Colin Smith, Save Albert Park Group lobbyist and Greens member, wrote one of four opinion pieces published about the Grand Prix in the Herald-Sun on 13-03-2008

Nothing can save this event.

It was not socially sustainable to 'enhance' our people's playground - sacrificing five ovals and 1000 trees so that a foreign juggernaut of concrete, crassness and commercialism could smother much of the park for three months every year.

And to fit the track up for a night race with (as in Singapore) a light on a 10m pole every 4m would compound the offence intolerably.

Again, it's not economically sustainable.

Our Auditor General has told us the costs to Victorians outweigh the benefits.

To spend scores of millions of our money each year to subsidise this exercise - scores more if we were paying for the 5.4 million watts they require for the night race in Qatar - is crazy.

And the GP is most certainly not environmentally sustainable.

Indeed, in the face of peak oil and climate change, burning fossil fuels for fun will have to stop. Let alone carting in 40,000 tonnes of stuff every time we do it, then carting it all out again.

And let alone setting it up with (as in Qatar) enough lights powered from burning brown coal to illuminate 70 football fields.

Moving the event out of Albert Park might ameliorate the social impacts and lessen the losses, but it would not alter the total mockery of any concern to meet emission reduction targets.

Also, it is most unlikely that any scheme of carbon offsets could be both genuine, adequate, timely and affordable.

Let's stop wasting our money propping up this irredeemably destructive exercise.

Let's spend our money instead helping to sustain the liveability of our city, and the viability of our planet, for our children and our children's children.

Click here to go to this and other stories about the Grand Prix in the Herald Sun