DERAILED, DISCREDITED, DESTINED TO GO NOWHERE

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.