There is now a new aged care home development proposal, and instead of first seeking approval from the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, the aged care home applicant has decided to first seek approval from the Department of Environment.
By law, approvals from BOTH the Trust and the Minister for the Environment are required.
The development is now on one side of the road, on the site of the heritage listed red-brick 10 Terminal buildings. However, the entire scale and form seem to have simply been moved to one side of the road. The number of rooms has only been reduced from 93 to 86. Therefore it appears that the overall form and scale of the development is similar to the original.
It looks like over 50%, if not more, of the heritage buildings will be demolished. This would be a devastating loss of irreplaceable national military heritage as we have reported on our website.
According to the Trust's own Conservation Management Plan (Robertson and Hindmarsh):
“The former brick and tile World War 2 School of Military Engineering buildings at Middle Head form an exceptionally rare collection of such buildings at a National level.”
Since the documents were only released today HPG has had just a few hours to look at them. However we can say the following:
The reduction of the number of rooms from 93 to 86 is inconsequential.
There is substantial demolition of heritage listed 10 Terminal – the result will be unrecognisable.
There is still a new 2nd storey. This will be clearly visible from the Harbour.
There is no statistic on the total floor area, so there is no way to compare.
It will still require an amendment to the Trust's Management Plan.
The new application will be now assessed solely on environment and heritage under the EPBC Act, but not under the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust Act. If it is rejected under EPBC the proposal cannot proceed.
We will provide a further e-blast tomorrow with details of how you can take action before the May 14 deadline date. View the documents for the new development application here >