Councillor Chris Harris

Liberal Councillor Shayne Mallard is a big fan of Twitter - he posted 15 times during this week’s Council committee meetings.  Two of those posts in particular caught my eye because they included a couple of unfair comments about the Greens:

http://twitter.com/ShayneMallard/status/14604440665

http://twitter.com/ShayneMallard/status/14604681033

Below is a media release I sent out today responding to Councillor Mallards comments. 

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City of Sydney Councillor Chris Harris has rejected criticism of the Greens by Liberal Councillor Shayne Mallard as “Typical of the simplistic spin of his party ” following two updates Clr Mallard posted to his Twitter account during Council Committee meetings on Monday 24th May.

Clr Harris  “Clr Mallard accused the Greens of being anti-corporation after we raised concerns about Council paying fifteen thousand dollars to sign up to ‘Lightsavers’, which is an energy efficiency program that monitors the use of LED street lights and is part of an organisation called ‘The Climate Group’. The Greens expressed concerns about aligning themselves to some corporations, that are current members of The Climate Group and have operations with a poor environmental record.

“To say we’re anti-corporation is nonsense.  The Greens are happy to work with corporations that are taking active steps to reduce carbon emissions and to act as good environmental citizens. Some of the corporate members of the Climate Group however are about as far from being responsible as you can get.”

One member of The Climate Group is Duke Energy which owns and operates 20 coal fired power stations in the USA and is America’s third largest green house gas emitter.  Duke Energy has spent years and countless millions of dollars fighting the US Environmental Protection Agency in court, trying to argue legal loopholes to allow themselves to continually increase carbon emissions.

Another member is BP, which, at the same time Clr Mallard was Tweeting in its defence, was busy spilling millions of litres of oil into the Gulf of Mexico each day.  They have refused to permit scientists to carry out detailed analyses of exactly how much oil is spilling – choosing to protect their own reputation and financial interests instead of helping to find ways to stop this tragedy.

Cr Harris: “We don’t want to hop into bed with Duke Energy and BP and so we raised very legitimate concerns about the membership of The Climate Group -  City of Sydney staff are looking into the issues that I have raised. If it turns out that ‘Lightsavers’ is genuinely independent from the The Climate Group then we may support the City of Sydney joining up. If that is not the case then I will oppose spending the $15000 on membership. I’d rather use the money on some extra highly efficient LED street lights.

Clr Harris pointed out that his reservations about joining the group were not just ideological.  “The Climate Group accepts money from Duke Energy, BP and many others in the form of membership fees.” said Harris.  “When you’re funded by a company it’s in your interests to keep that company happy, otherwise you risk losing your funding.  The existence of these corporations on the membership register of The Climate Group casts doubts over its effectiveness in pursuing real climate solutions.

“On a final note I wonder if Cr Mallard was even paying any attention at committee. His website shows that he sent 15 twitter messages during the committee session. It seems unlikely that he had time to make any contribution to the debate.”

The NSW government have decided to add insult to the injury that was the failed CBD Metro by refusing to release 45 boxes of documents relating to land acquisitions and planning decisions carried out for the project.  After wasting half a billion dollars of taxpayers money on the cancelled project the government are trying to hide behind spurious claims of “commercial in-confidence” to avoid further embarrassment.

My Greens colleague in state Parliament Lee Rhiannon has been pursuing the government over this matter and recently former Chief Justice Sir Laurence Street, the independent legal arbiter appointed to determine this matter, issued a report supporting her position.  The report concludes that the majority of the documents the government wishes to keep secret either contain no information that needs to be legally privileged or can be easily edited to remove confidential information such as contact details of individuals or financial information about private businesses.

Justice Street’s conclusion leads me to wonder what the government is so keen to hide in these documents.  I suspect that they want to avoid embarrassment over a poorly structured planning process that worked in reverse of the way these things should.  Rather than plan a Metro because they had carried out a thorough investigation of transport problems in the area and found this to be the best solution they simply determined that they wanted a Metro and then went about trying to find justifications for the decision. 

In the end the government was unable to find the justification it needed for its Metro plan and was forced to scrap it, but not until it had wasted hundreds of millions on planning, publicity and administration.  Even the communities that might have gained some small benefit out of it realised that spending $5.3 billion on a disconnected 7km dead-end rail line in inner Sydney was an appalling waste of money.  It was enough money to fully fund heavy rail connections to the north-west and south west of Sydney that would have made a vastly larger contribution to improving transport across the greater metropolitan area. Plus the leftover funds would have built a significant light rail system in the City and the Inner West

It will also be interesting to see what these documents tell us about the persistent rumour of a secret deal between the State Government and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore.  While I have seen no evidence of a deal as such I was disappointed, along with many other members of the community, at the Lord Mayor’s reluctance to give the Metro the criticism it was due.  Perhaps she was simply so dazzled by her desire for the upgrades of Town Hall Square that would have accompanied the Metro that she was unable to see how flawed the project as a whole was.

Whatever the case may be, it is now incumbent upon the government to take the advice of the independent arbiter and release the majority of the documents on the CBD Metro.  In the interests of maintaining a transparent democracy and learning from this costly mistake – which cost taxpayers half a billion dollars yet produced no tangible outcomes – I very much look forward to these papers seeing the light of day.     

Image of the Montreal Metro by Denis Jacquerye, use authorised under Creative Commons.  While this image is indicative of what a Metro looks like, the CBD Metro would have never seen such a high level of patronage.  For further information on the campaign by Lee Rhiannon to have these documents released see her letter to the Clerk of the NSW Legislative Assembly requesting they be released as well as Justice Streets report.