The Kalamunda Liberal staring down Satterley over North Stoneville plans

Liberal Kalamunda MP Adam Hort says he isn’t worried about upsetting one of the nation’s biggest property developers and former backers of his party by continuing to voice his opposition to Satterley Property Group’s North Stoneville development.

Hort, who is the opposition’s police spokesman, has been strident in his support of the Save Perth Hills group’s fight against Nigel Satterley’s plan to establish a 1000-block 2800-person townsite on Anglican Church-owned land in the hills suburb.

The first-term MP said he wasn’t worried about what his position on the project would mean for the already-strained relationship between his party and Satterley.

“I got into this job to represent the people of the Perth Hills, and I genuinely love doing that. It’s an important part of my job and the core of what I do, and if it happens to upset people along the line, then so be it,” he said.

Satterley is fighting to overturn the WA Planning Commission’s rejection of the North Stoneville structure plan because of bushfire management and traffic concerns in the State Administrative Tribunal.

In the hearing’s opening this week it was revealed Satterley intended to complete the estate in stages, 400 blocks first and the remainder after the WA government’s EastLink upgrade of Toodyay Road through the Perth Hills was built, to address concerns over bushfires.

That project is not yet funded, but Satterley’s lawyers said on Tuesday the company expected it would be built by 2031.

But Hort queried that proposal.

“It’s still largely theoretical. We haven’t seen any significant funding commitments from state or federal government around [EastLink]. It’s something that would require billions of dollars of investment to actually occur,” he said.

“If it’s 400 houses instead, there’s still a lot of extra people living in that part of the world.

“Last year there was a fire scare in Parkerville. I was there at the time, and there’s really one main road in and one road main road out. And I will never forget hundreds and hundreds of meters of cars waiting to turn onto Great Eastern Highway.

“If a fire had come through with those hundreds of, if not thousands of people, sitting in their cars waiting to exit Stoneville and Parkerville, it could have been quite devastating.”

Hort also leapt to the defence of Shire of Mundaring president and former Save Perth Hills chair Paige McNeil, who was singled out by Satterley’s lawyers in the SAT hearing on Tuesday and accused of eroding shire support for the project after her election to council in 2021.

“I think the Shire President Paige McNeil, just like myself, as an elected member, just like most of the councillors there, just reflecting what the community wants,” he said.

Hort’s opposition agitates a historical grudge between the WA Liberals and Nigel Satterley, who stopped donating to the party in 2016 over differences with the former Barnett government and publicly called for the party to dump conservative powerbrokers known as “the Clan” following the Liberals’ 2021 election defeat.

In 2022, the Fremantle branch of the Liberals launched a failed attempt to expel Satterley as a member of the party.

Satterley is a regular donor and has publicly cheered on the Labor government’s moves on planning reform and housing investment.

A spokesman for Satterley declined to comment.

Hort also called on Labor MPs to speak up against the project as he and federal Labor MP Tania Lawrence have.

“There seems to be an immense amount of silence around this from the Labor government around, well, what is their stance on it? They’re happy to kind of hide behind the WAPC, but surely they’re hearing from the community just like I am,” he said.

Planning Minister John Carey said the SAT was the appropriate place for the project to be scrutinised.

“The WA Planning Commission is an independent planning body and I respect their decision-making process,” he said.

“The matter is currently before the State Administrative Tribunal, and it would not be appropriate to comment further.”

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