IT WAS, perhaps, an inevitable clash between the
perfectionist and the pragmatist. The former prime minister Paul Keating is a
man who collects empire clocks and spent years undertaking a meticulous
renovation of his house in Potts Point.
This week he unleashed a blistering tirade against planning
in Sydney. It
was an ugly city and getting uglier by the day as the “creeping
eczema” of modernist architecture obliterated its sandstone heritage.
Frank Sartor is the state’s Planning Minister and the city’s
former lord mayor, an office he held for 11½ years, until 2003. In both roles
he must take some credit or blame for the shape of the city centre.
After all, it was Sartor who implemented the Living Sydney
policy, bringing hundreds of thousands of residents to the CBD to reside in the
high-rise that sprang up around the southern end. Some people refer to it as
Meritonia, an uncomplimentary reference to Harry Triguboff’s Meriton developments,
which proliferate in the area. So, when Keating described planning ministers as
the mayor for Triguboff, it was widely interpreted as a slight on Sartor.
Not so, says Sartor, who claims Keating told him that he did
not mean him at all. Nonetheless, Keating’s delightfully poisonous barbs have
thrust the architecture of our city and the role of Sartor in its shaping back
into the limelight.
To understand Sartor and his legacy, it is important to
understand his philosophy on public office.
“If you’ve got a job in a responsible public office,
you have to give it your best shot or get out, because you’re not in it for the
money,” he says. “You’re motivated by the public good – hopefully –
so you might as well give it your best shot, work like buggery – sorry, work
hard – and then get out when you’re finished.”
And giving it “your best shot”, according to
Sartor, means making decisions, and not getting too bogged down in getting it
absolutely right.
“It’s the law of diminishing returns. Whether it’s
making an LEP [local environmental plan] or running the council, you’ll never
get it 100 per cent right, no matter how hard you try. If you can get it 80 to
90 per cent right, you can amend or improve it later,” he says.
The 80-20 rule governs Sartor’s life. For him it’s a bit
like jogging. If you do three lots of exercise you’ll be about 70 per cent fit.
To reach 95 per cent fitness means running every day, and it’s just not worth
the extra effort.
This pragmatism, combined with a short fuse, a big ego and
an inability to suffer fools – has made Sartor admired and reviled. He has
fallen out badly with two people who served with him on the City of Sydney Council: Elizabeth
Farrelly, the Herald’s architecture writer, and the Lord Mayor, Clover Moore.
Moore
declined to comment on or off the record about Sartor. Farrelly is a constant
critic.
Then there was the famous falling out with Lucy Turnbull,
when he was overheard berating her from an airport lounge phone after she took
over as lord mayor. The two appear to have got over the highly publicised row,
but it earned Sartor the tag Cranky Frank.
There’s no doubt Sartor’s abrasive personality, and
seemingly endless capacity for work, wears some people down. Some staff have
found his manner too much to cope with; others have an admiration for the fact
that he just keeps pushing forward, when a lesser man would let the bureaucracy
weigh him down.
A conversation with Sartor can leave a normal person feeling
exhausted. He exudes busyness and frankly admits to having no close friends
apart from his wife, just because of the pressures of time.
That Sartor is fully preoccupied with the present is clear.
Ask him about his childhood, and you draw a blank. “Look, it was miserable
and poor. I don’t want to talk about it. You’ve written all of this
before,” he says.
He grew up in Yenda, near Griffith, the fifth in a family of eight. His
Italian migrant parents were farmers and the family spoke Italian at home.
Sartor won a scholarship to Sydney
University and worked for
Colgate-Palmolive, then the oil company Total, while studying for a commerce
degree.
He married, had two sons and still found time to run a
high-profile residents’ campaign against an ugly block of flats in Newtown, where the family
lived. In 1983 he began work for the public accounts committee in Parliament
and in 1984 Sartor and a team of independents won control of the city council.
As lord mayor Sartor was a doer. He turned the finances of
the council around, faced down the legendary town clerk Leon Carter, turned Sydney into a metropolis
in which people live and prepared the city for the 2000 Olympics.
It was the former premier Bob Carr and the former treasurer
Michael Egan who lured him to state politics and to an immediate elevation to
the front bench.
But not everything has been easy for Sartor. His first
marriage ended, and his next partner, Hephzibah Tintner, died of cancer in
2001.
It clearly had a major effect on Sartor, who became minister
for cancer and dedicates himself to achieving improvements in funding and
policy in the area.
For a few years Sartor seemed more irascible than usual,
until he met his new wife, Monique Flannery. It seems that happiness has
mellowed Cranky Frank. But that’s not to say he’s a pussycat these days.
In Parliament he was asked to apologise to a group of
residents for calling them “Putney lunatics”.
Then there has been the celebrated brawl with Mick Mundine
over the redevelopment of The Block in Redfern and his argument with the Mayor
of Byron Shire Council, Jan Barham, over the development of the Club Med/Becton
site.
But surprisingly Sartor has earned respect from most of the
interest groups that he deals with.
“My experience is that he’s passionate about the job. I
don’t always agree with him, but you can disagree with him, and it’s not the
end of the world,” says the Mayor of North Sydney and head of the Local Government
Association, Genia McCaffery.
McCaffery and Sartor disagree on the extent to which the
State Government now intervenes in council decisions, but McCaffery says part
of the problem is that she’s battling the Government’s “open for
business” approach, which developers have taken as a licence to push
harder.
Sartor, at least, is open to being persuaded, she says.
The Property Council finds Sartor a breath of fresh air. The
previous minister, Craig Knowles, seemed frozen to the spot when it came to
finalising the hard parts of the metropolitan strategy and plans for areas such
as the Central Coast and the Hunter. Sartor got stuck
in and finalised several problem areas.
“His great strength is that he’s smart, passionate, and
he knows this area because he’s been lord mayor,” says the council’s
executive director, Ken Morrison.
Even environmental groups such as the Total Environment
Centre rate Sartor – although it has growing reservations about the Government
he works for.
“Frank Sartor is intelligent, humorous and has a
capacity to understand the position of each stakeholder. Despite this, Frank
can’t escape being seen as the primary deliverer of the Government’s
pro-development agenda,” says the centre’s director, Jeff Angel.
The centre points to the Lower Hunter strategy, released a
month ago, as a case in point. “On the one hand he negotiated for
significant private land to be protected, but on the other he acquiesced to
allow the wrong development in the wrong places and contrary to good planning
principles,” says Angel.
Sartor admits the Lower Hunter strategy, with competing
pressures of population growth, mining, sensitive environments and agriculture,
was hard.
Sartor has his own strategies for keeping developers at bay.
He almost always has the department present at meetings and sometimes he drags
in the council as well.
On fund-raising he has favoured big functions over intimate
dinners because “they are transparent and everyone can see who was
there”.
“I don’t think it’s a big issue for me. At the end of
the day all I have got is my integrity and I want to hang on to it,” he
says.
Even though Sartor is one of the Government’s big
performers, he stands no chance of becoming premier. His next job is almost
certain to be the even more difficult health portfolio. Perhaps he once
harboured lofty ambitions, but four years in the Labor Party have perhaps
taught him what a tribal party it is.
Sartor’s tendency to bluntness also causes him problems
inside the Government. It’s no secret that Sartor and the equally volatile
Treasurer, Michael Costa, don’t get on, although he seems to have the respect
of the Premier, Morris Iemma.
He clearly hankers for the days when, as independent lord
mayor, he had more autonomy. ” I watched all the episodes of Yes Minister
before I arrived, but there’s still more to learn. I reckon I could write a
couple more series,” he says.