On 23 December 2025, the City of Albany issued direction notices requiring a grain handling business to cease operations immediately.
The business was responsible for receival, storage, and loading of bulk grain onto vessels at the port. The directive required it to stop receiving grain, stop moving grain, and stop all heavy vehicle movements—effective upon receipt.
The timing was not incidental. Western Australia is in the middle of the largest grain harvest in its history: 26.55 million tonnes, surpassing the previous record. The Albany Port Zone alone expects to handle 6.39 million tonnes. Ships are scheduled months in advance. Delays cascade through growers, contractors, transport operators, and export markets that do not care about local planning disputes in regional Western Australia.
None of this, apparently, occurred to anyone involved.
The stated justification was technical. The business was operating as “Industry – Rural”—a discretionary use under the local planning scheme—without development approval. The land is zoned General Industry. The activity is grain handling. It had been conducted in this manner for years.
What changed was not the activity. It was complaints. The City’s correspondence refers to “unacceptable detrimental impacts affecting the local area” and “significant issues impacting surrounding properties”—but does not specify what these were.
Dust and noise from grain handling are legitimate concerns. Neighbours are entitled to raise them, and the City is entitled to act on them. The question is how.
The City reached for the planning framework. A discretionary land use classification became the instrument through which a grain handling operation could be shut down two days before Christmas, mid-harvest, with ships waiting at port.
The business had spent weeks attempting to cooperate. Documentation had been submitted. The City deemed it incomplete.
And so, the directive.
The covering correspondence is worth quoting. Having ordered an immediate halt to operations during the largest harvest on record, the City advised:
The City will be in touch with further formal Directions regarding removal and management actions when the office re-opens in the New Year after the festive closure period.
An urgent threat to the public interest, then. But not so urgent as to interfere with the Christmas party.
Within twenty-four hours—following, one imagines, some rather pointed telephone calls—the directive was rescinded.
This is not how serious organisations behave.
Serious organisations understand that compliance serves a purpose beyond its own exercise. Serious organisations grasp that food security is not an abstraction, that harvests do not pause for bureaucratic convenience, and that the exercise of coercive authority demands a corresponding exercise of judgment. Serious organisations do not weaponise a technicality during a record harvest, issue a shutdown order, announce they’ll follow up after the holidays, and then expect to be taken seriously when they speak of serving the community.
The directive was rescinded. But rescission is not accountability.
Institutions act through culture before they act through individuals. The question is not how the directive was drafted, but what conditions made it seem unremarkable until it became public.
Until that’s understood, the reversal is not resolution. It is a bet on public amnesia.