DERAILED, DISCREDITED, DESTINED TO GO NOWHERE
- Author:
- Lawrence Gibbons
- Posted:
- Wednesday, 3 February 2010
The state’s latest plan to build a $5 billion transport link to Rozelle was derailed two weeks into the new year. Less than two months after Premier Kristina K Keneally took office, the state’s latest leader put out a media release: “This is about providing clarity and certainty for the businesses in the area.” But the announcement only brought further uncertainty and confusion to a string of local small businesses from the Central Business District to Rozelle that have been threatened with compulsory acquisition. While the Ten Network reported that businesses in Pyrmont would be spared, the local member for Balmain, Verity Firth sent a letter to constituents claiming negotiations would continue with businesses across the Anzac Bridge in Pyrmont. Only property owners in her own marginal seat would be spared. Labor Party insiders speculated that the State government was willing to knock down buildings in the City, since Clover Moore was the only inner city mayor to support the Metro (in exchange for bulldozing a city block to create a barren plaza opposite Town Hall) and because the Labor Party didn’t give a damn about Moore’s state seat, which it lost years ago.
In mid December, less than two weeks after KKK was proclaimed the party’s “puppet Premier”, Verity Firth wrote to Transport Minister David Campbell. The correspondence was leaked to the press. “Many residents have questioned the practicality and necessity of a rail line that runs between Central and Rozelle. They are keen to know how this section of the line fits into a broader transport blueprint for Sydney, and are not supportive of a line that terminates in Rozelle.” With state elections scheduled next year, Firth is right to be concerned. She holds her seat by the narrowest of margins. When elections are held, she will likely stand against Jamie Parker, the popular Green mayor of Leichhardt, whose opposition to Metro has received considerable media attention. Parker argues Metro is a waste of money; the $5 billion system will divert resources, passengers and funds away from the area’s existing light rail and will create massive disruptions to the area in the process. In 2003 Parker nearly toppled the then local member Sandra Nori over the State government’s plans to sell off state-owned land for development at Callan Park. Sandra Nori faced a 17.5 per cent swing against her. The public land was saved but Nori was replaced four years later by the younger, fresher Firth, who faced a further 3 per cent swing against her in the next election. Every time the government makes an announcement regarding its plans for Metro in Rozelle, the local mayor, Jamie Parker is handed a microphone. And Firth no doubt shudders.
Critics have proclaimed the Metro as the railway to nowhere. Why spend $5 billion burrowing to Rozelle, which is already massively over-served by light rail and buses? And why would the government spare Rozelle but continue pursuing properties in Pyrmont? Why spend at least a billion burrowing from Barangaroo to Pyrmont but stop short of Rozelle village? The answer lies across Rozelle Bay, on the other side of the Anzac Bridge next door to the City West distributor in Lilyfield. Amid the overgrown weeds sits a disused rail yard where Sydney Metro plans to house its rail cars and locate its central command. From the old Rozelle rail yard in Lilyfield, Sydney Metro proposes to operate trains without union drivers – or any staff for that matter. Rather than bust the union, which has created one of the most dysfunctional and inefficient transport systems in the western world, the Labor government has opted to simply build a parallel system beside it. Rather than confront the problem head on by attempting to privatise the system (a proposal the unions and the public would never support), the government has opted to duplicate an entire transport bureaucracy, complete with a separate train system and a self-contained rail yard on Rozelle Bay.
Officially known as the Bays Precinct, the harbour foreshore around Glebe Island and Rozelle Bay is a yet to be exploited developer’s wet dream. Spanning prime, disused industrial, waterfront land, the area is a capital asset any cash-starved government would dream of selling. Less than a year and a half ago, then Planning Minister Keneally said: “People have put forward various ideas and I think there is great potential between Barangaroo and the bays precinct to really remake the western half of the harbour, to use it for residential and commercial purposes, for public transport and quite possibly for entertainment and events.” The property developers couldn’t agree more. In its submission to the State Government regarding the Bays Precinct, the Property Council of Australia, the peak developer body argued: “The most practical (and potentially viable) redevelopment option for Glebe Island and White Bay is the delivery of large, mixed used urban villages… Access to the foreshore and community open space incorporating recreational and retail facilities could also be provided. This number of dwellings would deliver a significant proportion of the 30,000 new dwellings required in the Inner West…”
While local residents argue they do not want another Pyrmont–style Jacksons Landing in Rozelle, terminating a major rail yard in Rozelle ensures that kind of urban density will eventuate in the precinct, regardless of what residents say in interminable consultative meetings and in online forums. As Barangaroo architect Paul Berkemeir told Architecture & Design magazine: “The state government has locked itself into building a metro line that goes from nowhere to nowhere, and it happens to go under White Bay. Obviously … [it will] be pressured to develop White Bay intensively because it’s the only way that the metro will make sense … The mix will be whatever is needed to make the metro viable. In urban terms, that’s quite reasonable. But no one’s mentioning it – and government is putting what I think is a foregone conclusion off the radar by talking about consultation processes.”
When the newly-installed Rees government announced its plans to locate Sydney Metro’s railcards and command central in Rozelle, it stated the land would be used to construct the system and would not be available for development until 2015, making it a hotly contested issue in the state election that will take place four years after KKK faces the wrath of voters.
Buried in the thousands of pages Sydney Metro has put on public exhibition, the authority has stated its long-term intention to develop a train station at White Bay. Gazetted in the original legislation, the Authority is committed to building a Metro station at White Bay, near Victoria Road. How much do you reckon the State government could get for land like that from developers? Go figure.
Five years and four premiers ago, Bob Carr first announced the state government’s plans to build a rail system to northwest Sydney. Carr proposed to spend $7 billion expanding the CityRail network. It was one of Carr’s last announcements before he resigned. Carr’s original plan was to expand the existing CityRail network to serve the northwest and eventually Sydney’s expanding southwest suburbs as well. Transport experts argue an integrated rail network would have followed world’s best practice. Creating a duplicated, costly bureaucracy with separate entrances that can only be accessed at a few central intersections makes the system costly and impractical – to say nothing of creating yet another separate transport ticketing system (don’t anyone mention the failed effort to create an integrated T-card). Unencumbered by separate regional and local governments with the authority to control public transport, NSW had the opportunity to have an efficient and centralised rail system. In 2008, Carr’s successor Morris Iemma announced he would bypass the troubled CityRail system altogether, pledging $11 billion to build a completely separate Sydney Metro system. To fund his ambitious plans, he proposed to sell off the State’s electricity system. Iemma’s desire to break the back of the union movement at all costs cost him his own job, when the union bosses refused to privatise public utilities. Iemma’s successor, Nathan Rees attempted to fund the first leg of the Metro system by seeking federal stimulus funding. Canberra was unwilling to fund public transport in the Liberal-voting Hills districts, where Pentecostal fundamentalist Christians breed like rabbits. Rees’s proposal to spend more than $5 billion on a railway from Central to Rozelle was reportedly drafted on the back of an envelope and was met with derision by the Federal government, ridicule in the media and contempt in the vulnerable seat of Balmain, where Firth clings to power by her fingertips. For over a decade, Rozelle has been crushed between the expansion of the affluent City centre to its east and the rising masses of vocal Labor voters to its west. In their anger over a state’s rampant development plans for the peninsula, locals have threatened to throw the charming, attractive, dynamic and young Firth out of office for the equally charming, attractive, dynamic and young Jamie Parker. Days before Rees was to release his blue print for Sydney Metro in Rozelle, the party powerbrokers removed Rees from office instead, putting him and us out of our collective miseries.
And so it is that this month, the latest in a fast moving conga-line line of Labor premiers will convene a series of closed door Cabinet meetings to address the problem. How does a global city, Australia’s largest metropolis, balance the needs of a rapidly expanding urban centre against the demands of a vocal, mobilised anti-development citizenry? Can Sydney afford to spend billions creating an entirely separate rail network that is not integrated into its existing mass transport system? Will a stumbling State government continue to create competing bureaucratic infrastructures on the back of an envelope, hoping to sell off even more publicly-owned foreshore land to fund its follies? When the government comes out of its closed-door Cabinet meetings at the end of the month, they will let us know what they have decided.
February 4th, 2010 @ 9:53 am
I don’t think I have ever read such an article, that’s brought about such an awareness for both the people in the Inner West of Sydney and the people of Sydney. The title says it all. Derailed and discredited with nowhere to go. That’s the CBD Metro. In addition to the above we must remember the 3,350 jobs that will be lost. These are fully confessed outright by Sydney Metro in the Environmental Assessment in writing.
Labor has truly lost it’s way and I am also dissapointed now that we are hearing that the businneses in Union Square are putting up with the full brunt of an unsatisfactory CBD Metro Pyrmont Station. Why are people being punished ? Why are the people of NSW being forced also to fund the $5,000,000,000 project ? Divide that into 7 million population of NSW and thats over $758 each we all have to pay. Man, Women and Child. Thanks NSW Labor. I am sure the people in the Country really wanted to pay the $758 from their taxes to fund this disastrous project.
I would call on all good members of the public to make your feelings known. The people in Pyrmont need your help, as do we all. It’s only through your input that we can look after those that need it. I haven’t even mentioned those in desperate need of better public transport in the Western suburbs of Sydney. These people need this better transport to seek and hold down employment. One of the great things about people in Sydney is looking after one another. We may need to have to a bit more because NSW Labor certainly isn’t.
Roll on the the next election and thanks to the writer and paper for being such a bastian for the community and person in the street.
David Hunt
Rozelle
February 8th, 2010 @ 4:14 pm
Rozelle is NOT getting a Metro according to today’s Herald, but it going to be hard for Jamie Parker to ever argue for any public transport improvements in his electorate now that fan-boy here has said “Rozelle is massively over-serviced.”
What drugs was this person on?
Then there is our David Hunt, who says, “one of the great things about Sydney is people looking after one another”
Fortunately for him that includes those who own franchises which flog us our plasmas. But not in those in Rozelle who actually live here, a long way from the privatised, expensive light rail at Catherine St (which isn’t even in Rozelle) and the even more expensive and limited peak hour only ferry service at Elliot St (in Balmain).
But oh yes, we have buses, and are “massively over-serviced”.
What tosh. Jamie should ask Sydney Buses to reduce services! But I’ll leave those (minor gripes) aside and say this:
In this long, dementedly paranoid mish-mash of 70’s style conspiracy theory and anti-development whingeing which laughably impresses David Hunt (he of the plasmas), NOT ONCE does the author offer
1. Evidence. NONE, not a skerrick.
2. Anything at all constructive about how Sydney will cope with its growing population and infrastructure needs in the era of peak oil and climate change.
We are offered instead the “charming, attractive, dynamic and young Jamie Parker” (excuse while I go and take a cold shower!) Plus a lot of the usual nimby-ish, negativity which this publication and the “charming” Jamie Parker are now well known for.
Outside the affluent, boomer-dominant suburbs like Rozelle and Balmain, where the residents indeed may not want or need public transport (they have those luxury SUVs), anti public transport, anti- everything sentiments like those of the author’s are not quite so popular.
In those Labor regions to the west, development is not seen as evil. It represents jobs, and homes and security for our children. Not something City Hub could care less about, of course.
Apparently the author is waiting for some Thatcher-like messiah to “bust the union, which has created one of the most dysfunctional and inefficient transport systems in the western world.”
Good luck with the wait. He may well get Jamie, the “popular” (in his wet dreams!) mayor of Leichhardt. But Jamie will be a outsider in a government run by the uncharming, undynamic, totally redundant Barry O’Farrell and his party of climate change deniers, unrepentant Howardistas, big-end-of town spivs and right wing fundamentalists.
Enjoy that, City Hubsters…
February 8th, 2010 @ 9:33 pm
Whilst I don’t agree with every single point made in the article, I have to concur that the roll out for the CBD Metro has, at times, been incredibly inept. The project has been rushed & has done more damage to the re-election chances of the ALP in NSW than it needed to.
Why choose Rozelle as a stop? Think carefully before you answer this question, because “it will be the first step in the creation of a new transport network” is not an adequate answer (more like a catch-phrase) and if you choose to posit that as a credible answer, then please show the readers of City Hub the costings, funding documents, overall plan & government guarantee that the Metro will cross the Parramatta River to back up your statement.
If White Bay at some future stage, needs a transport node fine, all the State Government needs to do is come clean, explain the situation, and plan adequately. However not at the expense of having no money in the kitty for the rest of the city’s (& state’s)transport needs. Of course this will be a service for the well heeled, please spare us the “people need somewhere to live” scenario, this is all about desirable address not housing the general public.
The fact that the Metro will likely be nixed in Rozelle has little to do with the Greens being anti-public transport (I have read & heard their position on the Metro & it seems that this party is in support of public transport options other than the Metro) but more to do with the Metro being on the nose in a near marginal seat, it is political poison.’Simple a that.
It is little wonder that the current Premier is currently looking to strategies that might bring more immediate public transport relief such as light rail (a form of transport that Metro spruikers sought to denigrate as it was taken to be ‘the competition’).People want to see results & action, not another glossy brochure or pretty website.
Is it not conceivable to have an adequately planned Metro running alongside light rail and other public transport options? (the blinkered party political morons that cannot look objectively at this issue without their master’s approval only fiddle while Sydney ‘burns’, people are over the party line with this project I’m afraid)
If only the ALP put some of the stuck in the mud advisors on public transport out to pasture a few years ago they might not be in the situation they are presently in.
Let’s look at Pyrmont & the building of a Metro station. The first (lazy) option was simply to knock down the historic Victorian era commercial row at Union Square and have the hide to present the most bland, unsympathetic replacement buildings that I’ve ever had the misfortune to lay my eyes on, all within the surrounds of a popular local square that features predominately Victorian era buildings.
After much protest, the Metro Authority backed down somewhat at Pyrmont. Even so, many thousands of dollars were squandered on fanciful, over the top, ‘concept’ designs for the new Pyrmont station by some high profile architectural firms (none of these designs is likely to see the light of day – thankfully in some instances, as a few of those designs seemed almost as uninspiring as the initial designs for the station), it seemed odd that the Transport Minister was issuing statements to preserve the terraces when some (though not all) re-design options for the proposed Pyrmont Station (emanating from a public ‘workshop’) seemed to include impressions of a new structure in place of the terraces.
The same lack of sensitivity (with design) continued to Rozelle, the pushing through of over the top, needlessly grandiose, station entrances, with these entrances destroying local businesses and putting the locals well and truly off side.
Add into the mix conflicting projected patronage figures from both the NSW Transport minister & (acting) Head of the Sydney Metro Authority, the genuine lack of investment in transport infrastructure to the southwest & northwest, the perception that there might be safety issues with train speeds and well, I don’t need to go on…it speaks for itself.
February 10th, 2010 @ 12:13 pm
Thanks Jacko, thats a good analysis, and far better than the original article, which was lazy, confused agitprop from an ancient, irrelevant era. City Hub hasn’t got it. It is living in the 70s
But on the Greens… You say they support public transport, but not the Metro because its “on the nose in a near marginal seat, it is political poison. Simple a that.”
Those of us who live in Leichhardt have yet to see them support building anything, they even opposed facilities for their own Council staff. But the second bit is true.
And how cynical is that? It really looks like “whatever it takes” Richo has got another client now that McGurk is dead. The Greens of Leichhardt.
Some people did expect a bit of principle and honesty when they voted for the Greens here. But they got cynical opportunism and hypocrisy on a scale this area has not seen in my lifetime.
The West Metro may survive the current fiasco and it will have a station at Parramatta Rd near the Italian Forum.
But watch as the Leichhardt Greens oppose that too.
I’d suggest Sydney Metro bypass Leichhardt altogether, and put their stations on the other side of the road in Marrickville. And Ashfield and Canada Bay of course. Luckily, those areas do have Mayors who support their own commuters and residents.
February 16th, 2010 @ 8:07 am
Yeah I agree with some of the above comments. I think City Hub is confused, but it’s a state of mind which matches much of what used to be called the progressive left. They equate anti-capitalism with anti development and anti progress, which is a travesty of what the left used to stand for.
Notice their enthusiasm for fusty old visions like “villages” and trams. They harken back to the days when suburbs like Chatswood and Rockdale were sleepy low rise suburbs full of people just like them, rather than the high rise (and “asian”) “horrors” they are now.
City Hub will, like the Hearld, fully endorse the Ron Christie transport plan, with its emphasis on trams and strong anti Metro stance. Notice also the racist undertones of that report’s “east Asian” horrors if we get a Metro. European model “good”, Asian “bad.” Just pathetic…
Can you imagine a more conservative, establishment icon than the Fairfax group? The “left” claim its views as their own! What a joke, they have become the new reactionaries, and they’re out of step with the new Sydney. Which will become more “asian” and dense. City Hub, the Herald and like-minded fossils will just have to lump it.
Or leave!