The anti-freeway fights that saved Sydney part three: How the Greiner Government lied, and the Airport Rail Line got launched

Sydneysider: A personal journey

One evening in early August 1988, the Wolli Creek defenders rallied to the Jade Garden Chinese restaurant in Bardwell Park for an impromptu victory celebration. We’d just heard that the Greiner Government, elected in a landslide in March, had honoured their election promise to lift the freeway reservation through the Wolli Creek Valley.

There it was, written in the local paper: “Wolli Creek Valley Saved” – and there was a picture of Environment Minister Tim Moore, Transport Minister Bruce Baird, and local Liberal MP Phil White, sitting, grinning, like three sparrows on a wire, with the valley’s bush in the background. I was ecstatic, and relieved. I’d devoted most of my spare time to the campaign for a couple of years. Others had been on the job since the late ‘70s.

But it was a weird and brazen lie. Just three months later, the RTA released an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for a surface road straight through the valley. The struggle was to rage on for another decade.

The 1988 EIS, prepared by the Kinhills consultancy, was comprehensively discredited by the Wolli Creek Preservation Society. Shortly before the EIS was made public, one of our members happened, by an amazing coincidence, to sit next to a Kinhills consultant on a flight from Perth to Sydney. To their astonishment, the consultant sat editing the forthcoming EIS, breezily altering not just wording, but whole sets of figures in the accompanying technical tables. This seemed most improper, because the figures must have been supplied by specialist consultants.

When the EIS went on sale, one of our committee members went into the RTA and asked for a copy. The woman behind the counter seemed a bit out of her depth. She produced a copy of the EIS and asked if we’d like the subconsultants reports as well. The what? Um, well, yes , obviously we would. The RTA lady couldn’t find them behind the counter so she disappeared and staggered back with a huge pile of bound reports. Our member handed over $25, grabbed the material, and fled.

Nobody had ever got hold of EIS subconsultants’ reports before, and they proved to be a goldmine. There were the originals of all the tables that the EIS editor had altered, in-flight, as it were. It was a major coup. In our subsequent submission to the EIS process we recommended legal action against the RTA officers and the consultants responsible for misrepresenting the specialists’ considered opinions.

Everyone expected the RTA would rubber-stamp the EIS quickly and start construction. In despair we geared-up for direct action, but months passed, and nothing happened. Gradually it dawned on us that the RTA was in real trouble. Would we, in all or naivety and inexperience, have gone to the courts over the improprieties in the EIS? I have no way of knowing, but the clearly the RTA thought we would. They mothballed the EIS.

It was two years before they attempted to revive the M5 plan. When they did, it was via a bogus consultation process they called the Botany-West Transport Study, and it ended in disaster for them. The study threw up a series of “alternatives” to their original plan, but most were clearly bogus alternatives designed to be rejected – by a stacked consultative committee – in favour of the Wolli road. The Preservation Society had been invited onto the committee but we walked out of the first meeting and publicly rejected the exercise.

A few months later, a strange thing happened. The Society was contacted, privately, by a RailCorp bureaucrat. There was a plan for a new underground rail line from the East Hills line to the airport and the CBD. They called it New Southern Railway and they couldn’t get it taken seriously by the government. But if the Wolli Creek Preservation Society revealed the existence of the plan and pushed for it to be included as an alternative in the RTA’s public consultation process, cabinet could hardly refuse.

For the public servants involved, this was very naughty exercise indeed. The plans for the Airport Line were handed over at private a dinner party set up as a cover. My partner Lee, and I, were in Perth at the time, on a year’s desktop publishing tour of Australia, so I heard of these adventures in government decision-making by phone. Could I design a brochure for the proposal’s public launch? I whipped up the artwork in our caravan and despatched it. A few days later, Professor Peter Newman did the deed on the top of Nannygoat Hill in the Wolli Valley and 40,000 copies of the brochure were distributed.

And thus it was that a local conservation group publicly launched the Airport Rail Line plan and the RTA’s Botany-West Study became a public run-off between road and rail.