Port Phillip Conservation Council Inc. has, since its formation in 1970, striven to protect the waters and coastline of Port Phillip. Its present Committee of Management has thus resolved to make a submission to the present EES into the proposed deepening of shipping channels in The Rip, the Bay and the Yarra.

In the 1980s government made a deliberate decision to scale down further deepening of The Rip, and to restrict transits of The Rip by deep draught vessels to the higher part of the tidal cycle. Melbourne is now faced however with a proposal that would reverse that - despite the world’s now quite specific knowledge about future global warming, sea level rise and coastal erosion. PPCC Inc’s. submission will challenge the logic of removing that restriction to deeper draught vessels entering the Bay just so larger container vessels carrying larger volumes of cargo can enter the Port of Melbourne.

Port Phillip is the shallowest of Australia’s major ports, and it is also the furthest from the ocean, so the issue of deepening its shipping channels, particularly its entrance, The Rip, has been faced earlier - in previous decades, and will be faced again in 2030 even if this current proposal proceeds. PPCC Inc. sees this proposal as shortsighted, and parochial, and believes that a different solution is required for an environmental and social issue of national importance now facing us in the 21st Century.

DEVELOPMENT WITHOUT END:

Government policy has moved Australia well into the global market, and yet this proposal seeks to entrench petty interstate rivalries based on which state will get the largest share of international container trade.

 The current proposal provides for foreseeable needs only to 2030, but the pressure for vessels of ever deeper draught seems inexorable. Co-incidentally 2030 is also the year by which another Victorian Government plan, Melbourne 2030, seeks to make provision for a population increase of about 1,000,000 extra people. These two expansionist plans - Melbourne 2030 and Channel Deepening in Port Phillip - are obviously not unrelated. One striking similarity in the plans is their complete silence about what might happen after 2030 - just over 25 years hence. Are the economics of shipping, which favour ever-increasing volumes for individual container ships, expected to lose their allure by 2030? Victorians can expect renewed demands for yet deeper channels, or a similar assault on Western Port Bay and its environs when 2030 arrives.

Concerted pressure by shipping and industry groups and some trade unions continues to feed a mindset in government that Melbourne  must continue to expand, but to what end, and how long will our natural resources and ever-shrinking recreational and living space tolerate such continuing massive onslaught? The cargo cult and expansionist approach inherent in Melbourne 2030 and the Channel Deepening proposal have no logical end point, and will lose credibility if public opinion comes to realize that it is quality not quantity that will be important to our future.

As the environmental effects of deeper channels are enduring, and cumulative, Victorians will need to end this practice of ever-increasing modification of Port Phillip, and ever-increasing population pressure around it, at some time. When, and what will be left?

IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE?

The fundamental purpose of this proposal is to move more imports and exports (in boxes) into and out of Victoria. Each of the boxes is transferred from a ship to land transport anyway. A longer land journey, rather than more pressure on our Bay, is the issue. More rail transport via routes across Victoria would benefit the interests of all Victoria, which is not overcrowded, and also the interests of Melbourne, which is overcrowded.

We do not propose any reduction in the existing port size, but instead seek rail transport as a better way of handling the extra volume expected in the future.

A shipping-only approach gives a rigid inflexible, highly-centralized transport system, concentrating on expensive and highly desirable land on the edge of the Bay, whereas more emphasis on transport of Victoria’s imports and exports by rail would give a much more adaptable, decentralized ingredient to our transport system. Note that ships in and out of Melbourne go nowhere else in Victoria, whereas rail can go wherever a railway line is or will be built - where producers and consumers are, or can be.

The present EES swiftly dismisses rail as a reasonable alternative, but does not present thorough costings from a “level playing field” i.e. what would be the comparative costs of moving a container by rail versus moving it by ship if the present funds for channel deepening were allocated to further improvement of our standard gauge rail system between existing natural deep water ports in Sydney, Brisbane, Fremantle and Darwin?

Victoria is only 3% of Australia’s area. The centre of gravity of Australia’s population is moving away from Victoria northwards at one kilometre per year. Victoria should concentrate more on maintaining a balance between industry for Melbourne and the recreational and natural values of our surroundings, such as Port Phillip, and also industry and activity in the rest of Victoria. Further channel deepening points to an increasingly bloated Melbourne, with the rest of Victoria frustrated by Government neglect.

The specialists contributing to the EES have rejected certain of the more wishful, and possibly ambit, claims of the preliminary proposal. Mercifully the various ill-founded proposals originally touted for disposal of some of the 30 gigalitres (30 million cubic metres) of the natural floor of Port Phillip Bay proposed to be removed have all been rejected. The worst of those proposals was for a disfigurement of the bay the terminology for which reeked of pure propaganda - an “environmental island” to be created in Port Phillip. The EES so clearly had to reject such an unwelcome and potentially disastrous proposal that it is hard not to be suspicious that it was included so that at least something about the channel deepening proposal would be rejected, and that the EES process would not be seen to be a complete rubber stamp.