Talking Point: Stop work until UTAS rebuilds trust

RICHARD FLANAGAN: University of Tasmania will be building into the chaos caused by lack of a planning strategy for Hobart

REMAKE: Demolition of the Red Cross building on Melville St, Hobart, this month to make way for UTAS expansion. Picture: NIKKI DAVIS-JONES

TASMANIANS should view the University of Tasmania’s move from its Sandy Bay campus into the heart of Hobart’s CBD with grave concern. It makes little sense, raises many unanswered questions, and threatens to damage both Hobart and the university.

How can UTAS seriously argue that bringing more than 2000 staff and perhaps more than 20,000 students (the exact figures are not easily obtained) into the city daily will not severely worsen traffic and parking in Hobart?

Pushing past all the cosy talk of pedestrian and cyclist friendly solutions we need to ask where is the plan and where is the money for the plan to daily move so many people? Because if there is one, no one has seen it.

The truth is that UTAS will be building into the chaos created by a state government that refuses to come up with any planning strategy for Hobart. There is no vision for an enhanced public transport system for Hobart. Nor is there a plan to address Hobart’s appalling housing crisis.

It says a lot about the complete absence of political leadership and competent governance in Tasmania that a city of a little more than 200,000 people could have such profound problems. That is not UTAS’s fault, but it will become an extraordinary problem for us all if UTAS is allowed to go ahead with its plans unchecked.

This massive move will see a major, long-term increase in congestion and homelessness in a city where rents are now higher than those of Melbourne’s and traffic some of the worst in the country.

The reality for Hobartians will be worsening traffic and growing tent cities of the Tasmanian homeless, while the university, an institution mandated by government to make a profit, has to seek ever greater numbers of international students to keep making money. Today UTAS has 7000 international students and hopes to increase that to 10,000 by 2022 — that is 3000 extra rooms in a city that today has none, and which the UTAS cannot satisfactorily provide itself.

In this way, as in many others, the interests of the university are not necessarily the same of those of Hobart and its citizens, and we should not believe the university when they say they are.

UTAS accommodation complex in Brisbane St, Hobart. Picture: SAM ROSEWARNE

When, for example, the university was seeking funds for its STEM centre to be built on the old Webster’s site in town the university privately — and shamefully — campaigned against the much-needed light rail proposal, which would seem to be essential to any future for Hobart, on the grounds that it was a rival for federal funds.

These days, the university talks a better talk, of community consultation, of building on ideas of place. Its new Vice-Chancellor Rufus Black is a man of integrity and decency. But beneath him little appears to have changed from the previous administration which acquired a notorious reputation as the worst developer in town, trampling over whoever gets in its way, making and breaking promises as it saw fit.

Its new city buildings, such as the student accommodation building on Elizabeth St are oversize black holes that destroy the vibrancy of entire city blocks, impacting badly on many local traders, and where once was street-life there is now a dead zone, a vast block length of empty corporate foyer. Questions over UTAS using federal government social housing money for the project makes the whole mess only more bitter if you are one of Hobart’s homeless.

Why in its messaging UTAS has been notably silent about the considerable opposition to the move? Why has it not mentioned the many Hobartians who have opposed the move?

Why has it not acknowledged that the Glebe community wrote to the university opposing the considerable intensification of use and consequent damage to both the amenity of the Glebe and the heritage values of the Domain site — one of Hobart’s most precious — of moving all of humanities and law into the Domain?

Why has it not mentioned the 75 per cent of its own academics, polled by the National Tertiary Education Union, who oppose the move?

So many other questions remain unanswered while a feel-good publicity blitz ensues. The proposal to move university sporting facilities to the Domain would see a major transformation of what should be Hobart’s great central park — a semi-wild land — into a collection of modern stadia and sporting facilities and associated car parks and roadworks that should be built elsewhere. The loss of what should be a great urban oasis of serenity and peace would be an incalculable and irreparable tragedy for Hobart.

Why are Hobartians not being asked if they agree with this fundamental change to our city?

Then there is the spin justifying the move, much of which is palpable nonsense. The argument that moving into the city is a worldwide trend seems to have little foundation in reality. Nor do UTAS’s protestations that retro-fitting the old buildings on the Sandy Bay site is impossible and unaffordable, a claim every senior architect I know in Hobart rejects as unfounded.

None of this is helped by UTAS’s dissembling when asked hard questions. When, for example, its spinners were recently asked at a community meeting about how many staff and students from humanities and law were to be housed at the Domain site, the meeting was told the university didn’t know.

Really? How can such a decision be made without knowing? Or do they know and prefer not to tell the community?

At the same time who profits from UTAS’s deals with private developers to fund some of these developments? What exactly are the terms of these deals which will do so much to shape our city in coming decades?

Hobartians should not permit a single new UTAS building to go up in our city until there is solid proof that each building will be to the benefit and not detriment of Hobartians’ daily lives and the amenity of the city.

And we should ask the question which has never been satisfactorily answered — why move from Sandy Bay campus anyway?

Anywhere else it would be regarded as a city campus and it will become only more central as the city grows. Spectacularly beautiful, running from mountain bush to river, it would seem a perfect site to slowly fashion a great university for the coming centuries.

As a graduate of our university I am at a loss to understand how a fractured city campus can replicate the student life available on Sandy Bay, a student life that becomes ever more important in an age of growing social isolation of young people.

And behind all the important questions of detail, of probity, of planning, the most fundamental question of all: why?

Because it makes no sense, promising little and destroying much. What is the truth behind this move?

Anyone who has had dealings with UTAS in recent years knows that there is an enormous lack of trust and goodwill towards its administration.

Seventy years ago the university’s move from the Domain to Sandy Bay was beset by dark rumours, and the scandals finally led to a royal commission. This move by the university back into town raises many questions.

Who is driving this move from behind the scenes, and why? If we lose, who profits?

None of these questions have been satisfactorily answered. They need to be. Until they are the new rumours that attach themselves to unanswered questions will only grow.

The time has come, not for spin, but concrete proof of good faith and serious intent to rebuild trust and honour community, place and education as UTAS has for so long promised and so long failed to deliver.

Without that, UTAS will only face ever more questioning and growing opposition.

Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan’s awards include the 2014 Man Brooker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.