What’s best for the Moolap coastal wetlands and Point Henry on the southern edge of Geelong, a park for nature conservation and the community or a canal estate and residential development for an exclusive few?
VNPA is fighting for the first option and against the second. Why? Half of the wetlands along Port Phillip Bay’s western shoreline have been lost since European settlement, and those at Moolap have special values including:
- a summer home for thousands of migratory birds that have flown in from as far away as Siberia and the Arctic
- vital habitats for the orange-bellied parrot, Australasian bittern and fairy tern – all nationally threatened species
- nearly 70 bird species using them each year, including 22 shorebird species protected by international treaties
- one of the largest areas of seagrass in Port Phillip Bay along the shoreline
- a narrow but very important foreshore and public open space for a growing Geelong.
But canal estates have many environmental, social and economic impacts; interstate, and for a time in Victoria, they were banned in coastal planning. Victoria must again ban them.
As well as the canal estate proposal, the Moolap and Point Henry area is threatened by vegetation loss and fragmentation, weeds and feral animals, hunting and fishing, climate change, stormwater discharge, the absent management of water levels in the former Cheetham Saltworks, and a massive residential development proposal from Alcoa.
Our proposed Moolap Coastal Park would be the best future for the Moolap and Point Henry area. The first step in creating it would be for the Andrews Government’s Moolap Strategic Coastal Framework Plan to support conservation of Moolap’s coastal wetlands and the Point Henry foreshore.
More information
> Moolap salt fields brochure
> Moolap Coastal Park
> Moolap Coastal Strategic Framework Plan on the DELWP website
