Cockburn on the front foot

The City of Cockburn has continued its attack on the interim report by the state government’s Major Stadia Taskforce, flagging the possibility of legal action as part of its next move.

Cockburn Mayor Stephen Lee said the taskforce interim report contained numerous errors of fact and had not fully assessed the main criteria of a successful modern sporting stadium – travelling time and ease of access to the venue.

In response to the taskforce’s interim report, which dismissed Cockburn as a potential site for a new state-of-the-art stadium in Western Australia, the City of Cockburn has:

• sought legal advice that says the taskforce’s process was so flawed it could seek intervention from the Supreme Court of Western Australia to prevent the taskforce from proceeding to its next stage and prevent government from acting on its recommendations;

• claimed that the taskforce’s preferred sites of Kitchener/Mueller Park in Subiaco, the re-development of Subiaco Oval and the East Perth power station failed on many of the taskforce’s own benchmark criteria; and

• claimed the new stadium would not actually fit on the Subiaco or East Perth sites.

In addition, speaking exclusively to WA Business News, a spokesman for the City of Cockburn provided specific details of what the council believes are serious flaws in the John Langoulant-led stadium taskforce interim report.

He said the Kitchener/Mueller Park site failed on 12 of the 24 benchmarks set down by the taskforce, while the redevelopment of Subiaco Oval failed on 13 counts and the East Perth Power Station site fell short on eight of the 24 measures.

“The selection benchmarks listed seven hectares as the area that should be available for the stadium itself, yet the report shows that the East Perth site only has 6.4 hectares available,” the spokesman said. 

Another example is the benchmark that a stadium should not be built on A-class reserve. Mueller Park is A-class reserve.

Yet these sites were all put forward as preferred stadium locations.

And, according to Cockburn’s consulting architects, Bligh Voller Nield, neither of the Subiaco options could be built within the existing boundaries of Roberts Road and Railway Parade, while the East Perth site would overlap the heritage-listed power station and nearby roads.

The interim report also makes reference to volumes two and three, which contain the background information to the main document.

But the spokesman claims that, when the City of Cockburn asked for a copy of the additional volumes, the taskforce was unable to provide them.

The Cockburn Central bid team was originally told that there was 22 site criteria, and submitted its proposal against these criteria.

The spokesman said the taskforce then listed 24 criteria in its report, adding three new measures and removing one from the initial list the City of Cockburn was provided with.

The Cockburn spokesman said the city did not have access to the final list of 24 criteria and believes this affected its submission.

Further, the item deleted was a stipulation that a new stadium be located 1.5 kilometres from the GPO. On this measure, all proposed sites would have failed to meet the taskforce’s approval.

This criteria subsequently appeared as one of the taskforce’s recommendations, reworded as “approximately 1.5km from the CBD”, thereby including the preferred Subiaco and East Perth sites.   

Mr Langoulant said the fundamental point was that the benchmarks were not designed to be “deterministic”, and that the taskforce members had exercised their judgement in the decision-making process.