Thank you for a marvellous group effort in making submissions to the Commonwealth’s Review of the Tax Office’s move to Festival Plaza! We had nearly 120 submissions in that two-day window of time! Let’s see what comes out of it!
As a followup, we have the opportunity for up to four of us to present to that Commonwealth Public Works committee in Melbourne next Wed 8th July, at 9.00. 

Otherwise, if you could contribute financial support for this exercise it would be very much appreciated, details are below.

Here is the STOP THE CHOP paper petition for download. Please gather as many names as you can. The tower is very much a Park Lands issue and we are all working together as much as possible to defeat this scourge of clumsy and intolerant governance.

Please also sign our second digital petition No Plaza Tax tower. It needs serious attention.

And please read on if you want the full story to where we currently are at.

WHERE WE SIT

 We’ve spent time on the committee discussing why we bother to continue when there is much activity on the site.
The full story is that critical approvals are still lacking, and there is clearly a lack of a large commercial tenant - except for the Australian taxpayer via the ATO - and that is under review. A normal commercial build usually starts when all approvals are in place, and 70% or so of tenancies are let, so that the bank is prepared to release finance.

So the sight of work being done on the site is an exemplar of exactly the thing that we are fighting against, which is the highly questionable conduct of this whole project by our state government.
This is NOT essentially a planning issue, it’s a matter of governance and probity and our basic right to have some sort of a dialogue with government. It’s our state and our money, and something is very seriously wrong. The illustration at the top shows the seven pages of issues raised by the Auditor General and the Ombudsman, and other sources.
An unneeded skyscraper full of public servants occupying what was to be our plaza, with the taxpayer paying millions more than necessary per annum is scarcely an economic achievement. It sounds like the stuff of comedy. But that is highly likely - with no disrespect to public servants!

From 2013 onward this has been an extremely questiionable project which, incredibly, started with no open tender on the $2 billion dollar project, secret meetings with the developer, lack of documentation of key decisions, no probity controls, and many other highly questionable process issues.
It has been the Malinauskas government though, which took the 3 storey building proposed and approved (alongside the pre-existing 28 storey tower 1), and which would have been a reasonable solution, and inexplicably lifted its height to a punishing 38 storeys, accompanied by incomprehensible explanations, and manipulation of the planning system, and questionable influence on SCAP, and a derisory attitude towards its citizens.

The central issue is the gifting of public space for exclusive private use on terms so ruinous that, not only did the government receive nothing for the land, but taxpayers have also been left subsidising a structure that was never needed. To help make the project viable, the Tax Office has effectively been enlisted as an anchor tenant, relocating from its near-new central city offices to the remote and less accessible plaza at enormous fit-out expense and, quite possibly, substantial ongoing rental cost to taxpayers. It is a true debacle.

What might have been the city’s cash cow bringing in tens of millions per year, as a regenerated plaza, has been sold off for nothing, but the state has to keep subsidising it in the form of premium rents for any government agency that moves in. This does not make sense.
The government has done a deal which defeats the city’s best interests, not least because it will expose us to ridicule. And the ATO move caps it all off!

Best-of submissions:

Here’s land economist Geoff Hayter’s submission, some have asked for his speech at the Franklin St gathering, this one is much the same.

Cultural figure Liz Ho's excellent submission.

And here is that of civil engineer Adj Prof David Ness, of part of his PhD of some years ago, that shows that the Tax Office has a history of choices that are expensive and destructive in a town of this size.

Very best, and a big thank you,

Rob, for the Alliance

Robert Farnan
Convenor | Save Festival Plaza Alliance
O435007799
Savefestivalplaza@gmail.com
savefestivalplaza.net

Fighting Fund:
805 007 CUSCAL
00331035 Save Festival Plaza Alliance Robert Fa