The Western Australian Government has shelved a multi-million dollar plan designed to protect Perth’s bushland from urban sprawl, which has been in the making since 2011.

The Strategic Assessment of the Perth and Peel Regions (SAPPR) was established in 2011 due to concerns around land clearing the year previous. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) claimed at the time approximately 10 stadiums’ worth of bushland was being cleared a week across the region in 2010, with high-density housing floated as a solution.

The SAPPR was instructed by the then Barnett Government to assess what areas could be cleared and what would be preserved, in a bid to mitigate delays with development applications looking at bushland via a case by case process.

The Assessment Committee was allocated $7 million worth of funding between 2015 and 2021. The McGowan Government put the Assessment on the backburner in 2018, and then officially abandoned it in late 2022 in favour of regional planning practices created within its Native vegetation policy for Western Australia.

“Most things from governments tend to have a bit of a political sting to them, this didn’t, it was a completely objective, scientific and planning-based assessment, and it did lay down long-term future planning for Perth,” says former Premier Colin Barnett in an interview with WAtoday.

“It was to try and get away from that (local government intervention, development applications) and get a scientifically based plan.”

Concerns surrounding the SAPPR were to do with the rigidity of the assessment. State Greens MP Brad Pettitt says the announcement will allow for a lack of adequate planning to continue.

“Frankly, the only winners out of today’s announcement (scrapping of the SAPPR) are the property developers who are profiting off Perth’s unsustainable sprawl. Without a plan, they will keep doing what they have done for decades, bulldozing native bushland to make new suburbs with little room for trees.”

Current WA Planning Minister Rita Saffioti is quoted as saying the assessment was no longer required following the creation of the Perth and Peel @ 3.5 million planning strategy, which was finalised in 2017.

“While SAPPR will be discontinued, it has fed into the Perth and Peel @ 3.5 million land use and planning frameworks – which will address many of the issues that prompted its establishment in 2011.”

To read about the planning frameworks, click here.

 

Image: Botanical Gardens and Parks Authority