This is an opinion piece.

Here is the thing about the Matilda Bay ferry terminal that its opponents would rather you didn't dwell on.

The Western Australian Planning Commission approved the site in December last year. The government's own analysis assessed the available locations and found Matilda Bay to be the safest of them. The alternative the campaigners keep pointing at — JoJo's, a few hundred metres away — was assessed as carrying an unacceptable safety risk to windsurfers and kiteboarders, and as crossing established vessel traffic lanes.

So the safety campaign wants the ferry moved to the site the safety assessment rated worse.

You are allowed to find that odd.

What is actually being proposed

Five new electric ferries on the Swan. Two new stops — one at Applecross, one at Matilda Bay in Crawley — connecting to the Elizabeth Quay pontoon. Metronet on the water. The Matilda Bay terminal is costed at $29.9 million.

The mitigations are not vague. Reduced ferry speeds through the bay. A 40-metre jetty extension to push the berth further out. Wide exclusion zones. The Department of Transport's position is that every existing water activity in the bay continues, with adjustments still being finalised.

Transport Minister Rita Saffioti's summary of it is about as unromantic as government gets:

"Any bit of infrastructure we deliver has risk attached to it. But the aim is to mitigate those risks."

That is true of a pedestrian crossing. It is true of a train station. It is true of every piece of public infrastructure ever built in this city, including the ones the objectors drive over to get to the bay.

Who is objecting

The campaign has two visible faces.

One is Safety on Swan, a coalition of clubs and associations that use the bay, which commissioned its own risk report from a private risk assessor. Its argument is that good risk management should design conflict out rather than rely on people managing it in real time. As a principle, that is perfectly respectable. Applied here, it runs into the inconvenient fact that the design the government evaluated as having the least conflict is the one being objected to.

The other is Jonathan Huston, the Liberal member for Nedlands, who has been out with the protesters and launched a Change.org petition to "Save Matilda Bay" that has gathered more than 5,000 signatures.

Nedlands. Let us talk about Nedlands for a moment.

The electorate takes in some of the most expensive residential land in the country. The median house price in Dalkeith, in the City of Nedlands, is around $4.05 million — up more than 17 per cent in a year. In Nedlands itself it is about $2.7 million. This is the stretch of riverfront where the university, the yacht clubs and the very large houses look out over a bay that belongs, legally and morally, to all 2.1 million of us.

And it is the one stretch of the Swan where, we are told, a public ferry cannot safely stop.

The pattern is extremely familiar

Perth has seen this movie enough times to recite the dialogue. A piece of public transport is proposed. Nobody says "we don't want ordinary people arriving here every fifteen minutes." That would be impolite, and it would lose. So the objection arrives dressed in procedure and public safety: the studies are inadequate, the consultation was rushed, the risk has not been properly modelled, we are not against the project, we simply want it somewhere else.

Somewhere else is the whole argument. It always is. The word "safety" is doing work here that "amenity" and "property values" are not allowed to do in public.

And note what the campaign is not asking for. It is not asking for more exclusion zones, or slower transit speeds, or a longer jetty, or restricted operating hours during club racing. Those are the things you ask for if your actual concern is the safe coexistence of ferries and dinghies, and most of them are already on the table. The campaign is asking for the terminal to be moved out of the bay entirely.

The one objection that deserves a straight answer

In fairness — and this matters — Safety on Swan is not only yacht clubs. It includes Sailability WA, which runs sailing for people with disability, and the coalition says it speaks for more than 7,000 water users across sailing, rowing and swimming clubs.

A novice sailor with limited mobility, in a small boat, sharing water with a commuter service is a real scenario and it deserves better than a shrug. But it is an argument for operating conditions, not for abandoning the site: protected launch corridors, hard exclusion zones during programmed sessions, speed restrictions, published timetables that club programs can be built around. If those protections are inadequate, name the gap and fix it. That is a conversation the Department of Transport should be having in public, in detail, before a single pile goes in.

What it is not is a reason to relocate a $29.9 million piece of public infrastructure to a site the assessors flagged as more dangerous.

The river is not a private amenity

Matilda Bay is Class A reserve. It is not the front garden of the City of Nedlands. The people of Armadale and Ellenbrook and Girrawheen own that water exactly as much as the people whose windows overlook it, and they have spent several decades being told that the parts of Perth worth getting to are the parts that are hardest to reach without a car.

An electric ferry is about the gentlest intervention imaginable. It is quiet. It emits nothing. It carries people who would otherwise be driving through Nedlands to park in it. If this is the level of disruption that cannot be tolerated on the Swan, then nothing can ever be built anywhere, and we should stop pretending the objection is technical.

Build the terminal. Publish the operating conditions. Put the exclusion zones and the speed limits in writing so the clubs can hold the government to them. Then let the rest of Perth come and see the view.

Photo: Matilda Bay by Cygnis insignis via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Ferry photo: Calistemon via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).