‘Move It Mali’: Anti-Festival Tower billboards hit Adelaide streets
Thousands of dollars are reportedly being spent on billboards across Adelaide protesting the Festival Tower Two development in Festival Plaza, the Premier responding to claims his own office will be moved into the controversial building.
Save Festival Tower Alliance has unveiled several of its “Move It Mali” billboard campaigns on Sir Donald Bradman Drive and Anzac Highway, urging Premier Peter Malinauskas to move the planned Festival Tower Two development away from Festival Plaza.
The Alliance aims to run a rolling digital billboard campaign, which claim the Premier would move his office into the 38-storey Festival Tower Two upon completion, across the next four weeks. Several billboard locations have been earmarked including Goodwood Road and Richmond Road depending on availability.
The first sign was put up on Anzac Highway in early April which cost a reported $2500, while the latest billboard on the intersection of Sir Donald Bradman Drive and Marion Road cost $1600 per week.
The latest Sir Donald Bradman Drive billboard is set to stay up for two weeks.
Land Economist and Save Festival Plaza Alliance Member Geoff Hayter said he hoped the billboards would sway Premier Peter Malinauskas’s mind to understand the Walker Corporation development is “the wrong building in the wrong location”.
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“We’ve put up an alternative and said put it somewhere else, for example in Victoria Square in the dead heart of Adelaide,” Hayter said.
“There’s four acres of government land there with a bunch of old government buildings on it, and a lot of those are reaching the end of their life.
“The State Admin Centre was built in the late 1960s, the others were built in the 1970s and we believe the way things are going at the moment that the government is lining up to move into Tower Two, and that will leave State Admin Centre vacant.”
But the Premier denied claims he would move his office into the new Festival Tower on ABC radio this morning, and said the rumours were “an act of desperation”.
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“I can tell you categorically there never is, never has been plans for the Premier’s office to move in there,” Malinauskas said.
“I’m in the State Administration Centre. It’s fair to say it’s probably the worst government department [building] in the state largely because successive premiers, myself included, have avoided any suggestion that we’re moving into more luxurious accommodation, because frankly there are other priorities to pursue.”
Festival Tower Two first received planning approval in June, 2025, and is set to stand next to the existing 29-storey One Festival Tower behind Parliament House, with developer Walker Corporation reportedly leasing the land for one dollar per annum according to lease documents.
The state government has repeatedly disputed that the $1 land lease per year until 2116 is “not accurate”, but further details on the agreement have remained commercial-in-confidence.
Hayter said there was “still an opportunity to save Festival Plaza” despite construction already under way.
In February this year, hundreds of Save Festival Plaza Alliance members protested at Parliament House as construction of the $800 million office building officially kicked off.
“I don’t think most people in South Australia have any comprehension of what a 38-storey building is going to look like there. It’s enormous,” Hayter said.
“We want for it to be developed as the public space that it always should have been and it was always promised, and at the same time, to reinvigorate this very significant site right in the middle of the city, on Victoria Square.”
The construction of Festival Tower Two is scheduled for completion in late 2028, with the government claiming it would generate $1 billion in economic activity each year.
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