WA Readers PLease Watch 4 Corners Monday Night

g,day jon,
spent the day at wollumbin and mebin with the club. as we know it was a nice area for a visit but all gated now.
still a a great place for a picnic and a camp over but the best parts are now a few hours walk.
will watch four corners with interest.

regards peter

Jon

Having returned from WA a week ago I can tell you that the general feeling one gets when travelling the coast is that you are not wanted there. There are so many people camping at the 24hr stops off Highway 1 trying to save some money for the next foray into overpriced caravan parks or places along the coast which charge money for access but provide very little in return.

The resources boom in WA is continuing, the corporate mining giants control the state and especially in the Pilbara region one gets the feeling that you are only tolerated for the time being. Brochures tell you as much.

I can forsee tourism going the 'canned' way and by that I mean that if you don't go into a resort, hotel or motel type of accommodation you will be asked not to come to WA. They will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. As it is you can get fined for camping on the side opf the road ANYWHERE in WA. It is hard to police though and we were still able to stop over in out of the way places for the night.

And then there is the case of 1080 poison baits, but thats another story.........

Cheers

Glad i know lots of great camping spots that other's haven't found yet in WA . Maybe i should take some of you eastern staters for a trip up north . Errol

Errol ,although I agree with you that there are still a lot of hidden spots to bush camp and I use these a lot as I have been going up North for years, but I can see why Willem has his opinion as for the majority of Eastern staters who don't know the area that well his remarks would be spot on as in my opinion the caravan parks in the west are a bit money hungry and generally are not to the standard I have experienced in the East.

Local knowlage over "Blow -ins"

I find this whole attitude rather surprising given that Tourism Australia were bleating only a week ago in the national press that spending by locals (Australians) on Oz tourism was way down and they are trying to encourage locals to spend more money at home rather than O/S.

So what do they do, shut down local attactions to large demographic who are prepared to spend $$ seeing local sights. The WA government must be rolling in dosh if they can afford to do this....

Hi Again

I just watched the recording and have to say I was pleasantly surprised with the ABC, usually they are so green orientated it makes me ill. But although they did display some balance the usual bull about saving the whales, dugongs and dolphins was still there: there was not one piece of evidence offered that the area was not being managed sustainably. Rubbish about "beach erosion" is just that: rubbish! The potential problem about the disposal of waste (in particular toilet waste) needs to be addressed if it's not already.

However three things were clear from the Minister's very carefully worded comments (I might add that she was very blatantly wearing a bright green scarf, and no, politicians and especially Ministers do not do things like that on TV by accident, every word and every appearance is stage managed by their minders!):

1: All of the leases will be resumed and over the coming 5-10 year period and the vast bulk of free style tourism will be eliminated: the days of a beach side camp and a fish from the beach are over! All the free camping will go in favour of $500/night up market stuff. It will become more and more expensive and bureaucratically impossible to manage large scale free camping.

2: The area will become another of the highly managed: "come here; pay lots of money; look, but don't touch; say ahhh!; now p@#s off and go home" National Parks.

3: The existing Heritage area adjacent is not enough and this area will also become Heritage Listed. As a result all tourism will be based around highly managed very expensive resort style environments aimed squarely at the overseas market. Accompanying the listing will be large "no go" areas on the land and "no take" areas in the water.

People in WA, now is the time to start to fight to protect these areas, if you don't you will end up like NSW where there is basically no where you can free camp near a beach any more. Even where National Parks provides camping they make life difficult as difficult as possible, for example the latest guidelines for camping areas in NSW National Parks is to place the car park 200-500m from the campground so you have to carry all your gear on a 1km round trip to camp for the night, want some milk for a cuppa well its a 1km walk to the fridge in the car!

Jon www.trac.org.au