How a freeway freak became the greatest rail builder since WWII

Sydneysider: A personal journey

In 1990 the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority’s attempt to revive the stalled M5 East Motorway plan, with a “consultation process” called the Botany-West Transport Study, ended in disaster for the Authority. The Wolli Creek Preservation Society had been leaked the plans for an airport rail line. Publicly launching this proposal forced its inclusion into the options in the final stage of the study.

But the RTA were confident that they could easily overcome any public support for a new rail line, and they had a cheap trick up their sleeve.

The final phase of the Botany-West study was set up as an informal public vote on which of the M5 East Motorway or the Airport Line should proceed. The RTA issued a simple A4 form where you could tick a box indicating your preference for either the M5 (“Proposal R” – road) or the rail line (“Proposal P” – public transport). The forms were made available at all Motor Registries and NRMA offices. It was completely anonymous. Voters didn’t have to identify themselves in any way, so you could vote as many times as you liked and even photocopy the form for distribution to your friends.

No doubt the RTA officers who set this up thought that in the unlikely event that P votes outnumbered R votes they could just photocopy as many copies as necessary to “win”, sit down with a bunch of different pens, and tick away until they had a majority. They didn’t realise that by setting up such an obviously dodgy process they were walking into a trap of their own making.

The Wolli Creek Preservation Society immediately blew the whistle on the scam and invented its own transparent process. We issued preference forms in which the voters had to identify themselves by name and address, and add a signature. Our forms were addressed to the premier, rather than the RTA. We calculated that the RTA couldn’t simply dismiss a clean and transparent voting process while theirs was so obviously open to rorting, so our honest votes for P would have to be included in the final count.

And that was how it worked out. In the final tally, Proposal P got 62 per cent of the total vote. It wasn’t easy. We letterboxed thousands of forms and handed them out at railway stations. And I remember standing at the miserable windswept Sydenham Station bus rank at dawn, explaining to workers waiting for the Industrial Area bus that the proposed rail line would provide a better way to get to their jobs. Only a few wouldn’t sign.

The RTA had more or less invented a pro-freeway “astroturf” group called ERTAG which collected 4,514 of the RTA’s anonymous forms in support of the M5 project. But the Preservation Society collected 8,132 signed forms in support of the Airport Line.

RTA chief executive Peter Wolfe made a farcical attempt to rescue the situation. He counted all the society’s forms, endorsing Proposal P, and all the RTA forms submitted by ERTAG, endorsing the M5, as single responses. This left a handful of forms which had been otherwise collected (just over 2 per cent of the total). By disenfranchising 97 per cent of folk who had taken a position one way or the other, he was able to claim that “approximately equal” numbers of respondents had supported the rail and road solutions.

This dodge convinced nobody, and by then it was too late anyway. The Airport Line proposal had a head start.

Not long before the March 1995 election (which the Coalition lost), the Fahey Government’s Transport Minister, Bruce Baird, a rabid freeway exponent, signed off on a public-private partnership to build the Airport Line. If he wanted to proclaim an achievement, he had little choice. The project had sailed through the EIS process with near zero opposition while there was still no EIS for the freeway and it remained mired in controversy. In the brouhaha of the upcoming election, all Baird got was a single, almost unnoticed, photo-op, and he became, unwittingly, perhaps the greatest urban rail-builder since the end of World War II.

The RTA engineers wept tears of blood. Around $600 million in public funds had been diverted to a major rail project. Three more years passed before the RTA were able to get a start on the M5 East, and only at the price of putting it in a long tunnel under the Wolli Valley.

In 1998, with the tunnel plan adopted, and as a campaign commitment, the Carr Government announced the establishment of a Wolli Creek Regional Park. In the 14 years since, the various public lands that should constitute the park have never, finally, been consolidated, nor the park formally declared and opened. It’s a sadly typical story of the failure of NSW Government.