WestConnex putting the cart before the horse

As Janet Dandy-Ward was on her way to a yoga class in St Peters this week, she was shocked to see WestConnex workers chopping down trees on Silver Street.

Residents were expecting trees on the street which borders St Peters Public School to be removed. However they were expecting an arborist to be on site to assess whether some bottle brush trees could be saved.

Janet’s son will attend the school next year. On its other side, children cross Campbell Street to get to the school. Here residents have already been evicted, leaving perfectly sound houses empty for over a year. Sydney Motorway Corporation is refusing to plan for a School Safety Zone on the road because it would slow traffic.

In response to residents’ loud complaints and calls to Sydney Motorway Corporation, work stopped. Workers then built a metal cage around where Ms Dandy-Ward was standing. Eventually after police were called, she agreed to leave.

This work is part of preliminary work that is installing high voltage power lines designed for the massive St Peters Interchange for which an unfiltered pollution stack will be built close to Ms Dandy-Ward’s home.

Despite strong objections by the City of Sydney, all Inner West Council’s and 12,000 other submissions objecting to the proposal, the new M5 was approved in April. Many important issues have been left to the ‘detailed design stage.’ Major construction cannot go ahead until more detailed technical plans are approved.

The NSW Planning Department confirmed last week that no approval has yet been given for construction to begin at St Peters or nearby Arncliffe. Meanwhile, major contractor CIMIC has been allowed to knock down hundreds of trees on the Kogarah Golf course in Arncliffe as part of its “ancillary” plans, even before any detailed designs of the tunnel are complete. The trees stood on part of the habitat of the endangered Green and Golden Bell frog.

In response to written questions, the Inner West Council CEO Richard Pearson told this reporter that a draft detailed construction plan was received in June but “as the documentation was incomplete,” the WestCONnex Joint Venture was “requested to provide all relevant information. Updated documents have not yet been received.” Council will provide comments after the plan is received.

Janet Dandy Ward and other members of the WestCONnex Action Group have been fighting a long and exhausting battle against the motorway since 2013. But although massive devastation can been seen at Granville in Sydney’s West and Haberfield, the ever-growing motorway project is still only in its infancy.

Behind the scenes, all is not going well for the project. The new M5 is nearly a year behind schedule. As well, the Australian Financial Review has recently published reports that CIMIC, the major construction partner in WestConnex, is losing money on its M4 widening work, paying penalties for an international hotel contract that was late and is under-performing financially. The company is under investigation for corrupt international dealings and there is a Federal audit of the WestConnex’s funding governance. And with the NSW government’s Ausgrid sale to Chinese interests being blocked by the Federal government, financing for later stages of WestConnex is not in place. CIMIC itself is part of Spanish conglomerate Grupo ACS that would have to weather any further global financial crisis, which could have a massive impact on the construction industry.

All the while, community anger against WestConnex grows, including in Western Sydney where there is very strong opposition to tolls that will be imposed on users of the existing M4 to finance WestConnex.

The challenge is to transform this anger into an even stronger campaign. This was one aim of a WestConnex Action Group meeting held last Sunday in Sydney Park, parts of which will be taken over by WestConnex.

The action began with a tree at the corner of Euston and Sydney Park Roads in Alexandria being wrapped with a blue ribbon by Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore. (Campaigners have tied similar blue ribbons on hundreds of trees along the WestConnex route.) According to a rough count by City Hub, more than one thousand trees are slated for destruction in Sydney Park alone. 1400 more will be destroyed for New M5 construction sites if the project continues.

More than 400 people then packed into the Sydney Park Pavilion, the gate of which is less than 100 metres from Euston Road, which will become a six lane highway carrying an extra 52,000 cars a day if the Westconnex New M5 goes ahead. Not surprisingly, levels of deadly fine particulate pollution will rise in nearby parkland and local streets.

While the amount of land excised from the park will be restricted to its southern corners and road edges, the noise and pollution generated by a motorway would squeeze the entire well-used park inwards, impacting on many areas including exercise equipment zone, a planned urban farm, a children’s bike park, a small bird wetland and completely destroy some parts that have been especially cultivated to attract birds and butterflies.

Nick Bryant-Smith from Inner West band HorrowShow began the meeting with a rap poem including the words: “Can you feel the change in the air? I never could and then I took a second look and now I see it everywhere. Today moving so fast becomes yesteryear. And If you can’t keep up then you disappear? ”

Greens MLC Mehreen Faruqi summed up the views of many when she told the meeting, “According to the Baird government, it’s good for us that traffic will disappear down a tunnel and leave the streets relatively free, but they forget to mention that traffic going into a tunnel has to come out somewhere and the 1000s of cars that come out of the interchange here and will be funnelled into already congested local streets. With the Green Square development going ahead population is already set to increase around here and not many plans to improve public transport, we are going to face traffic chaos and literally a standstill.”

Janet Dandy-Ward spoke of the “ties once broken and the loss of community” that could cause “emotional and psychological damage to those leaving and those left behind.”  “I’m one of those left behind! But we know that this is just the start of this in St Peters and we know that the destruction that has happened in Haberfield, Kingsgrove, Ashfield, Strathfield, Concord, Granville …….. is coming this way unless we halt this project and stop the devastation, ” Ms Dandy-Ward, one of the WestCONnex Action Group organisers, told the meeting.

Ms Dandy-Ward is an immigrant to Australia from the UK. But ironically, she already knows far more about our city than chief Greater Sydney Commissioner, Lucy Turnbull, who when interviewed on ABC 702 this week said she was unaware of the  large-scale destruction of houses for the WestConnex motorway in the heritage suburb of Haberfield. This was an astonishing admission from a woman whose job involves co-ordinating district plans for the entire city.

Turnbull began her life in the wealthiest part of Sydney’s Eastern suburbs, was educated in elite schools and still lives in the exclusive enclave of Point Piper with its glistening harbour views. Her tone was detached as she spoke of Westconnex going ahead. Perhaps it’s time for Ms Turnbull to visit Granville in Sydney’s West to find out what it is like to live beside an expanding motorway towering over your home or Haberfield in the Inner West where streets of well-crafted homes have been turned into rubble. She might also bring her public transport loving husband PM Malcolm Turnbull who never even replied to hundreds of citizens who wrote to him about Westconnex. An invitation from the Westconnex Action Group is on the way.

Wendy Bacon is a supporter of the WestConnex Action Group