Make Melbourne Green

Above: coloured cardboard and butchers paper aplenty at Bronwyn Pike’s electorate office, 27/8/08.

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What you didn’t know about the State Government’s Victorian Transport Plan:

- ‘Public’ consultation has already closed!
- $10bn East-West Road Tunnel to be automatically adopted by the plan.

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Melburnians woke yesterday morning to a curious piece in The Age, Tunnel critics shunned by Pike transport forum, by Clay Lucas.

CRITICS of a $9 billion road tunnel plan have been barred from a Government forum this afternoon to discuss transport plans for Melbourne …

Opponents of the proposed 18-kilometre tollway, which would run from Footscray to Clifton Hill, have been told they cannot attend today’s forum, being staged by the Education Minister and MP for Melbourne, Bronwyn Pike.

That the government might be fed up with anti-tunnel protests is not surprising. What was surprising was that a transport forum for the state seat of Melbourne was being held at all: transport experts and activists alike knew nothing of the meeting until Residents’ Groups received their invitations a week earlier.

What was even more surprising was the forum itself. A mere 20 people gathered at the invitation-only event, and quickly discovered that they were taking part in what would be the first and only consultation session for the whole of the Melbourne electorate for the development of the state government’s Victorian Transport Plan.

The two farcical hours that ensued could have been lifted straight from a script of The Hollowmen.

Click ‘read more’ for an insight into the meeting from one of the attendees, and discover why the $10bn East-West Road Tunnel will be automatically adopted by the Victorian Transport Plan, as well as the unique definition of ‘community consultation’, according to the State Government…

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The Victorian Transport Plan (VTP)

The Victorian Government is developing a ‘comprehensive transport plan’ for the state (yep, another one) to be launched in November. Consultation for the plan comes in the form of the 2,200 Eddington Report submissions, plus the feedback from eight ‘Transport Round Tables’ and smaller ‘Transport Forums’ conducted by local members, and a state-wide ‘Transport Summit’ (reference). The date for the event (Minister Pike: “what are we calling it again? A Convention?” Adviser: “um… it’s a Summit”. Cue Rob Sitch) to be announced - Minister Pike hinted that the event will take place on September 5th at the Telstra Dome.

So, unless you made a submission to the Eddington Report during its 15-week public consultation period, you won’t be having your say on the state-wide VTP. Unless you were one of the select few that received an invitation to a Transport Round Table or Transport Forum, of course. Eddington Review submission-writers are the lucky few!

Their contributions, though focusing on only one part of the state’s transport network, will be much more valuable than anything taken from the Transport Round Tables or Forums, if Wednesday’s meeting at Minister Pike’s office was anything to go by.

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Melbourne Transport Forum 27/8 - Minister Bronwyn Pike’s electorate office, North Melbourne

With butchers paper and coloured cardboard to spare, 20 invitees, with not one transport expert or trader present, sat down as representatives of the communities within the electorate of Melbourne. Community groups were refused invitations, as were individual members of the public.

But no matter, “Ms Pike said she had invited a cross-section of the community to the forum.”

After some brief introductions, the afternoon’s business consisted of three activities, where attendees split into working groups. The first session required groups to come up with one ‘big question’ for the minister to answer about the Transport Plan. The second session required groups to come up with what they thought were the ‘five biggest transport problems that Melbourne is facing’ (with different coloured cardboard for each). The final session required groups to come up with solutions to the five biggest problem areas as determined by the meeting facilitator (after the coloured cardboard pieces were collected and bundled). After each session, groups reported back to the facilitator and brief questions were asked.

Just what other attendees thought of the process I can’t be sure of, but it would hardly be shocking to suggest that the vast majority of attendees, sitting councillors and a former acting CEO of Melbourne City Council included, found the entire process juvenile in the extreme.

The farcical nature of the meeting really kicked in at 6.15pm - the close of the ’solutions’ workshop, which had begun at 6.02pm. That’s thirteen minutes!

Thirteen was the grand total number of minutes of direct community consultation towards solutions for Victorias transport problems for the electorate of Melbourne.

For those amongst us who hadn’t quite figured out what was going on by then, it quickly became clear: why would you call a ‘community consultation’ Transport Forum meeting at the last minute, if it was only ever going to be a half-hearted attempt to appease Residents’ Groups and contain only 13 minutes of time devoted to seeking solutions to transport problems? Simple! Because then you can say that the community has been consulted! It doesn’t matter that there was nothing of substance: technically, consultation had taken place.

And it gets even better than that: the workshops were so shallow and short, with such vague conclusions, that the Government is free to pick its own narrative and make its own claims of what the results of the meetings were without being in danger of being, well, wrong. Our meeting apparently picked ‘Climate Change’, ‘Freight’, ‘Public Transport’, ‘Population’ and ‘Liveability’ as the five problem areas, before diving into 13 minutes to find solutions to all five. But ‘liveability’ was the facilitator’s word, and didn’t originate within the group of invitees. Is it too cynical to bet that ‘liveability’ is going to become the binding buzz word for the November release of the plan? Watch this space!

The interesting question now is: how long will it be before Bronwyn Pike tells a reporter that her Transport Forum, complete with 13 minutes of in-depth solution-finding, is proof that she’s consulted her community?

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What part will Eddington play in the VTP?

The words Minister Pike used to describe the way the VTP was being formed were similar to recent rhetoric from the Premier: the Eddington Report will be a starting point for the development of the plan, and its independence and extensive public consultation necessarily means that it will be an important and core part of any plan.

That the minister would use this same language with meeting guests, given the political climate of her own electorate and its resoundingly anti-Eddington sentiment, was a slight surprise. When pressed further and asked “does this mean that the East-West road tunnel will automatically form part of the Victorian Transport Plan”, the minister understandably wouldn’t give an answer in the affirmative, but her answer, which reiterated that Eddington made many recommendations and that the plan would be a state-wide plan and so on, did not satisfactorily deny that the tunnel would be automatically adopted by the VTP either.

Given the half-hearted nature of the regional Transport Round Tables and localised Transport Forums, compared with the expensive and extensive Eddington Report, one would have to strongly suspect that the state-wide Transport Round Tables and Forums were devised to show that ‘further consultation’ had been undertaken, but that the East-West road tunnel will still be ‘necessary’.

The Footscray Round Table meeting was staunchly pro-freeways, with just a few known tunnel opponents being invited. It might end up being that the Melbourne Transport Forum, and possibly also the Moreland/Yarra Transport Forum will be the only meetings with vague ‘no freeways please’ outcomes. And that’s despite anti-tunnel community groups being barred from Minister Pike’s meeting.

It is likely then that the minister is gradually preparing herself for the November unveiling (before or after the state-wide municipal elections we wonder!) of the Victorian Transport Plan, complete with a tolled freeway road tunnel underneath her electorate.

Not the most comfortable position to be in, certainly, but if the minister wants to finally take a stand and join with the resounding anti-tunnel sentiment found within the people of her electorate, and represent her electorate as accurately as she can, she has less than three months to move away from her current position, which is the epitome of fence-sitting (see her Eddington Report submission here).

Cartoon: Melbourne Times, 23/7/08