Billion-dollar wavepool, real estate and eco-resort development on Australia’s Sunshine Coast championed by Kelly Slater “no longer being pursued”!

Scuttled by government, by community activists or lack of interest by WSL?

It’s called the paradox of the environmental businessman. You want to save the planet but, hey, a buck’s a buck. 

Three years ago, the self-described pro-environment and wildlife advocate Kelly Slater urged the Queensland government to approve the WSL’s billion-dollar development on 510-hectares, or 1200 acres, of “highly constrained land” near the Queensland beach town of Coolum.

“This wave would become somewhat of a mecca and put the Sunshine Coast back on the (surfing) map…it will bring a lot of interest to the area and it will be a place that I know a lot of people are going to want to surf and have an ongoing impact on the local area…we have had so many people asking for so long where we’re going to build the next wave including Australia,” Slater told the local press.

In a series of stories for BeachGrit Longtom concluded, 

Drive-time from the airport is fourteen-minutes at a hundred k’s heading due north up the Sunshine Motorway. Glancing left at the site which is bordered by the road the presence of water on the ground, despite the drought, is startling. Fifteen hundred residential lots, commercial, retail, hotels plus the wavepool on some of the lowest lying floodplain in south-east Queensland.

What, as they say, could go wrong?

I put boots on the ground at the site. I know this country very well. It’s in my blood. My people come from the Queensland cane swamps. They are Danes, Swedes, Sicilians.

Practical people.

They would understand the necessity of bulldozing the bush to make way for jobs. But I do not. The developer’s eye eludes me. I see trees and bush. Birds, insects, frogs. I feel sad that surfers will be the ones behind the bull-dozers, erasing this wildlife, this bush from history.

From what I can see though, although there is ambivalence, distrust and even hostility to the Coolum wave pool development, that is unlikely to stop the bulldozers.

The greenwashing on the project will be immense.

Next level.

But I wonder, when Kelly thinks about what is being done in his name and looks in the mirror, does he still see an environmentalist looking back at him?

Now, after three years of lobbying, the development is dead in the water.

“The Queensland Government understands this development is no longer being pursued,” the Deputy premier and Minster for State  Development, Infrastructure etc, Steven Miles, wrote in a letter to the Member for Ninderry, Dan Purdie. 

(The Ninderry electorate takes in the proposed site for the tank.)

Now, what’s that say to you? 

It ain’t a formal rejection by the government, but reads like the WSL threw in the towel. 

Maybe too hard? Maybe too much opposition? 

Either way, you sad, would’ve been wild to see another Slater pool in the wild and to hell with the native fauna, or thrilled the WSL racked up another failure?