Mansfield Street  Action Group

Cairns Hill and Habitat Protection Incorporated

The area of land marked for subdivision - Click on the picture for a bigger view.

Last updated: 11/11/2009

Not sure who this will affect? 

If you ever look west at the hills this will affect you.

If you ever drive through the western suburbs and

are put off by the way houses have sprung up half-way up the hills this will affect you.

If you are at all concerned about the state of the rainforest along the creeks in Earlville and Mooroobool this concerns you. If you live in Earlville or Mooroobool this will affect you. 

Click the image above to see how it will affect you!

Since buying the block he has built a huge house on the forward edge of the spur, which while being mostly hidden by trees, is visible particularly in the dry season when the trees lose their leaves.  Along with the other eyesore buildings that have sprung up on the hillslopes it has contributed to a loss of visual amenity for Cairns residents.

As well as  building the house he also dammed up Chinaman's Creek without approval and put in a pumping station to provide a water supply for his gardens.  This dam mostly washed away in subsequent wet seasons and the remains of the pump station (concrete blocks, rusty lengths of 100 mm water piping ) still lay strewn downstream behind other resident's houses.  He also built a number of roads (Council calls them "access tracks" but they are bitumen surfaced, drained, culverted and for all intends and purposes roads)  without any approvals from council, the EPA or any other authority.  This area is listed as a Conservation Area and he is supposed to get approvals to do any works. He built them without any approvals and then sought retrospective approvals once they were built. He also built/dug a dam high on the ridge line which is at risk of overflowing in the heavy wet season and contaminating the rainforest. (the dam is plainly visible on Google Earth)  Along with this was  rampant clearing of trees from the  ridgeline that should be covered in trees. 

In 2005 he applied to divide the land into five so he could sell off some of the block for housing development.  However, he had a number of conditions imposed by council, before they would consider it. Evidently the conditions were so onerous that he withdrew the application.

Now he has applied to subdivide the property into just two parcels.  A seven hectare property at the front of the block and a twenty three hectare block at the back. He wants to then build a house on the twenty three hectare block.

To allow entry to the back house he has also applied for an easement on which he would build a further road.  (Oddly enough he went ahead and built the road without approvals anyway, before the easement issue was even considered by council.)

While this sounds innocent it has to be viewed with the history that he has tried to subdivide it into multiple blocks in the past without success and is now trying to sneak through a less sinister sounding subdivision - with one block obviously being big enough to further subdivide at a later date.   This is our main concern - That once the subdivision takes place he will then reapply for a further subdivision, then another and then another. In the end achieving the same outcome which he was originally told he could not have.

The residents of the surrounding suburbs and Mansfield Street, particularly, formed an action group to stop it happening. The Cairns Regional Council eventually decided not to approve the development.

Mr. Lavis is now taking the council to court to have their decision reversed by the court.

The Cairns Hill and Habitat Protection Inc is lobbying the council to continue the fight and joining the council as co-respondents in the case.

What's this all about?

The basic story is:

Kingfisher Investments (Roy Lavis from CEC) owns a 30 hectare block of hillslopes at the back of Earlville which runs up to World Heritage Area rainforest. The block is the only freehold block that runs right up the hill front. The western boundary is within metres of  World Heritage listed land.

When he bought the block in the 1990s though the land was freehold, there were local bylaws in place preventing development on the slopes (The well remembered "80 metre Rule" ie no buildings could be built above the 80 metre height line)) and there had been a history of local pressure and council decisions to prevent further development up the slopes.  There is no way he would have bought the land, ignorant of the fact that it was not allowable for him to subdivide.