As it happened: WA news on Wednesday, December 4

We’re bringing our blog to a close for today, but before we go we’ll leave you with the heart-wrenching statement issued by the five daughters of Perth grandmother Donna Nelson who was sentenced to six years in a Japanese prison over drug trafficking hours ago.

The statement from “Donna’s girls” Kristal, Ashlee, Janelle, Taylor and Shontaye says they were disappointed and devastated by the verdict and maintained she was the victim of a Nigerian love scam.

Here is the statement in full:

We are disappointed and devastated by the Court’s verdict in our Mum’s case. We maintain that our Mum was the victim of a romance scam.

She is the victim of a crime and not a criminal. She has always been against drugs. As she said in her trial, she was duped – and did not know there were drugs in the bag her partner asked her to take into Japan.

We cannot say any more about the case at this time as we consider preparing for an appeal. But we want to make clear now – we will never stop fighting for our Mum. And we will keep fighting until we can bring her home.

This has been a really hard few weeks for our family and we are really proud of how we have all come together to support each other and our Mum during her trial.

We are proud of her and of Ashlee for staying strong as they gave their evidence about what happened.

“It has been devastating for us as Donna’s daughters to be cut off from our Mum for these past two years. Our hearts break to think of her being detained in Japan for six years. Our Mum means the world to us.

We will continue to do all we can to improve her conditions in prison and make sure she has what she needs while continue to fight to bring her home.

We want to thank our lawyers in Japan Rie Nishida and Tomohiro Kurohara, and their paralegal Matt Owens, for all of their hard work throughout the case and during the trial.

We want to thank the Australian Government and the staff from the Australian Embassy in Japan for all of the support they have provided our family including visiting our Mum in prison and the care that they have shown her.

We want to thank Jen Robinson and the National Justice Project for their advice and support. We finally want to thank the media who have brought attention to our Mum’s trial.

We ask the Australian Government, the media and the public to continue to watch her case and to support us as we fight her justice for her.

Circling back to the Sculpture by the Sea furore, and Curtin MP Kate Chaney has hit back at claims from her Liberal opponent Tom White included in our blog earlier today that she didn’t have any influence to save the event.

Chaney likened White’s $1.5 million election commitment to get the event up and running in 2026 and 2027 to the sports rorts debacle and called it an empty promise that eroded public trust in politics.

“Public funds must be allocated openly and fairly, especially in a cost-of-living crisis,” she said.

“No one wants to return to the days of sports and carpark rorts, where funding was handed out in marginal seats to buy votes.

“When a candidate suddenly finds $1.5 million for a project right before an election, people are right to question the motives.”

Sculpture by the Sea organiser David Handley has blamed Commonwealth arts funding agency Creative Australia for the demise of the 2025 event for rejecting their application through the Four Year Investment program last year.

Chaney said Creative Australia applications were independently assessed by industry advisors, ensuring taxpayer dollars are allocated responsibly and not used for pork barrelling or political gain.

Johan Gjode - The Desert Island - Sculpture By The Sea, Cottesloe 2018.Credit: David Dare Parker

She encouraged Handley to submit another application to Creative Australia.

“I would encourage them to look closely at the funding criteria and consider more sustainable funding mechanisms, such as collaborating with other coastal councils like Scarborough, which have expressed willingness to contribute more significantly,” she said.

Chaney’s comments echoed the majority of WAtoday readers who voted in a poll yesterday urging organisers to find an alternative location for the event.

The City of Stirling offered to host the event at Scarborough Beach, which Handley rejected because the beach was too flat.

Handley said the event would need to operate under a new model to work at a different beach.

“Sculptures would need to be 10 metres in one diameter to work on the flat beach,” he said.

“Further, moving the exhibition would require ensuring all financial contributors would be prepared to back the move.

“This includes the artists who do not have the financial resources to make the very large scale sculptures required for Scarborough beach and therefore very few, if any artists would volunteer to make a sculpture to be exhibited.

“In short it is an extremely long bow to pull to suggest a few hundred thousand dollars, even if offered, would be enough to move Sculpture by the Sea from its present location to another location.”

To Japan now where former WA Greens candidate Donna Nelson has sentenced to six years in a Japanese prison for drug trafficking.

However, 430 days will be deducted from her sentence for time already served after she was arrested in January 2023 when Japanese customs found nearly 2 kilograms of methamphetamine in a suitcase she was carrying.

Donna Nelson was sentenced to six years prison by a Japanese court.Credit: Nine

The 58-year-old grandmother has maintained she was the victim of a Nigerian scam and that her online lover “Kelly” had arranged for her to bring the suitcase from Laos because he told her he was a fashion designer in Japan and he wanted to sell the case in one of his shops.

The panel of judges said the suitcase had a sophisticated hidden pocket that stashed the drugs and that Nelson had played a peripheral but essential role in the operation.

However, they also expressed sympathy for her and said Kelly had taken advantage of her and could not condemn her actions strongly.

They said Nelson’s case was similar to other love scam cases seen in the country.

Read the full story from 9 News Perth reporter Jamie Freestone who is in Japan here.

Heartbroken parents who lost their children in car crashes have joined WA’s top road cop and the road safety minister on a panel trying to drive down the state’s soaring road toll.

Daniel Campo, Samantha Saffioti, Tyler Rowe, and Caroline Herring were among the guests of an ABC Radio Perth forum, where calls were made to reduce speed limits and to strengthen P-plater restrictions just days after they came into effect.

Daniel and Bianca Campo, parents of Nick Campo.

“You don’t want to live a second life like we are. We had a former great life, now we live a crap life to put it frankly,” Daniel Campo said, whose son 18-year-old Nick died in a crash in July.

Nick Campo was one of four passengers in the ute, while the 17-year-old driver is behind bars.

‘Tom’s Law’, which restricts P-platers to just one passenger during the first six months of driving, was introduced on Saturday and already there are calls that it doesn’t go far enough.

“It needs to be longer, in our opinion, it needs to be 12 months,” Daniel Campo said.

Road Safety Minister David Michael said six months was in line with other states.

WA’s road toll this year stands at 165, the highest since 2016.

Former Australian of the Year Fiona Stanley was among a group of protesters calling on the Dockers to dump their sponsorship with Woodside outside the club’s annual general meeting on Tuesday night.

Professor Fiona Stanley at the Go Beyond Gas protest outside the Dockers AGM in Fremantle on Tuesday.

Footage of the protest shows Stanley with about 30 Go Beyond Gas protesters including Greens MLC Brad Pettitt and Curtin University sustainability professor Peter Newman singing outside the meeting at the Esplanade Hotel.

Stanley, who the state’s largest public hospital is named after, said she was “anguished and angry” about the sponsorship in a social media post.

“I think that the data…the science is so strong now about fossil fuels it is probably the biggest threat to the health and wellbeing of our children now let alone the future,” she said.

Woodside’s long-running sponsorship of the Dockers has angered climate activists including high-profile Dockers fans like former WA Premier Carmen Lawrence and was the focus of a campaign while its renewal was being considered by the club last year.

The Dockers ultimately renewed the sponsorship for another two years with chief Simon Garlick saying Woodside’s gas would play a role in the energy transition and that the company had stuck with the club through thick and thin.

In September last year Garlick told the ABC that organisations which had the capacity to support sporting clubs at the level Woodside had were few and far between.

When the sponsorship renewal was announced last year Woodside chief executive Meg O’Neill said as her company moved forward in the energy transition, partnerships with organisations like the Dockers would be critical.

Conservation Council WA fossil fuels program manager Anna Chapman, who is also a Dockers member who attended the AGM, said the sponsorship presented a significant reputational risk to the club, given the devastating impact of the company’s operations on the climate and environment.

To politics now where WA Premier Roger Cook has visited a home in Currambine to spruik the second round of electricity credits which will hit power bills later this week.

The $350 credit follows the $350 credit earlier this year which has been funded by the state ($400) and federal ($300) governments.

WA Premier Roger Cook.Credit: Hamish Hastie

Both state and federal governments are acutely aware that cost of living remains top of mind for voters as they gear up for both elections early next year.

The credit will start being applied to power bills from December 7.

Cook said the power credits were not impacting Australia’s stubborn inflation levels which is a major factor in preventing the Reserve Bank from dropping interest rates.

“We’ve had advice and modelling from Treasury, which suggests that this is not in doesn’t have an inflationary effect,” he said.

“We spread them over two payments over the course of the year which is another way that we can blend this cost relief into the economy without it having an inflationary effect.”

When asked whether the government was considering looking at other government charges like water bills or car registration Cook said his government was looking “right across the spectrum of state government.”

“I’m certainly not ruling out more cost-of-living measures,” he said.

“We’ll obviously look at all the opportunities that present to us and take advice from Treasury and take advice from the experts in terms of where West Aussies are doing at toughest and how we can particularly target those [people].”

With our state’s housing minister ‘pulling every lever’ to solve the housing crisis and the federal government putting forward a swathe of solutions, what do the people actually think of our government’s efforts?

Master Builders Australia has today released new independent research into the state of the housing crisis with 90 per cent claiming it was difficult to afford to buy or rent property.

Another 85 per cent agreed there was a shortage of housing, and seven in 10 say the housing crisis has gotten worse over the last 12 months.

Master Builders Australia’s chief-executive Denita Wawn said they were sombre stats that showed households and businesses are hurting.

“We’ve seen the housing crisis worsen over the last 18 months with more than one in three Australians now going without essentials like food or medicine to pay their rent or mortgage,” she said.

“This Christmas, while many will be decorating their homes, a large share will be trying to keep their home.”

Wawn said the industry needed more skilled tradies, simplified workplace laws and an industry watchdog to hold unlawful unions to account.

A small update to a post we brought you yesterday, where stallholders heralded the end of the popular Farmers Market on Manning, in Perth’s southern suburbs.

Well after some brief – albeit widespread – outrage, the markets are back on this weekend at Hedley Park in Bentley.

Omnomnom Food Truck, which was among the vendors to break the news of the markets’ imminent closure, posted on social media late on Tuesday that the markets would return “until a more concrete succession plan is in place”.

Farmers Market on Manning recently moved to Bentley.Credit: Development WA

“This means we’ll have the joy of serving you at this wonderful market a little longer while the organisers work on finding the best way forward,” they said.

The markets’ Facebook page also posted that it was open on Saturday.

We’re sure this will be welcome news to the thousands of visitors who flock to the markets each weekend.

The state government has formed a Little Penguin Advisory Group in a bid to protect the dwindling population of the birds on Penguin Island, off the Rockingham coast.

The move comes after a decade of inaction and multiple reports regarding a discovery centre on the popular tourist destination.

Little penguins on Penguin Island in Rockingham face an uncertain future.Credit: Rockingham Wild Encounters

WA Marine Science Institute chief executive Dr Luke Twomey will chair the group, which is due to first meet in January.

The population of little penguins on the island has dropped to about 114 birds, down from as many as 2000 back in 2007.

Scientists have been warning the government about the population’s decline for years.

Environment Minister Reece Whitby said the advisory group was the latest in a string of government initiatives addressing the decline, including the policing of speed limits around the island; upgraded nesting boxes; limits on visitations; and the decision to not press ahead with a discovery centre on the island.

“We know that little penguins exist elsewhere in Australia and Western Australia. What are the learnings in those other communities that we can help inform ways to protect the penguins right here in Rockingham?” he said.

“The big picture is a warming climate and what the impact that has on their habitat and their food source.”

City of Rockingham Mayor Deb Hamblin said the penguin colony had been part of the region’s environment for years.

“We need to make sure that we get enough research to make sure that going forward that colony can thrive,” she said.

You would be forgiven for thinking Cottesloe was the centre of the universe yesterday, given the furore surrounding the cancellation of Sculptures by the Sea.

But the story still has some legs with the Coalition seizing on the controversy and committing $1.5 million over two years to bring the event back in 2026 and 2027.

April Pine, ‘Shifting Horizons’, Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe 2019.Credit: Clyde Yee

More than 220,000 people attend the event each year.

The event organisers announced on Tuesday that funding through Commonwealth Agency Creative Australia had dried up forcing the cancellation of the 2025 event.

It has been revealed that organisers were offered support to stage the event at alternative coastal locations like Scarborough Beach in the City of Stirling but they were rejected.

Liberal candidate for Curtin Tom White and WA Senator Michaelia Cash announced this morning the Coalition would fund the event if elected to government at next year’s federal election.

“The Albanese Government pretends it cares about Western Australia but it has no concept of what is important to the people of our great state,” Cash said.

“Peter Dutton and the Coalition get the fact this is a much-loved event and deserves to opportunity to continue into the future.”

White stuck the boot in to Labor and his opponent independent Kate Chaney.

“The Federal Member for Curtin Kate Chaney has proved completely ineffective in supporting one of this electorate’s great events,” he said.

“Whether it is through lack of motivation or lack of influence Kate Chaney has let the people of Curtin down.”

Chaney and Creative Australia were contacted for comment.