How can the Australian Taxation Office as a public institution, play a pivotal role in a project which is about to plonk a vast private office tower in the middle of Adelaide’s only civic plaza? A tax tower on the city square sounds like a joke, but this is deadly serious.

The proposed occupation of Adelaide’s Festival Plaza Tower 2 by the Australian Taxation Office as anchor tenant is the pivotal act that could enable the most damaging urban development outcome in Adelaide’s history.

• ·The development is a public-private project which has taken the most intensely civic space in the city and, amazingly, handed it for exclusive private use to a major Sydney developer
  
  
• on a 100-year lease of $1 per year for a hundred years, 
  
  
• How can the Australian Tax Office as a public institution, be involved when there are such other huge issues of process raised by both the state’s Auditor General and the Ombudsman as documented here.

This space, Festival Plaza, immediately behind Parliament House, was promised to the city as a renovated low-rise civic square— a place of sunlight, accessibility, culture and fun. A huge office tower is the complete opposite of this. The community has been betrayed by its government.

• By being involved, the ATO risks becoming the decisive force that transforms this apparently struggling public-private development proposal into a permanent and deeply destructive reality for South Australia’s civic heart.

The Australian Taxation Office, as a public institution, should not become the commercial rescuer of a project that is so clearly is contrary to the public interest.

This petition calls on the Australian Government and the Australian Taxation Office to

•  reject any tenancy arrangement within Festival Plaza Tower 2, 

       and

•  support the South Australian State Government in finding an alternative solution* that augments Adelaide’s identity, heritage, public realm and democratic legacy. 

PLEASE SUPPORT US BY SIGNING OUR PETITION

* One of which might be the ‘Move It Mali’ option of moving development to the
   Victoria Square precinct where there is end-of-life government buildings.