film challenge for young Victorians - $8,000 in prizes to be won

If you are under 21 and interested in the much misused word “sustainability”, and visual media, here’s you chance to win some great prizes. If you chose to question the sustainability of building a huge desal plant, that would shut out cheaper and better options for our environment, while tying up huge amounts of renewable energy, that isn’t even available yet, that could otherwise have been used to cut our carbon emissions, and a plant that creates yet another ocean pollution outfall, I wonder if you would have much hope of winning, given who’s running the show, but you never know!

Click here for the details:  www.futureshots.com.au

Do you Bank with Westpac ?

Or if you bank with - click here

Or even if you don’t bank with either, read on and see what they are doing:

Westpac Bank espouses their environmental credentials in relation to investment decisions for the money we place in their care. Yet now they are allowing the desalination plant to go ahead, preventing better and cheaper options from an environmental point of view, from going ahead, by backing the desalination plant’s construction.

Write a letter of objection:

Download, print and post a letter addressed to their Board of Directors here, or
download a letter to their Corporate Responsibility Department here, or
download an alternative letter to their Corporate Responsibility Department here, or
Cut and paste bits or the whole of these letters, or use your own ideas and the points below, into an email to corporateresponsibility@westpac.com.au, or you can ring,
ask for their ‘Corporate Responsibility officer’, Westpac - 132032 or (02) 82530769, National - 1300 889398.

• shortcomings of environmental assessment study
• the consortium aren’t committing to proper monitoring of marine effects
• so much water we won’t build the sustainable alternatives
• financial risk to bank
• bad investment
• what could go wrong (soils, substructure of area-mines etc, size of project, water temperature, more ?
• NAB’s reputation as environmenatlly responsible may be lost
• backlash
• env and social impacts -traffic, housing, green tourism
• long-term damage to bank’s reputation
  

_______________________________________

The Board of Directors
Westpac Bank Head Office
275 Kent St,
Sydney, NSW 2000

Westpac’s Investment in the Wonthaggi Desalination Plant:

On the 31st July, Aquasure, a consortium made up of Suez Environment (affiliated to Degremont), Theiss and Maquarie Capital announced that it would be building the Wonthaggi desalination plant.

Aquasure and the State of Victoria secured a financing package lead by Westpac and NAB, and supported by banks from Belgium, China, France, Italy, Japan, Spain and the UK.
Westpac’s decision to finance the project is contrary to Westpac’s stated principles of responsibility toward the environment. Westpac could not legitimately claim that this project met even the most basic of environment requirements, due to the following:

1. Lack of credible environmental assessment of the site before works began. The shortest Environmental Effects Study (EES) on record took place - inadequate and insufficient for such a complex public infrastructure project, planned to be the largest desalination plant in Australia.
2. The long term effects of the construction and operation of the desalination plant have not been properly assessed. Comprehensive baseline data collected over 2 - 3 years is required prior to construction / operation in order to develop an optimal monitoring plan. In addition, no completed Cultural Heritage Management Plan required for a comprehensive assessment and planning, was completed.
3. Location adjacent to Bunurong Marine Park, in a migration path and activity zone for whales. The marine investigations in the EES were inadequate and deficient in their examination of the impact of the discharge from the desalination plant on marine life. There are significant gaps in the existing reports regarding failure to highlight known important EPBC listed species (e.g. three native orchids, Dwarf / Antarctic Minke Whales) and the frequency of presence of species, particularly migratory marine mammals.
4. Marine effects:
   • Mixing: There has been no analysis of the social, environmental or economic cost in the event that coastal upwelling shifts the brine pools along the Victorian coast. The outlet pipeline needs to be at least 2 km off shore (the current Aquasure plan shows pipe only 1.1km in length). An outlet on a true sandy bottom is “world’s best practice” and is essential to minimise negative impacts of brine and other chemical accumulation. The planned outlet is on moderate relief reef, rich in marine life.
   • Intake: The cumulative impacts of the entrainment of eggs, plankton, fish, larval life stages and other small marine invertebrates in the intake of seawater. Studies are required into the effect of entrainment of eggs and larvae of marine fauna.
   • Outlet - The cumulative impacts of the discharge of ecotoxins, and the potential for pooling of ecotoxins on the marine environment and human health. The effect that the long-term accumulation of organic detritus (typically includes the bodies of dead organisms or fragments of organisms) will have upon the marine environment was not assessed.
   • Other areas of concern: impact on coastal habitats, including the Powlett River, other coastal estuaries, rivers, inlets and bays; impact of construction and the operation of the desalination plant on endangered birds, such as the Hooded Plover that breeds within close proximity of the subject site; impact of the construction and the operation of the desalination plant (particularly noise emissions) on protected marine species including: Blue, Southern Right and Humpback whales; Dolphins; Little Penguins; Seals and sea lions; Leatherback Turtles; Sharks, specifically the Great White Shark.
5. French infrastructure company GDF Suez, whose subsidiary Suez Environment is a lead member of the Aquasure consortium, has a track record of breaches of performance requirements, after illegally logging Amazon rainforest during the construction of the $5.6 billion hydro-electric dam in Brazil. It was fined $305,000 in February for clearing 19 hectares of rainforest, some of which was protected by a permanent reserve. The project has been fiercely opposed by environmentalists, who say it will flood 520 square kilometres of rainforest, triggering tonnes of greenhouse gases from rotting vegetation, as well as impeding fish migration. According to Spanish news agency EFE, the company also used dynamite to kill 11 tons of fish in local rivers.
6. Carbon emissions associated with huge energy use:With only one larger desalination plant operating anywhere in the world, the scale of desalination proposed would prevent as many as 900,000 tonnes of existing emissions being avoided every year. The surplus energy from wind and hydro projects, that would still be available if cheaper water supply options had been chosen, will not be available to reduce existing emissions by 900,000 tonnes per year.

There has been little, if any, critical analysis of the desalination project promoting and complying with the principles of ecological sustainable development, which includes the precautionary principle.

Westpac claim to have a set of corporate environmental principles, promoted in television advertisements, to guide their investment strategies. I find it difficult to see how they can be reconciled with investing in the Wonthaggi desalination plant.

I appreciate that Westpac would be undertaking due diligence on this proposed investment and that it may find this investment not consistent with its stated corporate responsibilities and obligations toward the environment.

I urge the bank to investigate the many threats to the environment caused by the construction and operation of the desalination plant in Wonthaggi. To quote your own slogan “It’s about doing the right thing”

Yours faithfully …………………………………………………………………………

Address…………………………………………………………………………………

……………………………..………………………………………………………………

Postcode………………….

Click here to see BANK-Track’s assessment of Westpac

Click here to see what the “Equator Principles” that Westpac have signed up to say

Click here to see a flyer that we are handing out at Westpac branches

Click here to see Westpac’s statements on Water and Climate Change

HELP US  -  ONGOING ACTIVE MONITORING OF DESAL SITE:

As our campaign is strongly motivated by our love for the Bass Coast, we plan to actively pursue compliance with the Environmental Effects Study (EES) as well as acting on the social and traffic impacts of the project on our community.

In the next few weeks we will summarise the key EES recommendations to make it clear what may be breaches and to which authorities breaches can be reported. A program will be worked around this.

At the brainstorm on the 15^th August, 3 action areas were identified:

·         Monitoring wildlife, especially bird life.

We plan to get an idea of pre -existing conditions of a few key indicators such as the endangered Hooded Plover, which is known to visit Williamsons Beach and attempt to breed along the coast. Other species will also be important. Whales continue to migrate along the coast – there have been over 30 documented sightings in the last month. Salinity measurements will be important  near the outlet, though that will depend on our resources. Noise measurement will be needed. Vibration and light glare will also affect the environment.

·         Breaches of performance requirements.

During the pilot plant construction, numerous breaches of the Environmental Management Plan were identified, such as dumping of asbestos in Campbell St, waste dumping in Skip Lane and delivery of materials using trucks which were not compliant. We are not too hopeful of a better result now that the Aquasure consortium are in charge– the need for haste, disturbance of acid sulphate soils and waste silt flowing into the Powlett River some of the many conditions likely to cause problems. We have already had contradictory statements about at what hours per day the construction will take place.

·         Social  Impacts.

Traffic and housing problems are already affecting coastal residents. We need to identify which authorities are in charge of traffic planning and compliance. A list of people whose tenancies are threatened and  those who are experiencing problems with housing is being compiled, but follow-up is needed. Many families are not keen to make a fuss, in case they risk their chances of finding secure housing.

If you are keen to help with a bird count and keeping an eye on the project, please get in touch with Chris Heislers 0419556381 or Jessica Harrison 0407307231