From the outside it doesn’t look like much. A hurricane fence lines the huge construction site on three sides, each the length of a large city block, and the fourth is hemmed in by the Swan river. This is Elizabeth Quay, the project that is supposed to revitalise Perth: a $2.6bn showpiece for the world’s most isolated capital city. At the moment, though, it just seems to be blocking traffic.
Someone – presumably the same team at the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority (MRA) who have spent about $400,000 trying to sell the development to potential investors and the public – has adorned the black plywood lining the boundary fence with graffiti-style text enthusing: “The river. The city. Together again.”
In less than two months that fence is due to come down. What it reveals will not quite fulfil the planner’s vision of a cityscape flowing seamlessly to the waterfront. The bulk of the development, its towers full of office workers and luxury apartments, is yet to be built or even designed.
For a development often described as a vanity project for the Western Australian premier, Colin Barnett, Elizabeth Quay as it stands is underwhelming.
The public area of the project is 21,000 square metres of landscaped paving surrounding a man-made inlet with ferry terminal and boat bays. This section, which will be completed first, cost the government $440m. The rest of the project, reckoned to be worth $2.2b, will come from private development of 10 empty sites that ring the public areas. They will eventually house luxury hotels and apartments, 30-storey office blocks and restaurants, it is promised. A succession of food trucks, which have recently come into vogue in Perth, are also expected to colonise the area.
The waterfront development has been described by supporters as a jewel in the city’s crown and by detractors as a luxury that the state, which is $31bn in debt and heading to a deficit of $2.7bn, cannot afford; a palace built by a premier nicknamed “the emperor”.
Barnett has eagerly donned a hard hat to hold periodic press conferences at the site since construction began three years ago, and has declared that Elizabeth Quay would allow Perth to shake off its “dullsville tag”.
Barnett hopes Elizabeth Quay and the $2bn 60,000-seat Perth stadium, under construction 3km away on the opposite bank of the Swan, will be his legacy.
But Perth’s residents are less convinced. Some are angry that the government dug an inlet in the middle of Riverside Drive, a major cross-city road, forcing motorists to do a slow dog-leg around the development. Others resent the state spending so much on a luxury development ahead of more popular projects such as a proposed light rail line. And many fear that despite best intentions the development will succumb to the same eerie emptiness that haunted the Docklands development in Melbourne, which spent several years looking like the opening shot of a low-budget post-apocalyptic movie.
If Elizabeth Quay is Perth’s “Grand Design”, stepping through the hurricane fence is to become Kevin McCloud – you get a sense that quite a lot has been done and yet everything is still unfinished and nothing looks like it will be done on time. It certainly looks nothing like the artist’s impression shown at the beginning of the episode.
When Guardian Australia visited on Monday, dozens of workers were laying the final third of the million paving stones in the U-shaped public promenade that will surround the new inlet. A few more were finishing laying the wooden planks of the boardwalk. Figures proudly blazoned at the bottom of every government press release show about 3,700 people have worked on the project.
The path through the construction site took us past three squat, square buildings which protrude from the paving stones. They still show exposed wires and bare concrete but each will hold a different selection of restaurants, bars and ice-cream vendors. From a vantage point atop one of these buildings you have a clear view of the small inlet. Earthmoving equipment, parked on a mound of dirt under the new footbridge at the mouth of the inlet, suggested it was not quite ready to admit ferries.
WA’s planning minister, John Day, says this section is due to be completed by Christmas, although the timing is in the hands of the contractors. It has to be finished by 11 February, when the Perth international arts festival will convert one of the empty commercial lots, which houses a demountable city of building site offices, into its festival gardens for 25 nights.
It’s deja vu for the festival, which previously hosted an event on the old Esplanade reserve that now lies under the northern half of the construction site. The same goes for the site itself, which has undergone a lot of groundwork to be returned, albeit temporarily, into a public lawn.
Or, as Labor MP Bill Johnson put it: “The government has spent $440m pulling up the grass and putting it back, and now it will let another contract on top of the $440m to let people put dongas on the grass to sell coffee.
“Elizabeth Quay is never going to be a rocking place if at 11 o’clock at night it looks like [Perth CBD street] St Georges Terrace, yet that is the plan for Elizabeth Quay.”
Another Labor MP, Kate Doust, is even more scathing. Reckoning the Elizabeth Quay was too grand a name, she has dubbed the project “Betty’s Jetty”.
Day says the government aims to make back $170m of the $440m cost in land sales. So far it has made $64m from the sale of two lots to gas company Chevron, which bought the land in 2013 to build its Australian headquarters, and $25m from the sale of two more lots to the Far East consortium. It will soon begin excavating an enormous shared basement for its luxury apartment development and the neighbouring building, which will become the Ritz-Carlton hotel in February. The consortium has already collected a booking fee for 300 of the apartments. But Chevron, which was due to start construction in December 2016, was a fortnight ago granted a two-year extension, meaning that the lots it owns will also be grassed over. Another empty space for the MRA events team to fill.
Expressions of interest are open for two other lots, and developer Brookfield has been given the option of taking up two more. The final lot will remain available to the art festival for four years before being sold.
“It’s been an enormous project, a very complex project, so to get it to this point and when it is ultimately completed will be a major achievement for really everybody who has been involved,” Day says.
Day has brushed off criticism that the private investment which was supposed to underpin the development has been sluggish, saying in Parliament: “You wait and see in 10 years’ time.”
The opposition planning spokeswoman, Rita Saffioti, says that on current projections the area could be a construction site for another 20 years.
Saffioti says the decision to shelve a proposed Indigenous cultural museum, which was touted as the centrepiece when the waterfront redevelopment was first discussed in earnest in 2009, has left the development without a drawcard.
The 1.5ha museum site is still featured on the plans and Day said in 2013 that although planning had ceased, the land had been reserved for a future stage of the development. But he didn’t want to give the community “false expectations” about the museum being built – it would cost another $500m, and was unlikely to go ahead without federal help.
“[Elizabeth Quay] is going to look pretty, but the question is, is it worth half a billion dollars?” Saffioti says. “If there was some kind of iconic building, like the Indigenous cultural museum, that would be a destination in itself and you would say it was worth spending public money.
“As it is, I have no doubt that tourists will go there if they are in Perth, but I don’t think anyone is going to fly to Perth just to have a cappuccino in Elizabeth Quay.”
