Doyle’s metropolis

Melbourne's Lord Mayor Robert Doyle talks about the controversial Australia 108 project, the city's love affair with Greece, and protecting the Victorian capital's 'livability'


Robert Doyle’s welcome into his inner sanctum is warm and generous. I’m ushered to one of the large dark leather chesterfields in his office, flanked on the opposite side of the room by flags of city, state and nation.
A politician with a light and articulate touch to his vision, they’re attributes that have taken him to the heights of state and local government since starting out as the Liberal Member for Malvern in the Victorian Parliament more than 20 years ago.
It’s the morning after the night before. The previous evening, the City Council’s Future Melbourne committee had made their views plain (once more) in regard to Australia 108 – architect Nonda Katsalidis’ audacious plan to create the tallest building in the southern hemisphere, smack bang in the heart of Southbank.
The committee declined to support the final planning permit amendment – the last piece of the jigsaw that will allow Australia 108 to go ahead. No surprise there. The building’s proposed height of 388 metres rides a coach and horses through the council’s scheme for any building’s height in Southbank to be limited to 130 metres.
But the City’s latest objection is likely to fall on stony ground. Unfortunately for Robert Doyle, state Planning minister Matthew Guy holds all the cards and is almost certain to overrule the council’s objections.
Depicted in the media as a political arm-wrestle between city and state – the City as Don Quixote tilting at windmills – Melbourne’s Lord Mayor is keen to dismiss such a notion.
“We’ve done an enormous amount of work over the last four years on what we call the Southbank Structure Plan which looks at the entirety of Southbank and we said to ourselves ‘where do we want it to go as it’s developed over the next ten years?’.
“You can map what it will look like if the present trend of development continues, and the reality is, if you do project that out, it’s not a very happy ending. Southbank looks like a porcupine – all these big towers there.
“While we want to see it developed, we would like to put some caps around that development. We think buildings between 100 meters and 130 meters in height is about right and we don’t want to go over that.”
Doyle argues that the council’s efforts, most visible recently in its position on Australia 108, are about striking a balance.
“We’re pro-development, however it’s not just development that is untrammelled.”
Is it frustrating that the City is seen as impotent in regard to affecting large projects?
“95 per cent of applications are determined by the City, but it’s these few individual examples where the minister has complete power.
“I actually think it’s pretty healthy there’s a tension between us. That’s a good thing, but I would rather have all developments come before Council regardless of the size.
“The planning minister is the ultimate authority… the question is, is that a good relationship?”
Doyle is adamant in his belief that the minister’s powers should be returned to local government, but admits the last time Melbourne City Council held the baton, little or nothing got off the blocks.
“I believe those powers should be returned to the City, but the reason why they were taken away was because of glacial processes inside local government.
“It wasn’t taken away on a caprice, it was taken away because you had a council that was holding back the prosperity of that industry and architectural development.”
With the pendulum now on the other side, everything over 25,000 sq metres goes to the minister. Often portrayed as solely an issue of height, the council’s reticence to support Australia 108, he says, is based on a number of inter-related concerns.
“Height, overshadowing, how the building addresses the street, the City road aspect – all of those things start adding up.”
Of all Robert Doyle’s pronouncements on Australia 108, perhaps the most profound has been the concern he’s raised over what he sees as the erosion of public confidence in government planning processes in Victoria.
“You have a planning scheme so that people can have confidence and trust in it, otherwise it’s open slather.”
Another tension between city and state is whether Australia 108 meets the criteria for state-wide significance – an automatic trigger for it coming under the minister’s discretion.
The council holds out it doesn’t. Why? “Height doesn’t do it,” says Doyle. “Bigger is not necessarily better”.
Interestingly, he says that Eureka probably does meet those criteria. 


“The Rialto probably did too, and if you go way back, it started with the old ICI building, Number 1, Nicholson Street, which broke the then planning rules. I’d argue that that is one of the finest buildings in Melbourne.”
Doyle’s argument is that Melbourne’s urban planning for the 21st century should move away from judgements on a case by case basis, and that all developments should come under a formulated and agreed planning scheme.
“We recognise the quality of Nonda Katsalidis’ architecture, we recognise that he has made a remarkable contribution to Melbourne. We don’t dispute the quality of his work, but what we’re saying is, even the best of architects doesn’t get a free hand.”
Regardless of Doyle’s concerns, Matthew Guy is expected to sign-off on Australia 108 within days, and the council knows it. Hence their request for more than 60 conditions to be added to the permit.
Most detail minor technical alterations, but significantly, one – a levy on the developer at $3500 per apartment – will, if passed, fund enhanced public facilities on the City road site upon which Australia 108 will sit.
We move on to another Hellenic tower slightly closer to completion. How does Cllr Doyle view the development of the new Greek Cultural Centre?
“Though there may be more Greek shops in Oakleigh, we still have to celebrate Lonsdale street’s history,” he says.
“It may have lost a little in terms of shops and numbers of people, but you preserve what we’ve got. That means maintaining what’s there in terms of Greek shops, lighting, signage, and in particular supporting the new cultural centre. That’s why that building is so important.”
With more than $10m spent by the council in recent years on the Lygon Street, Little Bourke and Lonsdale Street precincts, the Lord Mayor says the council’s committed to capturing and celebrating Melbourne’s cultural heritage.
“If there’s one thing I’m very proud of about Melbourne it’s its cultural diversity. It’s one of the things we almost take for granted.
“We come from 200 different countries, speak 220 different languages, practice hundreds of thousands of faiths, but we’re one Melbourne.”
The Victorian capital’s sister-city relationship with Thessaloniki is something Doyle says he treasures, but is it just symbolic?
“I believe those deep cultural connections that we have with Thessaloniki can be a very powerful business tool. I see sister cities as a way of starting a conversation business to business.
“We only have six sister cities around the world and we’re unlikely to be adding any more. After Thessaloniki we’re the biggest Greek city in the world, so we want for instance to keep the Lonsdale precinct as the Greek precinct, it’s so woven into our fabric, it’s a part of who we are.”
And what of Robert Doyle’s Hellenic destination preferences, I ask: a favourite idyllic location in Greece, a pristine beach on a far flung Aegean isle?
“I’m not a Greek island boy. I’m a city boy,” says the Lord Mayor, perhaps unsurprisingly.
“I actually love Athens, its vibrancy, but I’ll never get used to the taxi drivers – ever.
“Part of its charm is that it’s not chaotic but what I’d call ‘loosely wrapped’.
“There’s something of the Australian culture in Greece; wanting to have a bit of a chat over a glass of wine, good things to eat, lots to pick at. It’s no wonder that so many Greeks have found their home here.
“There’s a similarity in our psychology, the way we approach life.”
And what of your approach to your second term of office? What are the priorities for Melbourne’s 103rd Lord Mayor at the beginning of the 21st century?
“Planning for growth. To me that’s the central issue.
“We’re still growing very quickly. I don’t know if we’ll finish up as a city of six million or seven million, but I do know that we have to plan for that, so that we don’t finish up with a Melbourne that is unrecognisable as the city we love.
“There’s nothing to fear in growth. We talked earlier about multiculturalism. It’s one of the things that’s made us great. We were a city of 2 million in the 1970s, we’re now 4.3 million. We’re a richer city, a more prosperous, more diverse city, a more creative city as a result of growth.
“The second thing is safety. There’s no city that’s solved this problem but we saw in the last crime statistics a spike in drug-related crime, we’re seeing domestic violence increasing alarmingly, and that’s a real problem for us.
“The third thing is sustainability, continuing to maintain those parks and gardens, planting trees, good urban design, all of the things that make up livability.”
My allotted 20 minutes with Melbourne’s Lord Mayor ran out ten minutes ago, but one last question I feel needs to be asked.
When you retire and look out at Melbourne’s skyline, what do you hope to see?
“Pretty much where we are now. A preservation of the best of the past – making sure we have protected the Melbourne that has grown through the centuries, but also a vibrant, modern city where building design has been thought through.
“For me it’s not about how tall a building is, or even the architecture. For me, it’s about what happens when the building hits the footpath – the culture of the street created by the building.
“We don’t have blank frontages anymore, we don’t have five-storey car parks on our streets, we don’t have things that are out of human scale. That contribution of a building to Melbourne’s livability – that to me is the important thing.
“I hope when people look back and look at our streets, they’ll say ‘they actually did that, they protected the livability of the streets of Melbourne’.”