But that was OK. This was news conference redefined; news
conference as closely kept secret, with potential dissenters filtered out beforehand
and the select grateful just to be there.
Where ministerial staffers brusquely hush anyone tedious
enough to ask hard questions (“Quiet there. This is a press
conference.”) and the local MP, blonde and stiletto-heeled, bobs in the
background like the Minister’s nodding dog, should anyone query his veracity.
It’s a new kind of language, too, where, for instance, the
much-abused “sustainable” has come full circle to mean something like
comfortable, or acceptable, or expedient.
Last year the Redfern Waterloo Minister, Frank Sartor, said
the Aboriginal Housing Company’s plan to rebuild its original 62 houses on The
Block (which it owns, freehold) was “not sustainable”. No reason
given. This year he insists that the big issue for The Block is “self-sustainability”,
which entails replacing virtually all its housing with commercial development.
For the locals, this is the opposite of sustainability. If
The Block is no longer a living community, it won’t matter how many
government-endorsed indigenous cultural centres you build there, it’ll still be
just another faked-up bit of white-flight conscience-salve.
It’s a David v Goliath scene, really, set up in last year’s
Metropolitan Strategy with its “global economic corridor” arcing from
the airport, through the central business district to Chatswood and Macquarie Park, with Redfern slap-bang in the
middle.
Now, globalism may taste and smell like cultural puree, but
it has its defenders, even now. And annexing Redfern to the CBD might make an
abstract kind of sense – except for two minor technicalities. One, office
vacancy rates are still high throughout the global arc, even without the huge
influx to come from both East Darling Harbour and Parramatta, so, as the former
city planner Councillor John McInerney notes, “there is no real argument
for office space at Redfern”.
Still less palatable, though, is the calculated removal of
the city’s oldest continuous Aboriginal population from its own land. This is
technicality No. 2: The Block. Right in the centre of Redfern, a veritable fly
in the global ointment, sits The Block. Recognising this, and recalling the
international eyebrows raised by the Minister’s last move on Redfern, when the
attempt to de-black The Block made the pages of Britain’s Guardian, this plan
is quite as dastardly, but much, much more Machiavellian, hoisting the
indigenous owners on their own economic petard.
Here’s how it’s done. Make a plan that appears to affect
only government property. Into it slip a piece of private land – The Block – but
call it, innocuously, Eveleigh
Street. Couch the plan in abstractions like
heights, zonings and floor-space ratios so no one will get it anyway. Then
devise a mechanism for so dramatically increasing the value of “Eveleigh
Street”, all the while sterilising it for residential development, that
the incumbents will be more or less forced to sell – if not voluntarily, then
by internal community pressure.
That way a government can zone its own land high and loose,
flog it, rake in the cash, then simply wait for the Aboriginal community to
unstitch itself while insisting that it was entirely self-determined.
The plan proposes about 18,000 new jobs in a clutch of five
18-storey towers, and 2000 new dwellings – no more than 30 of them on
Aboriginal land. This halves the 62 houses proposed in the Aboriginal Housing
Company’s long-planned Pemulwuy Project, intended to provide genuine
self-determination and affordable home ownership for its people plus an array
of performance, cultural and commercial centres around a central “Red Square”.
“We’ve made dozens of efforts to consult with the
Aboriginal Housing Company,” said the Minister. “I even had a coffee
with [Aboriginal elder] Mick Mundine, I think about last November,” (the
Minister was no doubt referring to the close relationship that followed his
elegant “black arse” invitation in September) without actually
inviting the housing company, mere landowners, to the launch.
Mundine’s view was less personal: “The … zoning changes
dash any hopes,” he said, “for affordable home ownership for
Aboriginal families on The Block.”.
The new plan halved The Block’s residential capacity but
near-trebled its commercial yield. It also raised heights, changed zonings from
residential mixed-use to commercial mixed-use, and rendered the blanket
heritage listing null and void. The effect is to explode the land value and
shift its highest and best use immediately to commercial. Jobs, like the man
said, and opportunity.
But opportunity for whom? Well, for locals, obviously. The
Minister assured his audience that developers would be required to provide
“a certain percentage of the employment on the site for local
people”. This is nothing more than blackwash, of course. Unachievable,
unenforceable.
Still, the Minister was pleased. “I think we’ve done
pretty well,” he said. Nod, nod, went the blonde, right on cue.