OPINION

By Cid Mateo

Eurobodalla Shire Council narrowly voted to resuscitate the failed and costly Batemans Bay Masterplan 2025, by five votes to three, at its Extraordinary Council Meeting on 10 March 2026. Councillors Anthony Mayne, Sharon Winslade and Deputy Mayor, Colleen Turner, had called for the Extraordinary Meeting to find a sensible way forward following release of the Probity Report into the Masterplan on 27 February 2026.

Watching the Meeting on Council’s webcast, the song, Road to Nowhere, by Talking Heads (1985), kept spinning around my head.

Well we know where we’re goin’

But we don’t know where we’ve been

And we know what we’re knowin’

But we can’t say what we’ve seen

And we’re not little children…

…We’re on a road to nowhere

In effect, the Probity Report started with a similar sentiment. The Probity Report, released to the public by General Manager, Mark Ferguson, was a scathing assessment of the whole masterplanning process to date, from start to finish. For five years from 2020 to 2025. The Review’s investigators found the Batemans Bay Masterplan 2025 failed on every possible masterplanning criteria. It failed on integrity. It failed on governance. It failed on transparency, decision making, accountability, fairness, value for money, and impartiality, by exception or otherwise.

Fortunately for the Eurobodalla community, some councillors began to ask questions. Councillor Mayne and Councillor Rob Pollock OAM put questions on notice to Council staff during 2025 in an attempt to increase transparency and improve on a woeful process. These questions led to the Probity Review. In the current term, Deputy Mayor Turner and Councillor Winslade joined the call for good governance. In yesterday’s Extraordinary Meeting, councillors split into two camps. The pro-housing camp, comprising Deputy Mayor Turner, and Councillors Mayne, Pollock and Winslade, were not convinced another lengthy and costly town-planning process would achieve the housing urgently needed. They understand that the main game in the Eurobodalla, as in the rest of Australia, right now, is housing. Not masterplanning. Not pipe dreams. They were not prepared to continue wasting residents’ money on a failed Masterplan, and instead preferred to prioritise housing for all in our community. They seemed to understand that in a highly resource constrained and low-capacity local government environment, like the Eurobodalla, what we need to prioritise. They chose housing. Housing in Batemans Bay, Moruya, Narooma and housing across the Eurobodalla.

The pro-housing camp councillors, calmly and diligently sort advice from the Council’s Director of Planning, Mr Gary Bruce, with respect to housing need, housing supply, population estimates, masterplanning parameters and development outcomes, and obtained some illuminating admissions from Mr Bruce.

Mr Bruce described a dismal picture of housing in the Eurobodalla. He told the Council that despite about 1,400 housing lots available in Rosedale, South Moruya and Dalmeny, development applications had fallen ‘off a cliff’ in recent years. Tellingly, he told the Council that despite the Batemans Bay masterplanning process, now running into its sixth year, it was failing to attract development applications. He told Council that the Masterplan could be thought of as a ‘vision’ with no certainty any targets would ever be met during its life.

The approach, attitude and behaviour of the pro-masterplanning camp, could not have been more dissimilar. Mayor Hatcher, and Councillor Constable and their 2024 local government election sidekicks, Councillors Amber Schutz and Mick Johnson respectively, argued for another protracted and expensive process of town masterplanning in Batemans Bay. Their justification for choosing town planning before housing was curious. Councillor Mick Johnson spoke to the Motion saying he would vote for a repeat of the masterplanning process, as he “did not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater”. The probity investigators reported there was no ‘baby’ anywhere to be found from 2020 to 2025, only ‘dirty bathwater’.

Mayor Hatcher and Councillor Constable appeared to lose their composure at times by pontificating about their own businesses and tourism, which was well off topic and inconsistent with their repeated attempts to gag the pro-housing camp—at times disrespectful of Deputy Mayor Turner and berating Councillors Mayne and Winslade—for daring to discuss the housing crisis and solutions to this in the Eurobodalla.

Despite Mr Bruce’s enlightening testimony to the Council, the pro-town-planning camp ‘dug their heels in’ and voted up a long motion prescribing the Planning Directorate to do a lengthy catalogue of work, which they have been unable to go anywhere near achieving in the past five years.

One needs to ask the question. If Council has been unable to get the Masterplan to first base in five years, and the Masterplan may not deliver more than a vision, why are we throwing more residents’ money into this pit while we have a housing crisis? It doesn’t make sense.

Given that Batemans Bay already has an excellent Masterplan, the Batemans Bay Structure Plan 2008, which is valid for 25 years until 2033, why do we need another Masterplan?

I hope for all our sakes that it’s not another unaffordable ‘road to nowhere’.