'It includes a six-star eco resort, another 200 rooms of accommodation, restaurants, bars, a retail village and an environmental education centre based on the site's wetlands and nearby waterways."
“Think of the press as the great keyboard on which the government can play,” said German spin-doctor Joey Goebbels, sometime in the mid-thirties.
It’s a lesson developers, rapacious consumers of untouched land, know well.
Earlier today, and following various news reports over the last couple of weeks about a Slater pool on 510-hectares (1260 acres) of “highly constrained land” on Australia’s Sunshine Coast, various media outlets have regurgitated the latest spin from the WSL.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported,
Surfing’s governing body, the World Surf League, wants to build the artificial wave pool within a tourist and residential hub proposed for a 510-hectare site at Coolum on the Sunshine Coast.
“Australia is really important market for the World Surf League,” the league’s general manager for Australia and Oceania, Andrew Stark, said.
It includes a six-star eco resort, another 200 rooms of accommodation, restaurants, bars, a retail village and an environmental education centre based on the site’s wetlands and nearby waterways.
Mr Stark said the 20,000-spectator stadium would cater to recreational surfers and aim to draw major competitions and events, including world qualifiers.
“The surfing community is ecstatic and excited. People go to these facilities and it’s quite a mind-blowing experience.”
Perhaps not so excited is the local council who say they’ve yet to receive a detailed proposal and that it didn’t have the authority to consider this sorta development anyway as it was “on land situated outside the urban footprint on a site that is highly constrained”.
Let’s unpack as they say in the corpo world the WSL and developers inhabit.
What does “six-star eco-resort” mean?
Wouldn’t a true eco-resort be a small clearing among the trees, maybe a few tents, where people might commune with nature, examine animals in their natural habitat, regard the stars at night etc, not bars, “a retail village” and a “20,000-spectator stadium.”
As for the “environmental education centre based on the site’s wetlands and nearby waterways” upon which the 510-hectare, tree-pulverising, energy-inhaling development will be built, well, fuck me.
Onto other important matters, should it be “wave pool”, “wave-pool” or “wavepool.”
I prefer the latter.
More over the coming weeks from our North Coast and Queensland reporter, Longtom.
I’ve lived on the Sunny Coast since 96′. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt through personal experience, is to never trust a developer, especially on the SC.
Other than the unashamedly transparent greenwashing by calling it an “eco” resort there are two things that stand out for me. 1, it’s on a flood plain, as are most of the latest estates… There are countless unsuspecting southerners who come and buy up their piece of sea-change retirement, only to find out the following summer they’re at the end of a natural flood plain. The “City” of Aura is the best example.
The amount of issues that would come from filling up a huge pool to have it constantly flood I’m sure are countless. The Sunshine Coast Environment Council (with a handful of other coast groups keeping the greedy developers honest) released a statement the other day… https://www.scec.org.au/coo…
The other thing is the 10k seat stadium. Sure, it’s for the Olympics. But that runs for a couple of weeks. Then what? The Sunny Coast is the last place on Earth I’d put a 10k seat stadium for anything. Sunny Coasters are fucking lazy and events on the coast always have shitty turn outs. Businesses constantly come and go because local punters make it a very hard place to do business.
The only places on the coast that have ever had that kind of turn out are Australia Zoo (I used to work there for quite a while) in the 5500 seat stadium when the Irwins feed the crocs on the summer holidays and that one time the Veronicas played there and it overflowed to 10k squealing teenagers. The other place is the Sunshine Coast Stadium and it has surpassed a 10k attendance maybe once or twice over the years. They had 15k for a Cold Chisel show once… is see a theme.
I’m not expressly for or against a wave pool, but let’s not be a bunch of dopey cunts about where it is located.
Good fucking luck to Stark and his developer goons.
We’re gonna see an eco-oil rig sometime here in the near future.
Classic tale of the sno-bro who thought because he can snowboard, ‘surfing shouldn’t be that hard’
One billion.way too much money to spend.
Too risky.they would never be able to get there money back on an investment like that.
Times have definitely changed. Living a life dedicated to scoring sick dicks was kind of taboo back then. Family members who were all about the dick were kinda kept on the down low. Now you got the WSL promoting (and trying to profit off) the pursuit of dick to a global audience! Guys like Turpel and 89 world champ Pottz rambling incessantly about dicks of varying shapes and sizes… Hell, even Kelly made a fake dick in Lemoore!
What!?! Balls Reef was holding at that size? Last time I was able to shred the shaft all the way to Balls Reef was El Nino ’97. I hear ya though, if you don’t prep and stretch for those days when Dicks are massive, that ass will pay the price. Saw some guys blowing up the spot on IG too, posting all sorts of Dick pics…
BRAH I SCORED SOME HUGE, THROATY, SPITTING DICKS WITH THE BOYS TODAY!
What about FLORIDA POOL!….we got burned by Palm Beach County
you got burned by the water table
Wavepools exist in a space where there is no localism, no snakes or drop-ins, no clean-up sets, no mals or SUPs sitting outside picking off sets, no rock offs, no jet ski step offs, no salt or sand, no girl-dunking mat riders, no wolf pak jujitsu, no unmakable sections, no sharks or stonefish or dawn patrols, champagne hours or evening glass-offs or butterflies on the big days, no pulling out and waxing the gun in anticipation. Local knowledge or years of experience don’t count for shit, or paddling skill and endurance. No getting the wave of the day, or a sneaky wide one or a barreling inside runner. No hardcore travel or watching the wams and buoys. No giving away sets or getting called into one or hanging in the carpark catching up with mates after a session watching the sun go down. No shoreys or outside reefs or winding points, no rips or sweeps or currents or line up markers. No perving on chicks arses as you paddle behind them, no becoming friends with some guy or girl because you surf the same breaks all the time and eventually end up chatting one day or watching and encouraging a grommet as they develop into good surfers, or stoking out a mate because you saw that wave he didn’t think anyone saw. Wavepools exist in a world of corporate returns and spin doctors and eco property developers and cunts like Andrew Stark and Dirk Ziff and, sadly, Kelly Slater, and even sadder, me. I signed up for the test runs at Tullamarine and if I get the green light I’m gonna be pumped to give it a go. I just want to ride waves and get barrelled and if it means a pool is my session that day then at least I got waves. I also took a sleeping pill about fifteen minutes ago, so….covfefe….
I don’t know, I’m kind of sorry to hear that, I’ll take my waves in the real ocean, even iif it means going without for a few days when it’s flat. It just makes it that much better when the surf finally picks up………
Priceless haha. I guess we’ve all been there after a few decades of practice.
You can’t imagine how much I relate to your story haha. The same happened to friends I took surfing with me countless times: the pro-skateboarder-who-bragged-about-being-able-to-do-airs-on-a-surfboard, the athlete, the overconfident-hottie-who-bought-her-first-surfboard-from-a-neighbour-in-Paris (a 5’8 Rusty quattro FFS…) All of whom refused my longboards and ignored my advice. Needless to say every single of them did a very poor job once in knee-high whitewater… Yeah no shit.
The morale of the story is that not everyone is able to put in the time to get to know the ocean and overcome the difficulty of learning. Natural selection at its finest (or so I keep telling myself)
Spot on Derek. Fuck their greenwashed version of “eco-resort”. Save our trees. Coolum is a beautiful area. Fucking tired of fighting against promoters
Just read the Sud Ouest…local paper here , thinking the biggest news of the day would be Jeremy’s win at the quiky Pro……the biggest news in the paper was how Surfrider were excluded by the WSL from the event as there was a clash with one of their sponsors …1/4 page at the back of the paper on the Qiky Pro and jeremy and a big article on Q/S selling their HQ in St Jean de Luz….WTF?
Fuck. I’m hoping to get an interview over there.. 136 people just got fired across France and indeed they’re selling their HQ.
Boardriders’ debt: 450M $….
Source https://objectifaquitaine.l…
You could build five artificial reefs for under a 100 million. Going off the cost of the Palm Beach reef. It’s barely had a proper swell hit it and already looks super fun. It could produce proper slabs on a decent swell. Fuck Slater’s kiddy’s pool
Could easily build a wave pool at Manly Dam.
Could just build a foil that runs alongside the dam wall.
Not much construction needed at all.
Good idea ay Nick?
Follow the money to the truth. This land is owned by a company wanting to make money. After failing to get the land zoning changed to enable the sand mining they are trying to do some genius came up with the wavepool plan. We have to remove all this sand to build our pool. Very convenient and profitable.
It’s a typo. Should read …
“an environmental education centre built on the site’s wetlands and nearby waterways”
WSL in their own little Goldman Sachs nipple twist where Kelly plays Lew Ranieri and the tube is the toxic mortgage backed security. Gotta sell before the bell!
I know some of you cats are into the contest scene, but trust me, this Dirk and Elo did not get where they are by playing with kids gloves on.
I would expect to see more stuff like this leading up to the Olympics, that only corporate big wigs could dream up. Wake up and smell the kelp! -Dirk (the Wsl) does not seem to give a crap about the everyday surfer (you). Dirk and Natasha seem to have an affinity for the pros, and as Dirk said from the beginning, “the Wsl is gonna be a money making interprise to benefit a ‘select few,” –while walking all over the real tribe. I think the only ‘soul’ your gonna see in surfing from now on will be from the bottom of Dirk’s shoe after he’s done walking all over the real tribe………
PS– quote from above article–“Australia is a real important ‘MARKET’ for the World Surf League,” the league’s general manager for Australia and Oceania, Andrew Stark, said. —That’s all we surfers are to Dirk and the Wsl– a “market”……
he has his own tribe and they are gods chosen people, so how he treats everyone else has no real consequences to him
Not one person I have spoken to is excited about this. The only positive voices seem to be the owners of businesses in Coolum and they have talked around the local boardriders club with a ‘community consultation’ of invite only community members. None of the surfers there every day knew about until two days after it had happened. Chris Kendall, local surf school owner and boardriders member, went from being on the fence to wholeheartedly behind it based on the meeting. Apparently they promised a ‘half-price pensioner Thursday’, so that would bring back to a more than unreasonable $US625 a wave, at current rates.