A Disconcerting Flashback
While nostalgia isn't what it used to be, sometimes something occurs which zaps you back to a previous time, place, situation or event which reminds you how far civilisation, if not you, has advanced since then.
Sometimes you realise what has not advanced. Recently, while waiting for the designated hour for my song and dance routine at the state conference of the Australian Property Institute, the assembled mob heard Shane Crockett, head of WA Tourism Commission and a chief pooh-bah in the selection of the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre (PCEC).
We saw colourful PowerPoint slides full of charts and graphs while Shane spoke about the winning Convention Centre bid by the Multiplex consortium - that name does keep popping up as winning the biggest government construction projects around Perth.
What Shane said that zapped my flashback button was a double-whammy statement. First, that he was not going to discuss the selection process used to decide the winning bid, and second, that the only issue of interest to the government was the financial side, not what the building looked like nor how it functioned. Environmental or social factors did not rate a mention, even to be excluded.
This all smacked of the eighties and WA Inc days where government involvement in major projects occurred without public awareness or comment or approval. Ditto PCEC, ditto secrecy.
The second flashback was to the nineties and such globally important achievements as the Kyoto Accord where Australia agreed that world sustainability meant no-one could remain blinkered by believing that only the financial factors of business were important. The notion of the double and triple bottom line, that is the environmental and social bottom lines, having equal if not sometimes greater importance than the pure dollar profit and loss. Slowly but inevitably the industrialised nations are recognising the absolute necessity to factor in environmental and social considerations.
Not so with the WA Government, it would seem - not with the PCEC. And because of the tight secrecy, and because we are now told it is the bucks not the architecture that count, we really don't know what the options have been or now are. We are expected to allow the expenditure of 110 million taxpayer dollars without an informed debate about all the costs and benefits of the PCEC.
City Vision, a group of skilled planners, architects, urban designers who work toward a healthy vibrant Perth, are holding a public open forum on the proposed PCEC, Friday 18th 1pm to 4.30pm at His Majesty's.
Business News 17 August 2000
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