Agriculture Minister Jackie Jarvis announces Murdoch Uni won’t host $320m DPIRD offices

The State Government has cancelled plans to build a new $320 million headquarter for the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development at Murdoch University, and will instead look for undeveloped land. Agriculture Minister Jackie Jarvis also announced Thursday that the State would spend an additional $83 million to fast-track a separate Biosecurity Response Centre at a metropolitan location to be announced in the coming weeks. The announcement of funding for the centre — set to be spent on urgently procuring and fitting-out diagnostic labs and response operations — comes as WA battles biosecurity threats on a number of fronts, including the polyphagous shot hole borer. The tiny insidious beetle has infested more than 6000 trees across Perth, including about 200 in Hyde Park and more than 240 in Kings Park. There is no pesticide to stop the beetle and no way of killing them once they have infected a tree. Other biosecurity threats include the sea squirt — which could threaten the fishing industry, and various species of ants that pose a risk to both urban and agricultural environments. Ms Jarvis said the emergence of both the shot hole borer and the Queensland fruit fly at the same time about eight months ago prompted the State to consider funding a separate site from DPIRD’s offices for biosecurity threats. Despite opening the tender process in May of last year, Ms Jarvis said she had told staff at Murdoch this week that the five-storey DPIRD offices, announced in 2021, won’t go ahead at that site. DPIRD staff have moved out of offices in South Perth due to asbestos concerns and are largely working from a leased site in Perth. The minister said the Murdoch University location was “always constrained” but that consultation had revealed five storeys would be “difficult to build” and would fail to “future proof the State”. “We need a site that we, or future governments, can expand if they need to,” Ms Jarvis said. “The other constraint at Murdoch was these national biosecurity responses that were happening at South Perth, cannot happen at Murdoch. It literally isn’t set up, and was never going to be set up, to have hundreds of cars coming in and out.” The Minister said she did not know how much had already been spent on the cancelled offices at the university, but that the work done on planning could still be use for the new site. “Murdoch have been fantastic to deal with, and obviously they’re disappointed,” Ms Jarvis said. “But Murdoch University remain a really important research partner of this agency, as do all the universities.”