Tuesday, 15 April, 2025
Candidates and council push for Healesville Urgent Care Clinic
Crank Up: Yarra Junction festival a hit among locals
Pub politics takes place at the Alpine Hotel
Real Estate liftout inside
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A Star News Group Publication
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Temporary bridge request rejected By Dongyun Kwon
Matthew Westbury’s sons, Angus (left) and Jack, and Elidon MP Cindy McLeish were disappointed at Minister Melissa Horne’s response. (Dongyun Kwon: 471243)
The idea of setting up a temporary bridge at a construction site was rejected by the minister for roads and road safety. Transport Victoria has kicked off four-staged maintenance works for the Maroondah Aqueduct Bridge with stage 3 scheduled in September. “Stage 3 will involve a full closure of the bridge for up to two weeks. There is no alternative to closing the bridge for this stage of works,” the Transport Victoria website reads. Since the plan was opened to the public, Yarra Glen residents raised concerns about the pending closure of the bridge. Matthew Westbury, who lives near the bridge, is worried about the safety of his two sons and other locals who regularly pass through it. As a solution, Elidon MP Cindy McLeish requested roads and road safety minister Melissa Horne to investigate the installation of a temporary 44-tonne bridge over the aqueduct, together with a temporary pedestrian footbridge in Parliament. Minister Horne, however, responded that a temporary structure was considered impractical due to the limited road reserve, encroachment into private properties as well as conflicts with overhead and underground utilities and services on either side of the existing bridge. Turn to page 3 for more
Keeping the roos Yarra Ranges Council will formally request to be exempt from the Kangaroo Harvesting Program (KHP) after a long-awaited decision was made during the Tuesday 8 April council meeting. Having been delayed to this month to seek more information from the state government, councillors fast-tracked the discussion to the start of the meeting with many in the gallery attending for the decision. With Mayor Jim Child stepping out due to a
conflict of interest, Deputy Mayor Richard Higgins invited local animal advocate Peter Preuss, who has led the charge for the council to withdraw from the KHP, to speak. Mr Preuss thanked the council again for letting him speak on the issue of commercial shooting in the Yarra Valley and said he wanted to emphasise the word ‘commercial’. Some people want to kill kangaroos, some people think they need to, that’s not what we’re
asking you to challenge, now the Authority To Control Wildlife (ATCW) can get a permit very easily for over 100 animals, 100 different species and kangaroos are one of them,” he said. “The permit system that we have, the permit system of authority to kill, is the best thing that we can possibly ask for because it limits the number of kangaroos that are shot, it limits the number of birds, cockatoos, anything that’s killed by a need, not greed basis, as soon as you throw the greed in
there, you’ve got a very different situation.” A number of the councillors weighed in on the motion, calling the commercial killing of kangaroos an ‘absolute tragedy’, a change that ‘requires discomfort’ and the the need ‘to look at it all from a big picture point of view’ while others thought it should be an issue for ‘the halls of Spring Street’. The motion was carried unanimously, with many members of the gallery applauding the decision. Turn to page 4 for more
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