Chapters → Dear Barangaroo Dallas Rogers and Chris Gibson

Dear Barangaroo Dallas Rogers and Chris Gibson

Dear Barangaroo (the place, not the person [20]),
There’s been a lot of talk about you lately. The casino-hotel tower is nearly finished, but doubts grow over whether Crown is fit to hold a gaming license. And after COVID-19, it’s questionable whether the promised Chinese high-rollers that justified the development will eventuate. Everywhere you go in Sydney, it seems, you can see the sleek tower looming over the horizon. It’s as if the developers knew this would be so, choosing the exact spot on your shore to maximise its visibility. How did this come to pass?

 Barangaroo, it’s time we had a talk: there are things about your past we must discuss.

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Many of us Sydneysiders already have strong opinions of you, Barangaroo. There’s a standard historical script that runs something like: Aboriginal people have lived there for tens of thousands of years; Arthur Phillip invade the shores and establishes a colony; Bennelong and Barangaroo (the person) are important colonial agitators and interlocutors of their time; John Bradfield builds the Harbour Bridge; workers queue along the Hungry Mile docks during the Great Depression, hoping for a day’s work to feed families; Jørn Utzon designs the iconic Opera House; Jack Mundy saves the Rocks from development through the Green Bans; Patricks operates a container terminal and then fights with the maritime union, before abandoning you, leaving the space clear for James Packer’s Crown Resorts Ltd to build a casino-hotel. This history, with its layers of consequence, is what we appreciate about you; you’re a complex place. But this is not the conversation we must now have.

Instead, we should discuss episodes and issues that flow across the ebb and flow of life on your shores. We’ve been searching around in the cracks between these grander narratives by talking to the people who live and work in your space. We’ve been asking them what they think the most important stories are about you, Barangaroo. And it’s taken us in some strange directions. Of course, everyone mentions the key historical events—they’re important obviously. But in terms of urban governance, there are other histories and stories to explore. When we pulled that historical thread, an absolutely fascinating, and at times disturbing, history of the people and governance of your place unravelled.

In early 2014, at the bit of your peninsula called Millers Point, we were interviewing local people for a research project calledResident’s Voices.[21] In 2014, the NSW state government had just announced sale of 300 public housing dwellings, proposing to relocate all public housing residents to other parts of the city.

Public housing residents, private residents with 99 years leases on their homes, and heritage and built environment professionals were trying to stop the evictions. One of the first people interviewed was Barney Gardner, who became the face of the resistance campaign. We were sitting in Barney’s house, having a rambling conversation about what’s happening, and two things he said stood out.

First, he said ‘this is a site of continual displacement’. He talked about an Aboriginal public housing resident who was going to be evicted from her home by the NSW Department of Housing. So we talked to her, and the weight of this site hit us. Not only is this site something of a ground zero for Aboriginal displacement in Australia, through the British invasion and establishment of the first colony, but the government is still displacing Aboriginal people from the land. Second, when we asked Barney why he thought he was being evicted from Millers Point, he looked out across the road: ‘it is because of that’, he said, pointing straight at the Barangaroo development.

And so we started digging further, asking: how was the Barangaroo redevelopment connected to the Millers Point evictions?

There had already been much public debate about the Barangaroo redevelopment: an international design competition, won by Hill Thalis Design, sought to reinstate much of the 1788 shoreline, and open waterfront areas to the public. Commercial towers were to rise behind in gradual fashion, thus blending into the high-rise central business district. Then, another proposal seemed to come out of nowhere and over the top of the Hill Thalis designs. Instead, the state would pursue a different design, featuring much more commercial real estate and a radically reconfigured suite of public space and community facilities—led by a consortium including developers Brookfield Multiplex, Mirvac, and Lendlease, who wanted to build a hotel tower in the harbour itself, out in the water. Another revised, and even bolder proposal, followed: Lendlease had teamed up with Packer’s Crown Resorts to pitch a $1+ billion hotel, casino and entertainment complex, this time not jutting out into the harbour, but instead placed on the dwindling area of land set aside for parks, educational and cultural space on the water’s edge at the heart of the precinct. The tower, which was a further 105 metres higher than Lendlease’s hotel-in-the-harbour proposal, would become Sydney’s tallest building.

A raft of criticisms was unleashed. Senior planners and architects took aim at arguments that the brazen building would prove an ‘iconic’ asset for the city akin to the Sydney Opera House. Paul Keating, previously on the Barangaroo Design Excellence Review Panel, and an advocate for redevelopment, switched allegiances and became an ardent critic. Sydney Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, resigned from the Barangaroo Delivery Authority. Their criticisms didn’t seem to matter, though. The plans went ahead. Public housing tenants were evicted, cleansing the area of working-class diversity, and the tower got built, in a location where it never should be been.

But here’s the thing, Barangaroo: we don’t think that the building, or even its location, is your biggest problem. After talking to public housing tenants, we interviewed people in government and the planning sector, who chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, and they patiently explained to us something much worse. Beyond an ugly, imposing building, the enduring legacy is a much more subtle, and sinister, shift in planning regulation.

What made it possible for Lendlease and Crown to build it on your shores was a technical change to the planning system: a policy called Unsolicited Proposals. Under conventional development application processes, a developer publicly lodges a proposal for approval. To succeed, the resulting proposal, by virtue of the government’s integrated planning system, must consult with stakeholders and concord with the metropolitan or state government’s long-term plan. But, only a week after a secret meeting between Packer and then NSW Premier, Barry O’Farrell, legislation ensuring that projects were independently reviewed before being allowed to proceed without going to tender was removed. Consultancy firm Malpine, with a background in infrastructure privatisation, had been hired by the NSW Government to develop a policy enabling consortia of developers and financiers to pitch unsolicited ideas to government to redevelop key sites and assets, without having to disclose to the public details of the deal, or whether there was a business case showing overall public benefit.

This, Barangaroo—this regulatory concoction called Unsolicited Proposals, and what it represents for democratic participation in city-shaping more broadly—is what we want people to understand and to discuss. It sits behind the explanation of how the casino tower has come to be, where it is. For the Crown tower was the first major project approved under the Unsolicited Proposal process. And since then, it has been used to legitimate and justify other things: new private tollways, infrastructure deals, and tower projects unfurling above railway stations. While the Barangaroo casino has received most of the intense criticism, a new planning mechanism and philosophy was formalised and entered the regulatory landscape with much less notice. While the rhetoric surrounding Unsolicited Proposals evokes notions of ‘freeing-up’ assets and sites to flows of private investment, for the actors involved there is no intention of opening up sites or plans to outside competition. With high barriers to entry and significant technical hurdles, community groups, welfare providers and other non-profit groups are effectively locked-out.

For developers and financiers, politicians and for a small cabal of high-level bureaucrats in Transport for NSW and the Department of Premier and Cabinet, it’s now just a normal part of doing government and business. Behind closed doors, proponents identify sites or infrastructures for which neither government nor the public have expressed a desire for change. Concepts are developed, project specifications defined, and even finance secured before approaching government for approval and support. Then—and this is a key detail, Barangaroo—proponents are invited to meet privately with government officials to discuss their ideas, before submitting plans to public scrutiny and formal approvals processes.

This lack of transparency has become, in the view of those we’ve interviewed, a worrisome corruption vulnerability. Private meetings between development interests and government officials, discussing possibilities and technical and financial calculations, have replaced brown paper bags. Commercial-in-confidence provisions and a culture of planning-as-deal-making make it harder to visualise development connivances as they evolve. And, in turn, favouritism and graft—what we might call corruption in any other domain—goes unchecked. This is by design. In fact, as we outlay in a recent academic publication [22], there is a longer history here. A political project legitimating secretive monopolies over high-value sites and normalizing planning-as-deal-making has been ticking along in background for many decades. Arthur Phillip’s 1788 theft of you from the Gadigal people of the Eora nation was, it could be said, the ultimate unsolicited proposal.

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Dearest Barangaroo, your history is full of momentous episodes and monumental structures. We value this. But there are ghosts that lurk between the buildings. Legacies of eviction and arrogation only become clearer talking to those on the ground, in your midst. As Sydneysiders grow used to the looming site of your casino tower, and its sparkle gradually fades, we hope people will find ways to listen to these other stories of you.

[20] Barangaroo was a prominent Aboriginal woman of the late 18th century, famous for her antagonism towards the British colonisers at the time of the invasion of Sydney near the current Barangaroo site. In talking to First Nations stakeholders for this project, we have been reminded that Aboriginal people did not name places after people, casting a shadow over this site’s most recent redesignation. While the anthropological records are unclear on its original Gadigal name—unlike adjacent Sydney Cove, which is Warrane—some First Nations stakeholders interviewed did accept that the new designation at least recognises a prominent, female, resistance figure.

[21] Darcy, M and Rogers, D (2016) Place, political culture and post- Green Ban resistance: Public housing in Millers Point, Sydney. Cities 57: 47-54.

[22] Rogers, D. and Gibson, C. (2021) Unsolicited urbanism: develop- ment monopolies, regulatory-technical fixes and planning-as-deal- making. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 53 (3), 525-547.