Choice the city faces over proposed Arundel Hills Country Club development

Strong arguments are being made for and against a controversial proposed development on the Gold Coast. This one image reveals the reality of what is planned.

Your columnist – a resident of Helensvale on the northern Gold Coast – has been enjoying in recent weeks the sight and sound of a nearby koala.

For a couple of days recently he was easily seen perched high in a gum tree on a neighbour’s property, contentedly munching on its leaves.

Where exactly he is now is not entirely clear, but the guttural grunting heard after dark indicates he’s still nearby.

For residents of Monterey Keys, such pleasant sights and sounds of nature have lately been replaced by the less appealing rumble and grind of heavy machinery scything a path through the area for the Coomera Connector.

The road will disturb plenty more koala habitat by the time it cuts south as far as Nerang.

Everybody says they like koalas, but room must be made for the new road to help solve that very human problem of excess traffic.

Sports facilities and a park proposed to be included in the Arundel Hills development.

An even greater problem on the Gold Coast is the lack of land available for new housing supply. It’s caused the cost of buying or renting even the most modest of properties to reach highs many of us never imagined.

The trickle down effect of that is a brutal one, and its result can be seen all around us too, in the discreetly parked cars and vans whose profusion of contents betray the sad truth that they are as much lived in as driven.

In that context, the prospect of providing 380 new homes on a disused golf club looks appealing.

There appears to be more than enough golf clubs on the Gold Coast to meet demand. The same most certainly cannot be said of housing.

Renders of the Arundel Estate masterplan by 3Group, which will include a sporting hub

But the proposal for the former Arundel Hills Country Club would come at a heavy cost – one potentially paid, yet again, by koalas and other native species.

There has been a concerted effort to present the proposed development as a win for the community.

There would be a new public park, where once there was only a fenced off private club.

Land would be gifted to A B Patterson College for the construction of new sports facilities.

A glossy image released by the developer shows an idyllic scene of children picnicking against a backdrop of native trees and flowers as a flock of corellas passes overhead.

Planning documents submitted to council present a less rosy appearance.

The compromises necessary to deliver those homes are starkly and honestly laid out, as they must be.

“Of the site’s 13.49ha of mapped Core Koala Habitat, a total of 49 per cent (6.65ha) will be required to be cleared to facilitate the development,” a report prepared by Burchills Science and Engineering starkly states.

Most alarming, an image from the same report showing how many trees suitable for adult koalas, officially defined as Non-Juvenile Koala Habitat Trees, would need to be removed.

An image from planning documents showing, in red, the Non-Juvenile Koala Habitat Trees to be removed in the proposed Arundel Hills development, and in green, those to be retained.

Offsets and other compensatory measures are proposed. Among the more interesting, a proposal to repurpose an underpass beneath Arundel Dr formerly used by golfers as a wildlife corridor. But there’s no getting away from the fact that it would be another chipping away of our city’s green space.

It’s a familiar story in the immediate area.

There was similar felling to create an industrial park at the former Colgate-Palmolive site on Captain Cook Drive, and such work is underway again to make way for the Coomera Connector.

Taken alone, those developments have strong merits. They meet important human needs.

So too would the proposed development at Arundel Hills.

But the likely impact on wildlife is clear, regardless of attempts to mitigate it.

At some point the home your columnist occupies was no doubt virgin bushland that provided a haven of wildlife of every kind.

The same goes for just about every dwelling on the Gold Coast.

The question now is, have we already gone too far, do we need to fully preserve the open spaces that remain?

The ultimate decision regarding Arundel Hills will say a lot about where our priorities lie.

Follow @keithjwoods