Becton, for example, whose contentious 117-unit resort on
the eco-sensitive Byron
Bay beachfront received
ministerial blessing last week, fought in court for the right to the minister’s lap. Foster’s,
similarly, whose Broadway brewery site was plucked from council purview,
lobbied long and hard for the privilege.
For them, ministerial favour is a given. Some are less
fortunate. To the Aboriginal Housing Company, owner of Redfern’s the Block, the state’s
attentions taste less like champagne, more like hemlock. Like precision
bombing. Like history. As the oldest and central urban Aboriginal community in Australia, the
Block is the centre. It’s where the
songlines meet.
The new Redfern plan, gazetted the same day as last week’s Byron blessing, will end that, allowing about
three-quarters of the original housing. This inhibits rebuilding private houses
on freehold (black) land but hugely increasing the capacity of adjacent lands
owned by (you got it) the Government. It’s
unjust and bizarre. Down-zoning doesn’t
happen. This is perhaps the only inviolable rule of Sydney’s
erectile planning tissue: everything goes up, nothing comes down.
Why single out the Block? Not for environmental reasons, if Byron Bay’s anything to go by. And not for heritage or
contextual sensitivity, since all such legislation has been specifically waived
on Redfern-Waterloo Authority sites.
For Mick Mundine, Aboriginal elder and Aboriginal Housing
Company chief executive, the reasons are simple: “Racism and greed … It’s more than bricks and mortar now. It’s the morality. And it boils down to this. They
want the land.”
Mundine has been slow to radicalise. He was always trying to
reason, trying to make peace. Now that’s
changed. “They never gave us anything,” he says, “except the
needle bus.” The bus that brought the junkies, that fed the smack empire,
that cost him his son, that forced him to bulldoze the diehard drug houses that
were killing the Block.
It was an act of desperate courage; the trapped fox chewing
off its leg to survive. It worked. But now, in a dreadful irony, the reward is
official depiction of the Block as beyond help, well beyond self-help. And a
ban on rebuilding. Could it be a simple land grab? So cynical, so blatant?
Well, there’s no
planning rationale. Redfern sits a good kilometre from the CBD. It has two
towers, the TNT twins, generally seen as a mistake. Soon, under the plan, it’ll have a whole cluster, a mini-metropolis there.
Why? Not because it’s the place for
high rise. Not because it can ever be part of the central business district (at
least until Central Station freezes over). But because the towers – and the
towering price tags they’ll generate
– happen to fall on government land.
The Block, they think, threatens this. As confidential
cabinet papers advised back in 2004, “if the Block is not redeveloped [to
reduce Aboriginal housing], the commercial benefits flowing … would face a
substantial reduction … probably in the order of 25-30 per cent”. In other
words it’s not so much a racist
government as a monetarist government, presuming on, and pandering to, a racist
market.
Many blame a rogue Planning Minister. Frank Sartor, after
all, gave us the “no black faces” and “get your black arse in
here” gems that made international headlines. Tom Uren, whose federal
ministry deeded the Block to the Aboriginal Housing Company in the 1980s and
who now chairs its Pemulwuy taskforce, is appalled by the state plan. He sheets
it home to Sartor. “Frank,” says Uren, “isn’t Labor. He’s
just a person of excessive arrogance who’s
been in the Labor Party five minutes and seems to be making most of the
decisions.”
But while Sartor may be hatchet man, he’s clearly under orders. Appeals to cabinet (from Uren)
and to the Premier are ignored or “lost”. The local MP, Kristina
Keneally, whose last appearance in this column had her assure Parliament at
length that she’s “never worn …
stilettos”, has also never visited the site. She attends press
conferences, often disguised as a nodding dog, but her first scheduled visit
last week was canceled so she could read the plan. Like, she hadn’t seen it?
Carmel Tebbutt,
whose Marrickville electorate – should she beat Anthony “The Man”
Mundine – will next year include Redfern, has visited the Block, at Uren’s behest, but changed nothing.
Sartor describes the Aboriginal Housing Company as
“ideologues”. He’s cut
funding, and plays divide and rule by appointing Aborigines (including Mick’s cousin, the ALP president, Warren Mundine) to his
team. They know the talk.
The “ideologues” answer with support from the
Governor, Marie Bashir, the
University of Sydney vice-chancellor, Gavin Brown, the City Council, Hillsong
and Catholic churches, the UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, Miloon
Kothari, and the Metro-Strategy adviser Professor Ed Blakely.
In the end, though, that’s
all ping-pong. The main issue is devastatingly simple. Whoever they are,
whatever they say or think, the people of the Block have a right to inhabit their
land. It’s not terra nullius.
“Why can’t
we be treated equal?” asks Mundine. “We’re
not asking for half Redfern Station, like some people wanted. The Block is our
land. What they’re trying to do to
us is not right.”
Elizabeth Farrelly writes on planning, architecture and
aesthetics issues for the Herald.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/no-favours-for-aboriginal-developer/2006/09/05/1157222129854.html
[REDWatch note – Please also see Kristina Keneally’s response “Errors of fact” in response to the above article at the link below.]