Barangaroo is sustainability refusing to be born

Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.

Aneurin Bevan

Barangaroo. The word has become a symbol of all that’s wrong with our society. Here you’ve got a slab of land, on the waterfront, right in the CBD, and, woopy-doo, it’s owned by the government. Which is to say, theoretically, by all of us. What an opportunity!

But we can’t do anything decent, progressive, forward-looking with it. Nothing socially useful. We have to go cap in hand to atavistic people like Lend Lease and Jamie Packer. And all they can think of is as much ghastly office space as they can fit in, the usual “world class” hotel, and a casino. A casino, ah yes – a cathedral dedicated to the capitalist ethos – where money is extracted from complete idiots impressed by RSL club décor, pretty nubile girls wearing next to nothing, free prawn cocktails, and the extremely remote possibility of coming away mind-blowingly rich.

Of course, we’re told that the casino will only fleece fabulously rich foreign idiots, but we all know, when established, it will have abundant opportunity for the poor to fleeced themselves too. And then we’ll all have to pay to pick up the pieces.

You only have to look a few hundred metres south to The Star casino, brooding, like a tarted-up 1950s suburban hospital, over Laurie Brereton’s tacky Darling Harbour, to see what will actually happen.

Way back in 2000, the McClelland Inquiry told us everything about the place we’d known even before they built it. It’d be used to launder drug money, we said. The politicians demurred. It would be strictly controlled by a Casino Control Authority. It would raise money for public schools and kiddies with cancer. There’d be special programs to help the hapless losers it might perhaps generate. They knew we knew it was a con, but the casino went ahead anyway.

The McClelland Inquiry revealed that the casino actively courted big-time drug dealers. Former casino employees testified they’d entertained heroin boss Duong Van Ia and his associates,,, and had done whatever was necessary to get them to try their luck in the high-roller room.

The Casino Control Authority hadn’t turned a hair when Mr Duong bet more than $20 million in a few months. But they felt he was just a small businessman who ran a Cabramatta roast duck shop, and everybody knows roast duck is very popular in Cabramatta.

And when Four Corners asked Kaye Loder, the Carr Government favourite in charge of the Casino Control Authority about the Duong business, she said she’d be sorry to see the money go out of NSW.

Maybe nowadays, in the brave new world of Chinese market Stalinism, the new high-rollers won’t be drug dealers, they’ll just be men who made billions selling the West cheap widgets made by wage slaves on hellish production lines in Guangdong, or maybe they’ll be owners of death-trap sweatshops in Myanmar, but is that much better?

For the low-rollers, The Star runs the Star Express, minibuses quaintly referred to as “chauffered coaches”, operating on dedicated routes from 7.30 in the morning to 1.00 am the following. “The Star Express ensures you are able to enjoy all that The Star has to offer, without worrying about your return home at the end of your experience,” as their website puts it.

I love it: “your experience”. Which is to say, when you blow the money set aside for the kids’ school uniforms, the rent money for the flat, and your noodle stall at Westfields, at least you’ll get home to bed for less than $10 dollars. How decent of them.

But Packer’s new casino at Barangaroo will be nothing like The Star. Or the theme park tack of Las Vegas. Or even Melbourne’s ghastly Crown Casino. Oh no. It’ll be penis architecture of a very high order, evoking the sail of a maxi yacht. Or maybe one skyward-pointed wing of a dead stainless-steel seagull. The sort of megalomanic “iconic”, “signature”, statement that appeals to Paul Keating, whose taste, famously, runs to the frigidly ugly clocks of Louis-Phillippe’s bogus Second Empire.

All of us who are socially responsible and scientifically-minded would cheer on a Barangaroo that was a model for a sustainable low-energy future: passive solar, powered by the sun and the wind, harvesting rainwater, with some socially useful, and uplifting purpose, modest, and, dare I say it, charming.  But we’re not allowed to have it. What we’ll get is what Jamie Packer wants.