They’re paving paradise to put up a dunny block. They can’t say they weren’t warned

2 hours ago 2

Opinion

November 20, 2025 — 1.57pm

Norman and Saxon (AD 1100)
1. “My son,” said the Norman Baron, “I am dying, and you will be heir
To all the broad acres in England that William gave me for share
When he conquered the Saxon at Hastings, and a nice little handful it is.
But before you go over to rule it I want you to understand this:–

2. “The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow – with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.
Rudyard Kipling

You know a town meeting is rising to pertinent levels of civil disobedience when a gorgeous silver-haired lady who has done selfless community work all her life gets control of the microphone and threatens arson. There are ex-fishermen here, daughters of fishermen, people who took a living from the sea and forest, locals who love this place, their small piece of the planet. And they’re angry. This is a community telling a foreign power to take a hike. This is the “Saxon” becoming sullen.

No one imagines a septuagenarian doyenne will actually torch a toilet block – but a town is abnormally riled when one of its respected elders threatens to chain herself to bulldozers with Comrade Molotov’s favoured tipple in hand.

There are nearly 200 impassioned people here at the community centre in Lorne. Many have prepared questions; many have prepared statements disguised as questions. And they all want to know why, after two decades trying to come to some negotiated planning outcome for the historic Point Grey Pier precinct in Lorne (and not a sod turned yet!), why after a couple of decades working towards some community asset that will be resonant of Lorne’s culture and history, some vibrant space that hums hospitality and invites visitors – why the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority (GORCAPA) has decided to build a dunny block in the centre of one of Australia’s most beautiful coastal locations.

Instructively, their questions are not heard by GORCAPA. Because GORCAPA is not here. Though invited, GORCAPA has not turned up.

GORCAPA is an unelected quango that controls the Victorian coast from Torquay to Warrnambool. “Our vision for the Great Ocean Road coast and parks is to thrive as one living and integrated natural entity.” Yes, central planning, the favoured choice of so many failed states and the kernel of so many cautionary tales. Nothing could be more efficient than being managed from afar by an absent, unelected bureaucracy.

GORCAPA might add to its vision statement, “In working towards this integrated natural entity it is necessary for us to ignore the thoughts and feelings of local communities along the coast. To let citizens influence their own foreshore would be to drift away from uniformity towards uniqueness ... heaven forbid, Greeks might open restaurants by the sea like they do in Greece.”

The Bracks government gave birth to GORC to take control of the coast away from its towns and shires, from the people who live along it, and to put it in the hands of an unelected, unrepresentative, body operating out of Torquay and answering to the environment minister, currently Steve Dimopoulos.

GORC morphed into GORCAPA a few years back. That’s the way with quangos – always some bright spark tweaking the livery, always a new person in charge – they are bureaucratic shape-shifters, unknowable and impossible partners. It’s been said a quango is cousin to the cane toad – in that it’s someone’s idea of a solution to a problem that becomes a problem for which the following generations are trying to find a solution.

This is really just another story of a people being ruled from afar, wanting the same autonomy other shires and cities enjoy. GORCAPA is imperial, a distant Norman Baron ruling a wearisome outpost by decree, intuitively knowing what’s best for people it doesn’t know. The locals had hoped to see some memorial of their seafaring history, their timber industry, and some commemoration of the Indigenous people.

But a classified GORCAPA document was leaked. At time of writing the new building at the pier’s end in Lorne will be made of eight gender-neutral toilets (Bring your Wellies, Ladies) in a semi open-air format, and a minimalist kiosk seating 10. So ... a latrine for tourists driving the day-loop from Melbourne to the Apostles.

“Mummy, I need a wee.”

“Hold on, darling. There’s a urinal called Lorne around the next bend.”

Would you like your name writ large on Lorne’s new pissoir, Steve Dimopoulos MP? I might be able to persuade a certain silver-haired activist to put down her Molotov cocktail and pick up a spray can.