To ignore RFS advice on housing isn’t just disrespectful. It’s stupid
Attempts by Planning Minister Paul Scully to improve the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act are overdue and welcome in the current housing crisis. But not giving full consideration to advice from our emergency services is folly.
The Rural Fire Service and State Emergency Service are staffed by volunteers who, year after year, courageously rush into bushfires and floods and save lives.
We know these weather-induced crises are becoming more fearsome in their scale. To build housing where either organisation deems the risk too high isn’t just disrespectful to these fine volunteers. It is sheer stupidity.
As state political reporter Max Maddison reports today, the new bill is expected to give the department more explicit power to intervene in cases of conflicting advice from government agencies, including the RFS and SES, in the hopes of accelerating the approval process. The Sun-Herald certainly hopes commonsense might prevail where there is a potential risk to human life.
The example of a development in Belrose known as Lizard Rock, now Patyegarang, is a case in point. The original proposal for 450 dwellings was made in 2022. It remains on the table. The RFS has never wavered in its advice.
In 1979, fires tore through Duffys Forest, Terrey Hills, Ingleside, Elanora Heights and Belrose, as well as other outer Sydney suburbs. Five lives were lost.
The RFS says the Lizard Rock proposal – among dense bushland with one road in and out – is unwise.
“The Patyegarang proposed development should not proceed due to extreme, and worsening, bushfire risk and lack of suitable evacuation paths for residents,” said Greg Mullins, a former commissioner of Fire and Rescue NSW who joined Duffys Forest RFS at age 13. Mullins’ father served in the Terrey Hills RFS for 61 years. If that is not expertise, we do not know what is.
All of this is not to say the 46-year-old, 327-page planning act does not need reforming. Cutting red tape is one thing, but crossing a red line is quite another.
In fairness to Scully, he did tell parliament in 2023: “Any objections from the NSW RFS would mean that the [Lizard Rock] proposal will not progress.”
Wakehurst MP Michael Regan has called it a “bushfire trap of a development”. Northern Beaches Mayor Sue Heins reminded everyone: “Only a few years ago, the NSW state government decided not to proceed with their own proposal for residential development under similar conditions at nearby Ingleside.”
But here’s the problem: NSW needs to build 377,000 new homes by July 2029 to meet the national housing accord.
The North Sydney Planning Panel went back to the RFS on Lizard Rock. It said: “Mitigation of bushfire risk had been canvassed extensively throughout the assessment of the planning proposal and while considerable work has been done to resolve that risk, the endorsement of the RFS had unfortunately not been obtained.”
There’s a good reason for that.
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