Fighting for St Kilda Rd

Meet the people fighting on behalf of Southbank and the entire St Kilda Rd precinct to protect our city’s most revered boulevard.

When completed in 2025, the Metro Rail Tunnel will provide a much-needed link from North Melbourne and Parkville through the city directly to Southbank and St Kilda Rd via the new Anzac Station at the Domain Interchange.

There is no one who doubts the value that the $11 billion project will add to Melbourne’s status as the world’s most liveable city.

The same goes for the founders of Save St Kilda Road, Marilyn Wane and David McGowan. Like everyone, the Wells St residents are very much in favour of the vital infrastructure project – just not the way it is being carried out.

Following the release of the Melbourne Metro Rail Authority’s (MMRA) environmental effects statement (EES) in 2016, they were alarmed by some of the impacts the project was proposing on the local area.

This included the removal of over 200 trees, major traffic changes, the new station’s design and a raft of environmental impacts that they argue could have been mitigated with better planning.

“This is 10 years of nightmares,” Ms Wane said. “We’re not opposed to the railway. We’re very clear about that but there was a better way to do it. They didn’t want to do that.”

“What we decided, in conjunction with experts, was that we would like to have the same construction method as they were doing in the city but the method they have taken is more convenient and cheaper for them.”

After engaging a qualified engineer and tunneling expert, the group called on the MMRA to reconsider its design and take the tunnel deeper underground in order to spare trees and prevent tram and traffic changes. Residents of Southbank have already been feeling the effects of road closures in the area.

The group tabled a petition to parliament in 2017 with more than 10,000 signatures. However, after experiencing what it described as the MMRA’s “divide and conquer” strategy to community consultation, they soon realised they were on a “hiding to nothing”.

“I think their view on communication is ‘let’s not get too many people involved’,” Mr McGowan said. “One of the features of the open sessions is that they shutdown the public part in asking questions because that just gets too difficult.”

A MMRA spokesperson told Southbank Local News that a deeper Anzac Station would add 30 seconds travel time between the surface and platforms, which would undermine the project’s fast and seamless train-tram interchange.

The MMRA refuted claims that it hadn’t engaged community, with the spokesperson stating that it had consulted extensively on the station’s design, construction, as well as traffic management.

Ms Wane and Mr McGowan said the only success the group had managed so far had been reducing the number of trees being removed by around half. However, with the MMRA and state government pushing full steam ahead with the project in its current form, they said they were saddened by the fact that they would not see St Kilda Rd return to its former glory during their lifetime.

“We’re beyond saving it. Now it’s more about managing the impacts,” Ms Wane said. “Save St Kilda Road’s function has always been to tell it like it really is as opposed to the mumbo jumbo that Metro put out. Now when there is something happening I’m posting about it and it’s about keeping people informed.”

Locals can stay up to date by following Save St Kilda Road on Facebook and Twitter or by visiting savestkildaroad.org