The owners of these expensive Pier South apartments now fast taking shape at Mirvac’s Waterfront project at Teneriffe will have exclusive views to the Brisbane River - at a very high cost.
While they are paying tens and tens of thousands of dollars more for that privacy, the cost to Brisbane citizens is also high. A year or so from now, they’ll be diverted away from their river, forced to go inland behind Pier South through parkland before rejoining the riverfront.
Buyers of apartments at the not-so-exclusive Pier North (bottom photo ) will have to put up with the sights and sounds of fellow humans having fun. For that terrible, terrible burden, their units are much, much cheaper.
We have no beef with Mirvac who it would appear has deliberately privatised a key section of the waterfront to maximise its income from unit buyers.
You can’t blame them for trying that on. But we’d like to blame someone for the fact that they got away with it. The trouble is no-one seems to want to put up their hand and take the blame for it happening in the first place.
And certainly no-one seems to want to ensure it never happens again.
The Independent can reveal that unnamed council officials gave the Mirvac plan their tick of approval, with our expert source telling us that the project was presented to them in such a way that those officials accepted the argument that RiverWalk simply could not be constructed in front of Pier South.
We repeat what we’ve said on this issue in the past: we congratulate Mirvac on the amount of parkland it has incorporated into the project. But we can’t help but feel that the fancy jetty to the left of the project, and the generous parkland and lake feature behind the Pier buildings, was all part of a master plan to get riverfront exclusivity for many of its buyers.
In fact, Mirvac appears to have engineered a win-win situation as the parkland is to be operated and maintained by the city council.
We repeat our point that there are plenty of lovely pathways in other parks near the river, but there is only one riverfront and the citizens of Brisbane have lost it.
We remain annoyed that Lord Mayor Campbell Newman, who has made so much political capital around election times in the past by promising to complete a nearby “missing link” in RiverWalk, has so glibly washed his hands of the issue by blaming former Deputy Mayor and local councillor David Hinchliffe for letting this decision pass when he was planning chair. Cr Hinchliffe for his part told us last year that he thought the final design would almost certainly come back to a full council meeting for final ratification and that he would vote for a change in design then. That did not happen.
All we know is that the project go-ahead was given by nameless and unaccountable council officials. We can’t vote them out of office for their decision. But we also know that a great opportunity had been lost forever to have a continuous walkway right alongside this fantastic river of ours from beautiful Newstead House right through to the city’s heart.
Or need it be forever? Mirvac got what it wanted, but can the people of Brisbane still have their right of way? What if the city council in future simply built RiverWalk in front of these exclusive apartments, regardless of the cost, to serve as the ultimate warning to developers that they can try anything on, but people will win out in the end?
Maybe in future when the residents of those apartments have to “put up” with the sounds of Brisbane families enjoying their riverfront and having fun, on foot or on bike, then maybe it’ll be known as the Mirvac principle.
So starting right now, maybe it’s time for all the local residents of the area – indeed all residents of Brisbane who love our city’s greatest natural feature – to put their local councillor on notice, indeed put future Lord Mayoralty candidates on notice: commit yourselves to rectifying this matter over the years ahead, or we simply won’t be voting for you!
Don’t tell us it can’t be done. Don’t snow us by saying it will cost too much. Just do it! Put future developers on notice that there’s a bloody good chance that if they try to be to too clever by half, they’re going to get “mirvaced”!
• Over coming issues, The Independent will examine what went wrong with this project’s approval process, and if there is any elected official out there who wants to say sorry for the fact that it did.
