Par for the course - Wooyung and Fortress Australia

Paradise in Fortress Australia - the land of the gated community - is an illusion created by the marriage of property developers and golf course builders. It's a marriage built on PR spin and profit.

This is a story about a place called Wooyung, just north of Byron Bay. It's a sleepy coastal hamlet consisting of a beach, a nature reserve, a few aboriginal bora rings and a caravan park.

It's where generations of Australian families have flocked for cheap summer holidays. Picture children running around on miles of beach with zinc covered noses, crawing seagulls, umbrellas and eskies. That's Wooyung.

In telling Wooyung's story one must also tell the story of rapacious property development on the coastal crescent of Australia and its curious twin, the golf course builder. The relationship between property developer and golf course builder is mutating the social and environmental ecology of the coastal crescent.

The property developer at Wooyung, Samtay Pty Ltd, is at an advanced stage of surveying an American-style gated community about 45 times larger than the MCG, right on the Pacific coast.  It's called a “Total Tourist Destination Resort” (TTDR) or in plain language, a gated community, and a key feature is a nine-hole golf course.

There are about 100,000 Australians living in gated communities such as the one planned at Wooyung, ranging from resort style golf course estates to townhouse complexes with streets accessible only to people carrying ID cards and where surveillance cameras scan for trespassers.

Safety is a prime issue in tourist or permanent gated communities yet 20 years after Australia's first gated community opened at Sanctuary Cove on the Gold Coast, research both here and abroad shows that high walls and security guards don't protect residents from serious crime.

As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (March 3, 2005), Sydney criminologist Dr Murray Lees said living in a gated community was no guarantee against violence because statistically, most serious crime is not between strangers - its with people we know. Not a comforting thought.

There has been a plethora of new estates popping up in Southeast Queensland and on the north coast of New South Wales with names such as Salt or Seaspray - names charged with a healthy maritime atmosphere at a healthy price.

And it's hard to find on the coastal crescent of eastern and southern Australia a tourist based gated community that doesn't have at least one nine-hole golf course or close access to one.

When one drives around the new gated communities, apart from some questionable taste in architecture, the primary difference from the traditional retirement village of the 1970s is that the golf course has come to the player rather than the player going to the golf course.

Golf courses are the expensive added extras created by marketers to satisfy a “lifestyle” rather than a life. In the parlance, they are Unique Selling Points (USPs).

So rich ageing boomers will see out their days playing golf in their own personal Fortress Australia? Golf becomes the core, existential reason for being. I golf, therefore I am. Who really believes the most politically active and vocal generation in the nations history is going to “grey out” playing golf? Clearly marketing people.

But as the “pig in the python” baby boomer demographic passes, what environmental legacies will the gated dwellers leave for the smaller generations coming behind them (especially those born in the 1970s) to inherit on the coast? Golf courses.

Here's another angle. To build a gated community with a golf course you need an abundance of one prime quality - water.

What's the most valuable commodity Australian has? Water. And both gated-communities and golf courses are gluttons for water. The MCG uses about 40 million litres of water a year. The planned 81 hectare Wooyung development will use about 1120 million litres of water a year - and that's not including human consumption or allowing for evaporation.

So the cost is both social and environmental.

It works like this. Developers hire a team of spin doctors who tell the locals in “community consultations” that a gated community with a nine-hole golf course will bring tourists flocking to the local shops. More money will float around the local economy. Property prices will rise. It'll be economic sunshine from here on.

This is called the “multiplier effect” but unfortunately the amount of money bought in to a community by gated community tourists is very, very low. Economic geographers agree that no where in Australia have self sustaining gated communities substantially added to the social and or economic welfare of its nearest town(s) or hinterland.  Surely there has to be something in it for the locals?

Yes. A few local kids might get jobs in the kitchen or as waiters but the majority of hospitality staff are recruited by large city based HR companies who look for service sector graduates. Stores are bought wholesale and trucked in from the closest city. The large economies of scale of gated communities mean that they need large quantities of goods from wholesale markets, not local shops.

One would think that real estate agents up and down our coastal crescent would be rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of more gated communities being built?

No. As they're finding out in SE Queensland, why should people buy land, apartments or flats when they can live in a gated community? People aren't buyers. They're drive bys.

Gated communities infer a “quasi-citizenship” upon all those who can afford to belong to them and all those, such as the local fish and chip shop owner, the real estate agent, the video store proprietor or those trying to rent their holiday apartments, are left out in the cold.

“Kenny” - a local

Let me introduce you to “Kenny” who has lived in the area for 40 years and paid his taxes and rates. He's a bit rough around the edges but he's a member of Rotary and always helps at the sausage sizzle for the Nippers lifesaving carnival. He likes fishing and a beer.

Unfortunately Mr and Mrs Kenny are not welcome at the gated community. The reason is - and I never thought I'd write this in the year 2007 - “they just ain't our kind of people”. Ergo the gated community.

By that I mean those in the millionaire class - the super rich. Property developers will dine with property developers.  Some of us came over here in canoes 30,000 years ago, some in convict ships, some fleeing war torn Europe while others came over on the ₤10 passage from the UK or in leaky boats from Vietnam and Cambodia.

But until the last 20 years or so, I suggest that we were all in the same boat. Some might be in steerage, true, but we didn't exclude people from a “community” on the basis on how much money they had; that money inferred a new set of rights on an elite, like a South American country.

The importance of community  What sort of “community” has as its core principal exclusion rather than inclusion?

As Hugh Mackay says in his book Turning Point, "Our values are acquired from the experience of living in community with others. Morality is the expression of community. An ethical system would simply have no relevance to a life lived in isolation", p256.

Robert Putnam’s central thesis in Bowling Alone, correctly identifies a significant shift in social structure and interaction. Putnam recognises the decline of actual community based interaction and the increase of “individualised” recreation and interaction.

If we wish to maintain the way of life we are accustomed to, then it is this very concept which needs to be controlled and arrested.

In fact the invasion of gated communities and their mutant twin, the golf course is bonding local communities tighter as they fight what they see as “viruses” landing on their front doorstep.

Local communities are not only becoming more social and cohesive as they fight these new developments, they're also forming alliances with other townships on the coast facing the same problems. That's real social capital and local democracy in action.