History
The Multifunction Polis was first proposed at a Japanese / Australian ministerial meeting between Japanese Trade Minister Hajima Tamura and Australia's Senator John Button in January 1987 in Canberra.
It was billed as "a multifunctional facility (which) would incorporate future oriented high technology and leisure facilities and could promote international exchange in the Pacific Region on new industry and lifestyle."
An early draft, produced a month after the initial meeting, described the Multifunction Polis as a "cosmopolis to become a forum for international exchange in the region and a model for new industries and new lifestyles looking ahead to the twenty-first century."
Originally proposed for the Gold Coast, the Committee For Melbourne lobbied strongly throughout 1990 for the MFP to be the centrepiece for a redevelopment of Melbourne Docklands. However the Melbourne bid fell through.
In 1990, northern Adelaide was selected. A Japanese press release said the Multifunction Polis will be "a place of providing, gathering, and reproducing information of diverse aspects, strata, and form, as well as relaxation, comfort, surprise, joy, entertainment and intellectual stimulation."
A rumor spread around Australia that 200,000 Japanese wanted to settle in the Multifunction Polis.
The Multifunction Polis project failed to attract the investment required, particularly after the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble in the early 1990s, and the Australian Federal Government withdrew funding in 1996. In 1998, the Premier of South Australia, John Olsen officially announced its demise. The cost of the failed project to the Australian taxpayer was $150 million.
Former Labor South Australian Shadow Treasurer, John Quirke, described the MFP saga as one of the most bizarre development projects in Australia's history. Denis Gastin, who headed the feasibility study into the project, said the demise of the Multifunction Polis was an embarrassment to the nation internationally.
"It's an international embarrassment that we deliberately sought and captured international attention for a project that we did not deliver," said Gastin. "South Australia had a chance to do something that would make the nation take it more seriously but what history shows is it bit off more than it could chew."
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