This was posted on the ABC website and I would imagine it would be if interest to many people here...
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The State's South West has long been a prime holiday destination for local, national and international visitors.
Tourists are spoiled with an abundance of accommodation options including hotels, apartments, resorts and caravan parks.
But, despite their increasing popularity as people hunt for cheaper alternatives and reasonably priced family holidays, it seems the future of the humble caravan park is under threat.
More and more park owners are opting to sell up or redevelop their land.
The Chief Executive of the Caravan Industry Association of WA, Pat
Strahan, says more than 20 caravan parks have closed in WA in the last 15 years.
Busselton Shire President Ian Stubbs says
Busselton has felt the impact.
"In the last 5-10 years we've seen about five caravan parks disappear to be replaced by more intensive tourism development and I believe the State Government is concerned the parks may be a thing of the past if we don't do something to preserve them."
The owner of the Mandalay Holiday Resort in
Busselton, Clive Johnson, says caravan parks have a low turnover compared to the value of the land.
"At the moment with the high rate of tax that we pay some of these caravan parks are just not viable to run as such."
"We saw the disappearance of the Vasse Caravan Park and
Acacia Caravan Park and a lot of those have disappeared because you can fill the land with strata title units and then you're using other peoples' money to buy into the development and it's actually quite profitable for a developer to do that."
Planning
The
Busselton Shire Council is trying to figure out how it can maintain caravan parks into the future.
A draft Tourism Planning Strategy was put before the Council in November which proposed to establish designated caravan park zones as opposed to tourism park zones in order to restrict development on the sites.
However, the Council refused to support the proposal saying it would not be fair on park owners as Mr Stubbs explains.
"For owners it could result in a significant drop in the value of their property."
"Obviously, with rezoning other use potentials of a tourism site, that block of land would be regarded more valuable than a block of land that could only be used for caravan park purposes."
Mr Johnson says it is important that parks remain viable.
"As supply and demand rises and falls within the tourism industry we need that flexibility to be able to change the method of tourism to suit the market at the time."
In January,
Busselton Shire councillors agreed to allow the rezoning of land to remain voluntary.
However, Ian Stubbs says the shire is aware of the real need to save dwindling caravan park numbers.
"We may lose another couple of caravan parks but we're also hoping the state government will provide some incentives through land tax concessions to encourage people to continue to operate their caravan parks".
Mr Johnson says WA is the only state in Australia that forces park owners to pay land tax.
He says that costs him around $80,000 a year.
"All the other states have got zero land tax because they could see that it was creating quite a loss of caravan parks up and down their coast."
"If you're to keep it as a caravan park we need to have some incentives, because the caravan park aspect of it has quite a low turn over for the value of the land."
The State's Treasurer Troy Buswell was contacted for comment.