OUR NEW PETITION AS OF JUNE 6:

No Tax Office Tower on Adelaide’s Festival Plaza. It’s our city square!

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.

This ridiculous outcome is the final mini scandal in a series of scandals as outlined here. Please read if you can.

How can the ATO 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. 

As revealed in the document, it gets even worse.

•   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 one dollar per year,
  
  
• The Australian Tax Office as a public institution, cannot be involved when there are such 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 completely betrayed by its government.

• By being involved, the ATO is becoming the decisive force that transforms this apparently struggling public-private development proposal of no civic use into a permanent and deeply destructive reality for South Australia’s civic heart.

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

•   Permanently takes the plaza away from full community use and enjoyment - and economic benefit
  
  
•  Takes tenants, like the 2,000 ATO workers, from the CBD, impacting the city’s daytime vibrancy, and emptying buildings, and
  
  
•  Wrecks the centre of the city by destroying its welcoming scale and style: making the central focus of the whole city this overwhelming structure of no civic utility
  
  
• Belittles South Australia’s world-famous National Heritage Parliament House, the global birthplace of full political rights for women, including the right both to vote, and to stand for Parliament

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

•  reject any tenancy arrangement within Festival Plaza Tower 2, 
  
  
• support the South Australian State Government in finding an alternative solution* that augments Adelaide’s identity, heritage, public realm and democratic legacy. 
  
  
• put an immediate stop on the lower level construction work  and conduct a full national public enquiry such as a Royal Commission to discover how this project, affecting a national heritage asset of international significance, has gone so seriously wrong.

PLEASE SUPPORT US BY SIGNING THIS PETITION -  and joining our main mailing list at SaveFestivalPlaza@gmail.com

* One option 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.

SaveFestivalPlaza.net
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Mockup to approximate scale showing Tower 2, with existing Tower 1 on the left