Building Into the Flames: The Madness of North Stoneville and LA's Lesson Unlearned
- Save Perth Hills Inc
- 16 minutes ago
- 3 min read
2026 - our 35th year fighting to stop the bushfire dangerous and environmentally destructive, proposed ‘North Stoneville’.
Over the years, we’ve mindfully promoted a particular message - to successive governments, the landowner, Anglican Archbishop Kay Goldsworthy, and developer Nigel $atterley…
‘You have been warned’, we tell them - ensuring no ‘excuses’ when disaster strikes.
Now the respected Doctors for the Environment are echoing our call in light of this week’s sobering Climate Council report… we thank them, and continue to hope their warning, and ours, is heeded…
Doctors for the Environment - Facebook Post 7 Jan 2026
Building Into the Flames: The Madness of North Stoneville and LA's Lesson Unlearned
Can humans learn from their mistakes?
The Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles one year ago tore through neighbourhoods like they were kindling, destroying more than 16,200 structures and displacing thousands of families. The flames moved so fast that people had minutes—not hours—to decide what mattered most. Most chose their lives. Everything else turned to ash.
Here in Western Australia, one of the most fire-prone regions in the world, you'd think that might have taught us something. You'd be wrong. Developers are pushing ahead with a plan so reckless it makes LA's mistakes look almost quaint by comparison.
The proposal is called North Stoneville. If approved by the State Administrative Tribunal, it would bulldoze 60,000 trees—some over two centuries old—to create a townsite for more than 3,000 people on 550 hectares in the Perth Hills. To call this development "fire-prone" would be like calling the Sahara "somewhat dry." The 2021 Wooroloo bushfire burned within five kilometres of the proposed site, destroying 86 homes. The area sits directly in the path of Perth's easterly winds—hot, dry gusts that roar in from the interior desert, exactly like the Santa Ana winds that turned LA into an inferno.
The parallels are almost too precise to be coincidental. Both LA and the Perth Hills feature steep, wooded terrain with dense native vegetation. Both experience catastrophic fire weather driven by powerful, sustained winds. Both have a documented history of devastating fires. The only real difference is that Perth has the advantage of watching LA burn first, of seeing what happens when you pack thousands of people into the exact kind of landscape that fire loves most.
Fire risk is the lived reality if you already have a home there. It’s another thing if you choose to develop in what would be the most fire-prone region in WA.
And yet here comes Satterley, the developer, pushing forward after the Western Australian Planning Commission and the Department of Fire and Emergency Services both rejected the plan in 2020. They're taking it to tribunal, arguing—one assumes—that they can somehow mitigate the risks.
But we know better now. This isn't 1961, when the catastrophic Perth Hills fires caught everyone by surprise. This isn't even 2011, when fires destroyed 71 homes in Roleystone and Kelmscott. We've had the data, we've had the warnings, we've had the dress rehearsals. Climate scientists have been clear: fire weather is getting worse, fire seasons are getting longer, building in fire-prone areas makes little sense. The only real mitigation is not building there in the first place.
Los Angeles showed us the future. Satterley wants to build it anyway with the tribunal decision now expected in early 2026.
This is what despair looks like in the Anthropocene: not just the fires themselves, but our stubborn insistence on learning nothing from them.
The Climate Council report that compared Perth to LA wasn't hyperbole—it was science. The question now is whether anyone with the power to stop this madness will actually use it. Because if North Stoneville gets approved, if those 3,000 people move into those homes in that fire-prone landscape with those inadequate escape routes, then we're not just making a mistake. We're committing premeditated negligence.
And when—not if, but when—the easterly winds come howling and the temperatures spike and the fires race through the landscape incinerating everything in its path, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves. We'll have known exactly what we were doing.
Times for climate change to be factored into all planning through an overarching climate policy framework. Begin with a climate change act. May sense prevail over short-term profits and politics.
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