In 1986 an international urban design competition seeking designs for “Kawasaki: Information City of the 21st Century” was sponsored by the Japan Association for Planning Administration and
Mainichi Newspapers, with cooperation of ten ministries and three agencies of the Japanese government. The first phase of the competition was anonymous and attracted over 200 entries from more than twenty countries. Seventeen semi-finalists were selected and flown to Japan to present their entries in Kawasaki in 1986 – sixteen men and one woman, Zann Gill. The second phase of the competition occurred in 1987 and winners then learned that the competition not only sought ideas for Kawasaki, but also concepts for a showcase “city of the future” to be built in Australia, which became the ill-fated Multifunction Polis, a showcase for misguided bureaucracy. The Multifunction Polis was first proposed in January 1987 by the Japanese
Minister for International Trade and Industry (MITI),
Hajime Tamura, at the ninth
Australia-Japan Ministerial Committee meeting in
Canberra. A concept paper produced by MITI a month later said the Multifunction Polis would "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". More than 100 Australian and Japanese companies signed up to the MFP Joint Feasibility Study. Site proposals were received from New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the A.C.T. In 1990, the MFP Joint Steering Committee (chaired by
ANZ Bank chief executive Will Bailey) awarded the project to the
Gold Coast in Queensland, but after the state's premier,
Wayne Goss, declined to consolidate the land under a public corporation, the Joint Steering Committee switched its choice to Gillman, near
Adelaide in South Australia. By that time, however, some potential Japanese investors had lost interest because of the negative publicity in Australia and repeated delays with the feasibility study. Others were discouraged by the choice of little-known Gillman for the site, rather than a location with strong appeal as a resort. The Multifunction Polis project failed to attract the required investment, particularly after the
bursting of the Japanese economic bubble in the early 1990s, and Australia's Federal Government withdrew funding in 1996. In 1998, the Premier of
South Australia,
John Olsen, officially announced the MFP's demise. Denis Gastin, chief executive of the MFP Joint Secretariat, said the loss of the project was an embarrassment to the nation: "It's an international embarrassment that we deliberately sought and captured international attention for a project that we did not deliver. 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." ==Opposition to the Multifunction Polis==