Articles : Miscellany

All that remains of that bright, shining dream is a windswept plain where a herd of Mongolian wild horses shelters under the she-oaks, and a 42-year-old Thai elephant called Samorn flaps its ears and peers glumly into the late autumn rain.

Over there, where a bustling business and shopping centre should be, a scimitar-horned oryx is grazing; and the fastest form of transport at the would-be airport is a train of guanacos, South American camels, humping along in the distance.

We are in the middle of South Australian mallee country, an hour's drive east of Adelaide, on the empty, undulating scrub land that stretches from the eastern foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges to the mouth of the mighty Murray River. It is an essential detour on the journey to discover the source of that other, newer urban dream, the Multi-Function Polis.

This is the site of what would have been the jewel in the crown of Labor's population growth strategy of the early 1970s - a brand new city the (then)size of Canberra, 200,000 people living in a space-age technopolis, telecommuting to work from homes powered by the sun and the wind, travelling by driverless cabs on electronic pathways. Sound familiar?

Monarto, it was called officially. Dunstangrad it was derisively nicknamed, after the premier of the day - just as that other ambitious "growth centre"1,000 km closer to the source of the Murray, the border cities of Albury and Wodonga, were once known to one and all as Whitlamabad. Not that either elder statesman would care to be reminded of that now, nearly 20 years on.

Today, even the bullet-riddled signs that once marked the perimeter of this enormous site, 150 sq km of wheat and wool country, pig farms and quarries, have rusted away. At South Monarto there's a one-petrol-pump store, a tennis court and a tin bushfire brigade shed; at North Monarto a sign points to a Baptist church; Monarto itself seems not to exist at all, except as a figment of the imagination of social planners long gone to that great think-tank in the sky.

Even so, this phantom city cost a heap before it was finally abandoned without a yard of concrete being poured - $28 million of public money was spent here during those brief, hectic years when Don Dunstan was presiding in a caftan over the South Australian cabinet, and Gough Whitlam was introducing the Treasury mandarins in Canberra to the joys of Bankcard budgeting. That's$138 million in 1992 dollars, enough to build a dozen schools or a decent hospital.

Some of it went on the army of 70 or so bureaucrats with their cars and clipboards who beavered away for the Monarto Development Commission, as it was called. The bulk was bestowed on the 100 or so local landowners who happily abandoned their pigs and their corn when the com-mission waved its chequebook under their noses. And why not? Twenty years ago $1,350 an acre was a fortune

After barely two years, the public money ran out. The private investment Dunstan was desperate to attract never looked like arriving, and in 1979 the State Government changed and a new Liberal premier named Tonkin took one look at the books and scrapped the project. Monarto had become a "financial millstone around the State's neck", he said, and added with a felicitously fractured metaphor: "It was one of the Dunstan white elephants that went completely off the rails."

The land was mostly sold back to the farmers - all except a few thousand hectares which were given to the Adelaide zoo as a place to breed its Mongolian horses and oryxes, and to retire its lone elephant.

If you ever sought an example of what could go wrong when growth-hungry governments with edifice complexes establish bureaucracies to "challenge the Australian sense of vision", this is the place you should come.

Even Don Dunstan, now living quietly in semi-retirement, agrees that"parallels will inevitably be drawn" between his scheme of a generation ago and its hideously named stepson the MFP, which, after years of lurking on the fringes of public debate, now threatens to come to life less than 100 km away

And this time, if the planners have their way, the cost to the public and private purse of this new Monarto won't be a mere $28 million, it will be $2 billion or more - enough, to put it in perspective, to run the entire State of Tasmania for a year.

The time: one Saturday in 1996. The place: a muddy embankment surround-ed by mangroves and a turbid pond. Bunting flaps overhead. A sign says, "Stunning home sites | Best in Adelaide | Only $100,000 |" The players: A real estate salesman, complete with mous-tache, yellow tie and portable telephone; a young couple with child in tow.

Young Couple: What's that?

Salesman: That's our water-field forest, very proud of that we are ...

YC: No, not the mangroves, THAT (pointing at a reddish slime on the surface of the water).

S: Ah that. That's what we call (lowering his voice) a toxicalgalbloom ... now, over there you will see the fine golf course we are constructing on the site of the urban recycling facility ...

YC: We're not interested in the rubbish tip, what's this toxic whatsit?Does that mean you can't drink it?

S: Not as such, no. And you shouldn't swim in it either. Or boat on it. In fact, don't go anywhere near it.

YC: What are you doing to get rid of it?

S: Well, we are monitoring it, you can be sure of that. Very intensive monitoring. Now then, did I tell you about the interactive fibreOPTICS ... (his voice is drowned out by the roar of a light plane taking off from the nearby Parafield airfield.)

YC: Monitoring what?

S: Nothing to worry about, just a few heavy metals, pesticides, faeces. That sort of thing. All within safe levels, I can assure you. Or they will be, when we have invented the technology to clean it all up.

YC: Safe?

S: Yes. Except for the radiation, of course, and you'll notice we have put a very nice fence around that area ... ah, would you mind telling your child NOT TO DO THAT.

(YC drag child away from a two-metre pipeline he is hammering with a piece of car body.)

YC: What's that?

S: Oh, that's your abundant supply-of-natural-energy-right-at-your-doorstep.

YC: You mean the gas pipeline? Right in our backyard?

S (slightly hysterical): Of course, if you don't like gas, you can always have electricity (he points at the towering pylons carrying 275-kilovolt powerlines overhead).

YC (scurrying back to car): Look, we're not quite sure this is EXACTLY what we were looking for. Not 100 per cent anyway. Perhaps we could think it over...

While it cannot be stated with absolute certainty that the Adelaide suburb of Gillman, 15 km from the centre of that pleasant city, is the worst development site on the surface of planet earth, it cannot be far short of it. If you can picture the pollution of the Ganges, the pestilence of Mexico City and the stinking swamps of the Louisiana bayous, you are getting close.

The site itself, around the estuary of the Port Adelaide River, was cursed by nature even before man came along. It is a tidal no-man's-land of mud, barely above sea-level, with the waves of Gulf St Vincent crashing down on one side, and a poisonous flood of urban stormwater pouring in from the other every time it rains. Even tracts of mangroves have given up the ghost and died.

It wasn't the first choice of the Multi-Function Polis committee - that honour went to a sunny corner of south-east Queensland, close to the ocean and the golf courses. But when that was knocked back by the Goss Government (on the ground that they didn't want to enrich speculators such as Eddie Kornhauser and his mates who had shown great enterprise in buying up the land)Gillman was the second choice. The wonder is that it ever got on the list in the first place.

For more than half a century, Adelaide has treated this blighted landscape as its garbage heap. The environmental impact statement released last year reveals that there is not one but six separate dumps here, some mountains of household rubbish, some lagoons of industrial waste such as the acids used for pickling steel.

This was where the noxious industries were concentrated - the raw hulk of South Australia's second largest power station dominates the landscape, dust from a cement works blows in the breeze, there is the stink of an abattoir, the crash of a railway shunting yard, the roar of a speedway, the pile of car bodies in the yard of the metal recycler. Poisonous chlorine gas is bottled here, out of sight of the good burghers of Adelaide, along with ammonia and sulphur dioxide.

Large areas are contaminated with heavy metals such as copper, zinc, lead, chrome, manganese, nickel and iron to levels above those the SA Health Commission says are "generally accepted levels of concern". And that's not counting the 120 tonnes of uranium ore which is left on the site from the days when a radium treatment works was operating here. It is officially admitted that if anyone wants to grow vegetables in their backyard, they would be wise to dig lime into the soil to avoid being poisoned by their carrots and broccoli.

The stormwater which flows on to the site carries astonishing levels of faecal coliforms (sewage residue which indicates the presence of dangerous pathogens) which have been monitored at 100,000 per 100 millilitres - this is more than 3,000 times the level the NSW Health Department says is safe.

The river estuary itself is so polluted that algal blooms and "red tides"of minute poisonous organisms make its reeking reaches "dangerous to human health for four to six months of every year", according to the environmental study. Even the air people breathe is heavily polluted with dust and smoke, fluorides, formaldehydes, nitrous oxide and cadmium-laden dust.

Hardly surprisingly, local residents groups (such as CHOKE, Concern for Health and Our Kids' Environment) have been complaining for years that their neighbourhood is literally killing them ... and surveys bear this out. The incidence of bronchitis, emphysema and asthma in Gillman is rampant, and deaths from some kinds of cancer, particularly lung cancer, are 67 per cent higher than in the rest of SA.

And, as if all this were not enough, the local Kaurna Aborigines claim that there are heritage sites in here among the muck somewhere.

This, then, is the site chosen for the MFP, Australia's city of the future, which will "reflect Colonel Light's vision of Adelaide set in parklands ... awake to the social and economic needs of the next century", if you believe the South Australian Government's sales pitch. To most people who have visited the place, it looks more like the crime scene of a particularly ghastly act of ecocide.

Rod Keller clenches his fists and sticks out his chin. "I have explained this 30 times before," he says - a favourite phrase which recurs throughout the interview. "This is going to be a viable proposition. We have done the numbers. The reports are here ..."

Reports there are, all right. Tonnes of them, full of pretty sketches and colourful graphs. Shelves of them, lining the board-room of the handsome offices of the Multi-Function Polis secretariat which occupies the top floor of Adelaide's new Myer centre, overlooking the dirty dribble of the Torrens River, and dec-orated with ceramic logos designed by Ken Cato ("Australia's foremost cor-porate identity architect," explains an awed official).

Four years might have gone by without one contract being signed, one brick being laid on another, but the MFP has proved to be a bonanza for one sector of the Australian economy - the consultancy industry. More than 150 companies, experts in everything from the biology of the Western king prawn to the economics of optical fibre technology, have had a piece of the action. The key feasibility study, by the South Australian con-struction companies Kinhill and Delfin, cost more than $1 million, and is so massive no-one is quite sure whether it is 12 or 14 volumes long.

Rod Keller is the fifth person to head the MFP team since it was formed in 1988, but the problems he faces are the same as his predecessors' -principally, in spite of the mountain of consultants' studies, a lack of credibility. No-one yet has any idea what "a kind of hothouse of cerebral activity on a global scale" is, let alone "a biosphere which would become a hub for an international management industry" to cite just a couple of the more flatulent-ly florid descriptions of the MFP. Nor does anyone know for sure what the MFP will cost, who will pay for it and what, if anything, it will contribute to Australia.

The idea grew, as is by now well known, from a suggestion made by Japan's Minister in charge of MITI - that country's trade and industry ministry - at an inter-government meeting in January 1987, and it was enthusiastically taken up by Federal Industry Minister John Button, who has been indefatigably throwing money and manpower at it ever since. "The MFP is an exciting project, a rare example of Australians planning ahead to grasp and control the future for the benefit of the nation," he said as recently as two years ago.

Precisely what the Japanese originally had in mind - apart from building a bargain holiday and retirement centre near a beach somewhere - is difficult to follow, unless you are, like Professor Gavan McCormack of the Australian National University's school of Pacific studies, both a Japanese scholar and the author of a book on the MFP (obscurely called Bonsai Australia Banzai).

McCormack, who is currently in Japan completing a year's study at Kyoto University, thinks it may actually all have begun with a dreadful misunderstanding. "I think that the Australians got the idea that the Japanese regarded Australia as so important to them that they should bring technologies to us and invest - and that MITI had the power and the will to make this happen. That simply wasn't the case."

His studies of Japanese source materials, and his discussions with MITI officials, certainly indicate that building a string of villages in the mangrove swamps of Adelaide was not high on Japan's list of priorities. Their initial proposals included mining Australian rare minerals and creating an artificial mountain 2.1 km high with a railway line up the side, which would be used to catapult spaceships into orbit.

According to McCormack, right from the start the MFP was a government-driven project. "The only Japanese companies which were keen were bank-ing, real estate and tourism," he says. "The others had to be dragged kicking and screaming into it. For our government it became an investment cargo-cult, whereas for the Japanese Australia was simply not important enough to be part of their global strategy."

And, of course, the past four years have shown him to be right. In spite of all the hype from Senator Button, in spite of the promotions and the dozens of junkets to Europe and Asia over the years, not one red yen (or franc or dollar) from business has yet been committed. Nor will one be for many years, if ever, if you listen to the Japanese.

Indeed, the only company which has made any sort of commitment is BHP, which has announced it will build some sort of research facility somewhere at Gillman some time. Curiously, Australia's largest company says it has not yet decided what sort of research will be done, what it will cost, when it will be built or what the benefits will be to the company's shareholders.

As for the Japanese, last December a delegation of 50 of that country's business heavyweights visited the MFP site, and went back to Tokyo to write a report. Only the executive summary of this report was released in English - an anodyne version put out by the Aus- tralian Embassy. Until the other day, when Good Weekend had other sections translated in detail, even Will Bailey - the ANZ Bank chief executive and co-chairman of the MFP's international committee- had not even read it.

Although the language may be mild by the robust standards of Australian debate, McCormack says, "The report is astoundingly frank, brutally frank, coming as it does from some of Japan's leading industrialists and bankers. I can understand why the Australian officials would want to play it down, but this report is a no - no investment until Australia has got its act together, as far as the infrastructure is concerned."

Here are some of the comments:

"MFP is supposedly a federal project, however, as yet, no definite assistance plan has been submitted by either a State or federal body ... all the other States seem to be busy developing their own plans." - Toshikuni Yahiro, Mitsui.

"Frankly speaking, I expected to see a definite, ready-made plan for the MFP project while I was in Australia (but) no development plans have been decided on yet (and) I was afraid that in the end the Japanese corporations may find Mel-bourne or Sydney more attractive." - Tetsuo Nakatani, Kamija Construction.

"There are lots of unknown factors ... such as how much it will cost to acquire the land, how will energy be provided, what will be the means of communication, how will the workforce be developed, and so on. Australia must find the answers to such questions and provide the necessary information before they attempt to attract foreign capital." - Tochiharu Kodama, MITI.

So, what will it take to turn this toxic wasteland into a basic building site? The long answer is decontamination, building an enormous dyke - three metres high and 10 or 15 kilometres long - to keep out the sea, diverting the storm-water, shifting 30 million tonnes of soil to create lakes and canals and islands above water-level, inventing the tech-nologies to stop the foundations being eaten away by sulphuric acid and the waterways choked with poisonous algae ... and servicing all this with sewers, water, electricity, phone-lines and roads.

The short answer is $882 million. Just to get a quarter of the land, 500 hectares or so, fit to build on. The rest of the MFP is beyond reclamation -it will be left to the waterways, and the parks where only salt-loving scrubbery such as samphire will grow, and "urban forests" where they will do their best to replant the mangroves killed by pollution.

Rod Keller draws the figure in blue crayon on the whiteboard. He writes another number underneath - $251 million. That's how much the govern-ments, State and Federal, will have to come up with. The other $631 million - that will come from "the private sector", he says. He underlines the numbers. He taps them with his crayon. They now have a reality of their own. They must be true.

Over four years of debate, the only real criticisms of the MFP that have bi tten (apart, of course, from the fundamental issue of what it actually is)have been those of the environment lobby (it is claimed the work will upset the mating habits of the King George whiting), and of commentators such as Bruce Ruxton of the RSL who, with his customary racial sensitivity, dubbed it"Jap City". Until now, there has been no critical analysis of the economics of the thing.

With the exception of a token $10,000 each contributed by the 160 or so Australian and Japanese companies which signed up for the MFP committee, all the money so far has come from taxpayers. This is in spite of vehement assurances from day one by Senator Button, Will Bailey and others that, "We have to work out how we can finance it, govern it and make it happen without a drain on the public purse."

That is not how it has worked out. A highly conservative estimate of the cost to the public to date is $25 million. This does not cover any work on the site - it pays only for the 20-strong MFP secretariat in Adelaide, for consultants, for the estab-lishment of an MFP bureaucracy within Senator Button's department in Canberra and for overseas promotional costs, such as the trips of the international secretariat.

But Senator Button's man minding the shop in Adelaide, a bureaucrat named David McCarthy, shows how rubbery these figures are when he reveals that the MFP is also aiming to obtain allocations from the budgets of the departments of the environment, education and energy. "If we are successful in carving out a slice of what goes out in the forthcoming budget, it could be another $10 million or so over the next four to five years," he says with a measure of pride.

That will be peanuts alongside the allocation of $40 million announced by Prime Minister Paul Keating in the One Nation economic statement. That money represents nearly half the total amount allocated to South Australia under the Better Cities program - and councils from Noarlunga to Port Adelaide are screaming that the millions would be better spent fixing up their immediate problems with sewerage and roads than draining a swamp at Gillman.

And even this will be dwarfed if no private investor can be persuaded to come to the party - and there are compelling reasons why a private devel-oper would run a mile rather than get involved in a highly speculative venture such as this, deep in the swamps of Gillman. If this is the case, the govern-ments will have the choice of pulling the plug on the project (and writing off that$25 million) or ploughing on with an open-ended commitment to spend $1 billion or more of public money.

The eventual plan is to construct a small city, interspersed with commercial sites, educational centres, high-tech research facilities and all the Buck Rogers mumbo-jumbo we have been hearing about for the past few years. At least, the "world university" and the bizarre plan to make Gillman an HDTV(high definition television) broadcasting centre to cover Asia appear to have bitten the dust.

Just what it will actually look like remained even more of a mystery when the architect, Lionel Glendenning, gave an interview in which he was quoted as saying, "It's going to be an urban city (sic), a set of villages, the sort of place where you go around the corner to buy a cappuccino. It will be a slice of a city like Venice, Paris or parts of Sydney (with) people living above pastry shops. We have turned the project on its head. Now we are creating an urban experience that gives everybody the opportunity to gain access to the Arcadian dream."

Be that as it may, the only source of income (other than the taxpayer) the MFP authority will have to actually build this dream is the sale of land -land on which houses and blocks of flats to accommodate a population of 40,000 will be built (the polis), and land on which those beloved high-tech businesses will be established (the multi function). Unfortunately, a quick scribble on the back of an envelope illustrates a major flaw.

It will cost a developer (if the MFP's figures are right, and at least one consultant has commented on the "highly speculative" nature of some of their calculations) $600 million to develop the site - that's if the Government provides the land for nothing and charges nothing for the $250 million of services that will have to be put on. That comes to more than $1 million a hectare, or close to $100,000 for a standard building block.

Now, this is Adelaide, remember, the capital of low-cost housing. A typical serviced block in a new outer suburb costs $15,000 to $20,000. You can get a two-bedroom apartment in a bayside suburb, or a nice little freestone cottage in leafy Malvern for $100,000. For that, in Gillman, you get a bare block next door to a rubbish dump, gas pipeline, toxic bloom etc.

The equation is starker when you con-sider commercial land. Less than a kilo-metre away from Gillman is Adelaide's Technology Park, a development next to the University of South Australia, which has over the past decade attracted about 50 high-tech companies, just the sort the MFP is looking for. If anyone is thinking of investing in Adelaide, it would be happy to sell a hectare of land, fully serviced, for just $350,000, a third the cost of reclaimed land at Gillman.

Even Will Bailey acknowledges the difficulty in making the numbers add up. "The coming months are critical," he says. "Enthusiasm is no longer enough. It has got to be based on substance and fact. I am a disciple, but I am also a rationalist and a banker, and if at the end of the day it's not bankable, then that's that."

The question is, has anyone told the politicians, the bureaucrats and the social planners? You have only to look at South Australia's original pitch for the MFP to see where they are really coming from: "Ultimately, the economics of the MFP stand or fall not on the commercial assessments of private sector participants ... but on the size of net public sector spillover benefits, and the corresponding willingness of the Australian and overseas public sectors to fund relevant aspects ..." Pity no-one told the taxpayers.

Ian McLachlan, the Federal Opposi-tion's industry spokesman, chooses his words cautiously. He doesn't want anything he says to be taken as knocking development, or discouraging investment.

His attitude - and that of the South Australian Liberals who, after some ritual harrumphing, have voted in favour of legislation setting up the MFP authority - is at best ambivalent. The local media - and, in particular, the city's only newspaper, the Advertiser - have also been giving the MFP a soft, uncritical ride.

In fact, the only effective opposition has come from Mike Elliott, one of the two Democrats who hold the balance in that State's Upper House. "It's very dangerous to even question development in this State. It's like a holy grail,"he says.

For Premier John Bannon, the MFP is very much the last hurrah, says Elliott. He is languishing in the polls after two by-election defeats which saw Labor's vote driven below that of the Democrats; he is blamed for the State's cruel 12 per cent unemployment, the highest in Australia; and he is shortly to be grilled by a royal commission on what he knew, and when, about the multi-billion dollar collapse of the SA State Bank. The MFP is his "last hope of re-election", according to Mike Elliott.

The only other high-profile critic that Adelaide has thrown up is John Harwood, an articulate reader in English at the University of South Australia

He believes the Gillman site is so irreparably polluted that the MFP will never be built. "The whole thing is a ridiculous con, but no-one wants to point out the fact that the emperor has no clothes," he says ."There is no high-tech, no Japanese investment. All we are left with is a government-subsidised real estate scam. I have always run the argument that, sooner or later, the taxpayer is going to cop it in the neck."

Or, as he put it in an article in the Adelaide Review: "(The economist)John Maynard Keynes, who argued that governments should spend their way out of recessions, once suggested hiding banknotes in abandoned coalmines for the unemployed to find. Burying money in a swamp at Gillman would certainly be an interesting variation."

But why resort to fiction when an hour's drive away at Monarto you can visit the fact - the elephant, the oryxes, the little groves of she-oak trees, the last resting place of tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money which, just a generation ago, was supposed to build another city in another wilderness?