IN yet another frustration when it comes to the restoration of Stockton beach, it is the Newcastle Herald's sorrowful duty to report that thanks an otherwise little-noticed change in the law, the harbour dredge David Allan stopped Stockton's only real sand supplement midway through last year, apparently with no public notification.
As Donna Page writes today, the David Allan stopped its sporadic Stockton dump runs before June 30 last year, when legislation known as the Coastal Management Act was repealed.
That law had allowed the port to put 30,000 tonnes of sand a year in the waters off Stockton, which if nothing else was at least slowing the 110,000-tonne-a-year loss estimated by experts.
Under the new act, only "public authorities" are empowered to dump sand off the coast for beach replenishment.
But because the port was privatised via a 98-year lease worth $1.75 billion in 2014, the privately owned Port of Newcastle is not a "public authority".
Annoying as it is, it is not the cessation of the sand dumping that's the real problem here. It's the fact that the public has apparently been left in the dark on the matter.
The time it takes for most legislation to wend its way through parliament means the the authorities must have had many months - if not years - to realise this (presumably) unintended impact on the harbour dredging, meaning they presumably had the chance to do something about it beforehand. If not, there's an argument to say they have failed in their duty.
But either way, it's the way the public are effectively treated as inconsequential second-class citizens that sticks in the craw.
The longer the Stockton imbroglio continues, the more it resembles the Hunter's other big dredging controversy, at the entrance to Lake Macquarie.
For more years than anyone cares to remember, present and past state governments - Coalition and Labor alike - have made all sorts of promises about permanent solutions to the silting up of "the dropover", but little if anything ever seems to be done.
Now it seems the Swansea sickness has migrated north, to Stockton. In neither place has the response been anywhere near good enough.
Both sides of politics are now very much on notice, and whoever holds power after March 25 needs to take decisive action, and fast.
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