My bet is that if they'd had an election on any given March in 2014, 2015 and 2016, Labor would have won with increasing majorities.

The fact that West Australians had to suffer the Barnett Government for four years until this March 2017 was the reason for the Campbell Newman style swing against the government of the day.

Frank wrote on Mar 12^th, 2017 at 6:48pm:

I dunno... What would you reckon? Dick size?

Frank wrote on Mar 12^th, 2017 at 6:48pm:


One will be Pm in about three years and the other will be Premier ?

Paw old LW who hasn't got a clue is blabbering like Pauline was just before the election.

One of the flashpoints in WA is the Roe 8 highway extension which the useless Greenies are going berserk over as it is a development.

Union controlled Labor has sucked up to the Greenies just like in Victoria where Labor stopped the big freeway project which has stuffed Melbourne.

So union controlled Labor has ALREADY started stuffing up WA.  It is just like basket case Sth Aust.




Roe 8: Perth’s environmental flashpoint in the WA election
March 9, 2017 6.26am AEDT •Updated March 9, 2017 11.34am AEDT
Authors
Jane Chambers
Academic Chair for Environmental Science and Environmental Management and Sustainability, Murdoch University
Philip Jennings
Emeritus professor, Energy studies, Murdoch University


Protesters gather against the Roe 8 highway extension in Perth. AAP Image/Bohdan Warchomij

One of the flashpoints in Saturday’s Western Australian election is the Perth Freight Link, a policy to improve the access for trucks to the port of Fremantle. This includes an extension to Perth’s Roe Highway, known as Roe 8. The plan has met with years of protests by local government, environmentalists and residents who are concerned about the economic, social and environmental issues associated with the development.

In particular, Roe 8 will cut through the Beeliar Wetlands, home to threatened ecological communities and migratory shorebirds. Labor and the Greens have long opposed this plan and have developed an alternative freight strategy. But this was discarded by the incoming Liberal government led by Premier Colin Barnett in 2008, which reverted to an older plan to extend Roe Highway.

Work has begun on clearing the site. However, a Senate inquiry report released on Tuesday recommended that action be suspended. WA Labor has promised to cancel Roe 8 and the Perth Freight Link project, while the Liberal Party is holding fast on the issue.

The controversy around Roe 8 has highlighted the lack of effective consideration of biodiversity values, not just at the Beeliar wetlands but across the city.

Why intact wetlands are important

In a recent radio interview, Premier Barnett stated that Roe 8 “will not damage the environment of the Beeliar Wetlands other than you will see a major road going between two lakes”.


The proposed extension of the Roe Highway. Man Roads WA

This displays an ignorance of natural systems. Fragmentation is a serious threat to our remaining biodiversity, along with climate change and declining rainfall.

Wetlands aren’t swimming pools with neatly tiled boundaries. Wetlands function because open water areas are linked to their fringing vegetation and woodlands. This is how pollutants are filtered before the water passes into the lake, how turtles maintain sustainable populations by nesting in woodlands, and how they exchange genetic material with turtles in other wetlands.

Nor is it difficult to enable these linkages. Examples include refitting drains to become living streams, and creating wildlife corridors along road verges with natural vegetation and trees.

It is essential that we retain our few remaining natural assets intact and enhance the connectivity between them. In assessing the Roe 8 proposal, the WA Environmental Protection Authority concluded that habitat fragmentation was a major issue of the development and that there was no easy solution to it.

Wetlands have been lost throughout the state. When the WA Environment Protection Authority released its State of the Environment Report in 2007 it noted that more than 80% of the original wetlands on the Swan Coastal Plain had been lost to development since 1829. Furthermore, it reported that wetland loss was continuing at an average rate of about four hectares (two football fields) each day.

Why is this happening? There are many reasons, but the principal one is a lack of will by the state government to implement its own policies on wetland conservation. The Bush Forever Plan – which aims to protect a comprehensive and representative system of Perth’s amazing biodiversity – is still incomplete nearly 20 years after it was drawn up. The government’s draft Green Growth Plan proposes a massive downsizing of the urban conservation estate.


Read the rest of the Labor assisted Greenie destruction of WA here

https://theconversation.com/roe-8-perths-environmental-flashpoint-in-the-wa-elec...

How the Greenies changed the WA govt over Roe.

Next thing the Greenies will demand a return of the favor by demanding union controlled WA Labor install 1000's of useless Greenie WindyMills to wreck the power system just like Sth Aust.

The Greenies will be controlling the union controlled WA Labor.  What a brothel!!!!

Of course none of these Greenies ever gives a thought as to how their self entitlement WELFARE is paid for.




Three ingredients for running a successful environmental campaign
Author Andrea Gaynor Associate Professor of History, University of Western AustraliaFebruary 3, 2017 5.45pm AEDT


Protesters against the Roe 8 project make their voices heard outside WA Premier Colin Barnett’s office. Beeliar Wetlands Supporter, Author provided

Here in Perth, a battle is raging over a 5km stretch of road known as Roe 8. Work on the project, part of the proposed Perth Freight Link, began late in 2016 and as legal avenues to halt construction were exhausted, opponents resorted to non-violent direct action. Some protest “mass actions” have attracted more than 1,000 people from all walks of life and by the end of January, as bulldozers tore through the Coolbellup bushland under costly police protection, well over 100 had been arrested.


Clearing machinery arrives on site under heavy police protection, January 2017. Gnangarra

Proponents say the road is necessary to improve the safety and efficiency of freight traffic to and from the Port of Fremantle. Opponents point to freight alternatives that will avoid Roe 8’s destruction of Aboriginal heritage, endangered banksia woodland, and important wetlands. Critics have also decried the government’s lack of transparency and prudence in decision-making, and highlighted serious shortcomings in environmental policies and laws.

The state’s Labor opposition has promised to scrap the project if it wins government at the state election on March 11, yet to the shock and dismay of many, bulldozing continues.

How will the conflict end? While history provides no sure guide to the future, it does reveal that successful environmental campaigns have tended to share several key features that unsuccessful campaigns have lacked. What are they?

1. Elections

Some of the biggest environmentalist victories have been won at the ballot box. This was the case for the proposed Franklin River dam, which became a federal election issue and helped to bring Bob Hawke’s Labor government to power.

By-elections have also decided the fate of environmentally contentious developments. Wayne Goss’s proposed “Koala tollway” between Brisbane and the Gold Coast cost Labor nine seats in the 1995 state election; a by-election in February 1996 saw the end of both Goss’s majority and the toll road.

Similarly, the campaign against a proposal for agricultural development in Victoria’s Little Desert delivered a shock metropolitan by-election result that, along with sustained public pressure, quashed the proposal.

More recently, the East-West Link toll road in Melbourne was, like Roe 8, hurried into the construction phase before an election with no full business case available for public scrutiny. The campaign against the Link, which united public transport advocates and local councils, ran for more than a year and attracted A$1.6 million in policing costs. Labor promised to halt construction and following his electoral success in November 2015, the incoming premier Daniel Andrews tore up the contracts, setting what might turn out to be a crucial precedent for WA Labor’s Mark McGowan.

Even electoral failures can help environmental causes in the long run. Advocates for Lake Pedder in Tasmania didn’t attract political support for their cause from either major party, so they formed their own: the United Tasmania Group. It narrowly failed to win a seat at the 1972 state election, and Lake Pedder was lost.

But those who were galvanised by this failure were instrumental in the victory 10 years later over the Franklin dam, which transformed federal-state relations and launched the Australian Greens as a political force.

2. Unions

Many past environmental campaigns have succeeded only through union involvement. In the 1970s and ‘80s, almost 50% of the Australian workforce was unionised, giving the unions significant power to shut down contentious projects.

The 1970 campaign against oil drilling on the Great Barrier Reef claimed success when the Transport Workers Union and affiliates placed a black ban on drilling vessels in the region. The 1970s “Green bans”, led by Jack Mundey and the NSW Builders’ Labourers Federation, blocked a range of threats to heritage sites and bushland, including urban bushland at Kelly’s Bush on Sydney’s lower North Shore.

With union membership today at only around 15%, and the environment a low priority for some key unions, this opportunity for intervention has all but vanished.


Read more of how Greenies sabotage Australia overleaf

But when Greenie and union controlled Labor close down the last business in WA how will they earn the money to pay for the railway ?

Oh I forgot, borrow BORROW

BORROW!!!!

and send the debt thru the roof!!!!!




Ring around the rail in the Western Australian election
Authors Peter Newman Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University  Cole Hendrigan Transport and Land Use Integration, Curtin University February 28, 2013 7.05am AEDT


Transport in Perth has become a major talking point for the upcoming state election. Flickr/eGuide Travel

Public transport has risen to the top of the campaign to-do list for the upcoming Western Australia election. Both Labor and Liberal have unveiled plans to bring a rail network to the airport - it’s now a matter of how this will be achieved.

The West Australian declared on its front page that transport, especially rail, would be the main election issue and the premier admitted they were probably correct.

When last in government Labor had previously backed a short link between the present Domestic Airport and the Midland Rail Line and had even put it in for Infrastructure Australia funding. But Colin Barnett took over shortly after and immediately withdrew this submission and there it lay smouldering away until the election drew nigh.

In 2012 the Western Australian Transport Minister Troy Buswell announced plans for a major upgrading of roads to the airport (the Gateway Project) that would serve the new combined International and Domestic Airport, currently under construction. The original plan was designed with no need for an airport rail link, based on the assumption that people in Perth mostly drive. But behind the scenes, planning for an airport rail line under the runway was quietly being conducted through the Public Transport Authority.


As one of the fastest growing capital cities in Australia, Perth airport is undergoing a multimillion dollar redevelopment. stusev/Flickr

In December 2012 as the first main shot for the election, Labor announced METRONET. This consists of a series of extensions to the heavy rail system including a link to the airport. But in a major difference to the government it would be part of a Ring Rail around the middle suburbs of Perth.

There was an immediate boost to Labor’s ratings in the polls, as a major project that would ease the public’s lack of transport options. The government was quick to react to Labor’s proposed rail network by criticising the costs of the project.

Ring rail

The Ring Rail is a concept that has been raised several times in the past, including the original Stephenson-Hepburn Plan in 1955, and is even conceptually presented in the state government’s own strategic plan, Directions 2031.

As part of a PhD project over the past year we have been developing a similar concept with a few differences.

The figure below shows a Ring Rail following a freight rail reserve in the south and east and two freeway reserves in the north. Fast bus services linking to this rail enable the outer suburbs to have significantly quicker commutes. This has already been demonstrated with dramatic success in the Northern and Southern Rail Lines, which both now carry over eight lanes of traffic.


Figure 1: Perth Ring Rail Network.

Inside the Ring Rail we have suggested a set of Light Rail lines, to attract urban redevelopment around their stations and around the heavy rail lines. Our calculations suggest the next 30 years of urban development could be accommodated in these Transit Oriented Developments, including the airport.

Not only do we believe that this system could be built quickly and relatively cheaply (no major land acquisition, tunnels or bridges), but our calculations suggest the urban development attracted could pay entirely for the new rail lines through the mechanism of value capture.

Election promise

The Ring Rail concept has had considerable publicity in recent months. The two main parties have been dancing around the key ideas, with Labor clearly winning the debate for a visionary concept that largely follows our own.

Most recently, on February 10th the Premier announced as a key part of the Liberal campaign to build a $1.895 billion airport railway. It would run in a tunnel under the runway and reach out to the adjacent Hills suburbs largely following the route of the Ring Rail.

By announcing the airport rail the Coalition’s stance has become much more committed to a rail future, and in reality is building the first step in the Ring Rail.

The rail debate in Perth will rage up until the March 9th election, when its likely a much clearer set of options will have been clarified. But what is clear now is that the airport rail link is likely to be built one way or the other in Perth. We hope it will go further and be part of a visionary Ring Rail.

https://theconversation.com/ring-around-the-rail-in-the-western-australian-elect...

Labor will order a Commission of Inquiry to find out exactly how the once-boom state fell into such dire financial trouble, probing government contracts and "secretive" deals to explain cost blow-outs and record debt and deficit.

Looking forward to this