WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES
Bureaucrats flown from Canberra for a snap Senate inquiry into alleged environmental breaches at the Roe 8 project site in Coolbellup continued to resist requests to make fauna survey results public.
Community members and scientists fronted the inquiry with an extensive range of photographs and other records of dead and injured birds and animals taken from the site over the past three months of clearing.
They provided extensive documentation of alleged breaches of state and federal environmental conditions.
One condition says an area's traps must be free of bandicoots for two days before bulldozing, with witnesses providing extensive records they said showed bandicoots being removed hours before clearing commenced.
There was also a continuing failure to install animal-proof mesh on fences to prevent animals entering areas about to be cleared, witnesses told the inquiry.
Greens Senator Scott Ludlam said these reports had received no response from the state office of the Environmental Protection Authority or Environment Minister Albert Jacob.
He said federal Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg last week also failed to respond and had for some weeks failed to comply with a Senate order to table the results of black cockatoo surveys, sparking the inquiry.
Minister Frydenberg's departmental staff told Senator Ludlam in the hearing that the Minister had consulted his staff before deciding not to hand over the documents.
The federal government is obliged to oversee the project because the site is home to nationally protected endangered species, including black cockatoos, two species of orchid and a native flowering herb with only 200 specimens remaining in the wild.
Banksia woodland, which provides food for black cockatoos, is also nationally protected – but its endangered listing occurred soon after the project was referred to the federal government.
This meant public servants were obliged to proceed as though the woodlands were not endangered when setting their conditions, the inquiry heard.
Compliance and enforcement assistant secretary Monica Collins said the department had received a "large number" of allegations of environmental breaches of matters under federal jurisdiction.
Trained auditors qualified to do the job had been flown in from Canberra to investigate.
Those so far investigated had not been substantiated, apart from one minor matter in which Main Roads WA had failed to produce reports on time and had now been warned.
"We have other allegations that we are still considering," she said.
"We take our responsibilities seriously."
The departmental staff told the inquiry that a staffer for contractor AECOM was tasked with checking for potential black cockatoo nesting hollows and had found 26 trees with hollows.
They could confirm none of these had yet been felled but could not confirm AECOM's method of checking for nesting birds in the hollows or promise to release the survey results.
"They are asking us to believe that they sent a team through a five-kilometre stretch of bushland," Senator Ludlam said.
"Given the number of people on the site it is amazing that none of the volunteers saw it.
"This inquiry was triggered by us saying if you don't hand this information over by a certain date we will hold an inquiry.
"Now miraculously they have not been able to bring the documents."
The alleged breaches of the environmental conditions regarding the dead southern brown bandicoots were not under federal jurisdiction, the staff said, but were the affair of the state.
The state declined to attend the hearing to respond to the allegations, despite invitations issued to Environment Minister Albert Jacob and representatives of the Environmental Protection Authority, proponent Main Roads WA and its contractors and subcontractors.
WA professor Richard Hobbs, part of the Beeliar Group association of WA scientists formed late last year over concerns about the environmental management process, told the panel the breaches were "obvious and persistent".
He said the fauna management plan complied with standard practice with bandicoots, but was poor in relation to reptile trapping.
"These animals are cryptic and hard to trap effectively so the plan does not allow sufficient time," he said.
"Also it did not include turtles which were identified afterwards and again the trapping period was way too short.
"It's all to do with the speed of the process, the rush of trying to get this happening [before the election] that makes the implementation of the plan so difficult.
"Overall, the fauna specialists have had a tough job to do here and some at least are doing their best. But there are many problems."
He pointed out the Fauna Management Plan was completed only days before work began and was not made available to the public until after work had begun.
"The south west of WA is one of the declared biodiversity hotspots in the world with a huge diversity of flora and fauna found nowhere else in the world," he said.
"The Beeliar Wetland is one of the jewels in that crown, not just because of its biology, but because of its location in the middle of the city – its social value is huge. That is why you are getting such an emotive response."
A colleague, UWA professor John Bailey, described Beeliar Regional Park as the Kings Park of southern Perth.
"No one would dream of bulldozing Kings Park," he said.
A strip of land about 25 metres wide and 4.5 kilometres long has been bulldozed, say protesters, and though there are substantial areas of bushland still waiting to be cleared work is progressing fast.
The senate committee, which includes Labor, Greens and Liberal senators, is due to make its report on March 6.
This will be just five days before the state election that will decide whether the project continues under a Liberal government or ceases under Labor, which has promised to spend the money on other congestion-relieving measures.
A Department of Energy spokesman said the Department of the Environment and Energy had requested information from the state EPA office more than a week ago and could not respond to the Senate until it received this information.
A spokeswoman for Minister Jacob said the allegations were unfounded.
"The Roe Highway extension is being constructed in accordance with the approved conditions and management plans. The Office of the Environmental Protection Authority has independent auditors on site daily when work is underway to monitor compliance with conditions. All allegations have been examined and there have been no incidences of non-compliance to date," she said.
Dean Roberts, spokesman for Main Roads WA, said all work undertaken to date has complied fully with environmental conditions.
"Compliance has been verified by the Office of the Environmental Protection Authority, which continues to monitor work at the site therefore it was not considered necessary for any State Government employees to attend such a public hearing at this time," he said.
