Make Melbourne Green

Hundreds of The Greens’ “No Road Tunnel” triangles made their way to Melbourne City Council’s Planning Committee meeting last night, in the hands of angry Kensington, North Melbourne, Carlton and Parkville residents. (Above: residents in the council chambers building foyer queuing to get into the meeting)

The Planning Committee met in the packed-out Yarra room at the council chambers building, after having moved from its initial location due to the size of the crowd, to consider the city’s response to Rod Eddington’s East-West Link Needs Assessment (EWLNA) report.

The outcome of the meeting was hard to predict: all councillors, apart from Greens Cr Fraser Brindley and Cr Brian Shanahan, had previously given their in-principle support to the East-West tunnel. But the 400-strong capacity crowd made it abundantly clear that they expected council to overturn its original support for the tunnel.

Disappointingly and unsurprisingly, the Lord Mayor did not attend the meeting.

After hearing from the council’s Manager of Strategic Planning and Sustainability, who presented a draft submission for council which included the recommendation that the city “support an East-West city tunnel bypass” and contained no mention of the blatant inconsistency between the city’s goals to tackle a global warming emergency and the tunnel’s disastrous environmental consequences, the meeting heard from city residents.

Kay Oddie, Julianne Bell (convenor of the Royal Park protection society), and members of the Kensington Association were among those who spoke against the draft submission and implored councillors to distance themselves from the EWLNA report’s recommended road tunnel and embrace alternative solutions to Melbourne’s transport woes, such as a decent investment in public transport.

As soon as the verbal submissions to the meeting had concluded, Greens Cr Fraser Brindley immediately moved that the committee recommend that the council abandon its support for the road tunnel, and he duly received the largest applause of the evening. After some discussion and alteration of the wording of the motion, and an abandonment of Cr Clarke’s foreshadowed motion to defer the decision for 5 weeks, the committee meeting eventually agreed to Cr Brindley’s motion.

Cr Brindley mentioned in closing that in his time as Melbourne City Councillor, he had never before seen quite so much community concern into council deliberations, and he praised the democratic process which saw the passionate arguments of Melbourne’s inner north communities essentially overturn the stances of four of the six present councillors.

Exactly what Lord Mayor John So makes of this outcome will be very interesting to see. An enthusiastic supporter of the tunnel, he will now have to cope with the political reality that three of his own alliance (Singer, Jetter and Wilson) have just voted to abandon their support for the road tunnel.

The motion will now go to a full council meeting for endorsement on June 24th. If at least five of the six councillors present at yesterday’s committee meeting maintain their stance, council will officially voice their opposition to the East-West road tunnel at that meeting, and the state government will have yet another political hurdle to overcome. Cr Brindley closed his remarks by encouraging residents to keep the pressure on the Lord Mayor and the state government.

Meanwhile, the Greens Lord Mayor Candidate for Melbourne for November’s elections, Adam Bandt, has pledged, if he wins, to stand in front of the first bulldozer in his mayoral robes and chains if the Brumby government insists on forging ahead with their plans to build the greenhouse gas polluting East-West tunnel.

Rohan Leppert 4/6/08