OCEAN activist Josie Jones believes ratepayers and the community are being shortchanged by a new hand-cleaning model that fails to clean the entire beach.
Jones has spoken to shire-contracted beach cleaners and questioned them about their cleaning from the low water line to the high tide mark, and failure to clean the rest of the beach. Jones was told the water line is all they were contracted to clean.
Jones’ concern is that the contracts for the hand cleaning falls short of what is required to keep those beaches clean, providing poor value for ratepayers and increasing the workload for volunteers and community members to step in and fill the gap.
“The contract isn’t fit for purpose,” said Jones.
“The shire has a hybrid model where a beach is either raked, or it is hand cleaned; not a combination of both.
“The problem is that while recreational areas are being raked on the mechanically raked beaches, only the waterline is being cleaned on those that are being hand cleaned,” said Jones.
“That leaves a huge swathe of those beaches untouched.”
Beach cleaning has been a contentious issue with hand-cleaning trialled across the shire from July 2024.
Councillors attempted to cut the trial short by voting that mechanical raking be reintroduced to all accessible peninsula beaches, against the the recommendation of officers (Hand cleaning sinks on bay beaches, The News 27/5/25).
The state government subsequently rejected a Mornington Peninsula Shire application to mechanically rake beaches in areas with coast saltwort, forcing a shake-up of the return to mechanical raking in favour of continuing hand cleaning of the majority of the shire’s beaches (State rejects beach machine raking to ‘safeguard vegetation’ The News 2/12/25).
Jones believes that the new hand cleaning model in place leaves the high traffic areas uncleaned as well as the foredunes and in-between beach boxes.
“Volunteers are supposed to complement the work of the shire employees, but they are really required to carry it,” said Jones.
The ocean campaigner who was recognised as the “Vic Local Hero” in the 2020 Australian of the Year Awards, and was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 2022 said this wasn’t about attacking the shire’s approach to beach cleaning in general, but to ensure that the best value and most sensible approach was being taken.
“The due diligence hasn’t been done correctly here,” said Jones.
“The system they have put in place has created two paths of dependency. We as ratepayers pay for it, the job is not done sufficiently, so someone else has to step in and fix the job.”
Jones asked about the cleaning at public question time at the shire’s 17 February meeting with shire CEO Mark Stoermer answering “Mechanical ranking is undertaken on beaches accessible by tractor where there are no records of coast saltwort or other sensitive native vegetation”.
“Hand cleaning is focused at the waterline and high tide zone because this is where the majority of marine debris accumulates and where mechanical raking cannot operate effectively.
“The current hybrid model reflects council’s endorsed direction to return to mechanical raking for broader sand areas with hand cleaning retained for zones requiring more sensitive environmental management.”
Jones believed the answer failed to address the issue as to why the scope of hand cleaning had been reduced to just the waterline, and followed up with the shire.
A subsequent reply from a shire manager stated that “The Shire has not adopted a formal conclusion that most litter accumulates at the waterline. The beach cleaning program operates on a two‑weekly cycle, focusing on open and accessible sand areas, with the expectation that visitors will bin their rubbish or take it home”.
“We are continuing to review how these variables influence the presence or absence of both methods at particular sites, and we are also examining servicing of upper recreational areas during peak visitor periods.”
Jones believes that the confirmation that upper recreational beach areas are not included in the formal cleaning program suggests that a significant proportion of litter generated in high-use zones is not being addressed within the contract’s scope.
“This raises questions regarding the effectiveness of the current model from a preventative perspective.”
First published in the Mornington News – 7 April 2026
