"Forgive my skepticism,
but don't be surprised if it comes as a silly season curtain-raiser, unleashed
for formal public comment in the January festive fog, when the media goes to
sleep and attention is on the cricket and the beach, or when many are away or
enjoying family time with the kids on holiday."
That was my November prediction in this column about the timing
of the State Government's announcement on the future of the Newcastle rail
line.
On cue, less than two weeks before Christmas, the NSW
Minister for Planning, Brad Hazzard, announced the State Government's intention
to cut rail services at Wickham, and released its long-awaited Newcastle Urban
Renewal Strategy, which was placed on exhibition from 14 December until 17
March.
Printed copies of the documents weren't made available to
the public until mid-January. The dates and venues of promised information
workshops on the Strategy still haven't been announced.
Nothing in the strategy's documentation even attempts to explain
or justify the decision to remove rail services between Wickham and Newcastle
stations.
In fact, the support documents for the strategy were clearly
written before the rail decision had been made, and make the point that the
strategies they propose are workable with or without the rail line.
Among these are proposals for more crossings across the line,
which the community has been advocating for many years.
Community groups are already finding extensive errors and
unresolved problems with the strategy.
Among other things, the strategy indicates that passengers
who alight at the new Wickham terminus will face a 200metre walk to the nearest
bus stop (in Hunter St).
Since the release of the strategy, the state government has refused
to rule out suggestions prompted by graphics in the strategy itself that Sydney
trains will have to terminate at Broadmeadow.
They've also refused to say what they intend to do about the
Beaumont St and Railway St level crossings, which previous state government
reports say will have to be cut (for safety reasons) if rail services are cut at
Wickham.
It's hard to fathom how they don't have answers to such
basic questions when they repeatedly assured the community throughout last year
that they were taking so long with the decision on the rail line because they
wanted to make sure they had all the details right!
While the community was waiting and wondering about what the
strategy would propose, the Hunter Development Corporation (for many years the agency
voice of the anti-rail lobby) was being given an inside run on the Project
Steering Committee.
Now, the community gets its input through the submission
process. Submissions close on 17 March.
The Newcastle Urban Strategy is available at: http://www.planning.nsw.gov.
Printed copies (without appendices) are available at the
Department of Planning and Infrastructure's Newcastle office, Level 2, 26
Honeysuckle Drive, Newcastle.
Note: Readers interested in the stockpiling of potentially
explosive ammonium nitrate in Newcastle (the subject of my December column)
might be interested to learn that a new proposal for storing 13,500 tonnes of
ammonium nitrate in Sandgate is now being considered by the NSW Department of
Planning and Infrastructure. This is comparable to the amounts to which my
December column referred.
