NAKED CITY: BIG IS GOOD IN 2013!
It’s no coincidence that the big yellow duckie at Darling Harbour has been heavily promoted as the Sydney Festival’s visual centrepiece. At a time when the green light has been given for those massive B-Triple trailer trucks to go thundering down the Hume and the skyline of Barangaroo gets taller everyday it seems ‘BIG’ is the word for 2013.
Maybe it’s our smugness in surviving the global financial crisis or us all heaving a sigh of mock relief that the world did not implode in December of last year. Whatever the motivation it appears that politicians and the financial moguls have seized the moment to promote ‘BIG’ as the ethos for the next 12 months.
Hunting in the national parks – now that is ‘BIG,’ especially when thousand of gun toting shooters converge on your favourite bushland, massacring anything remotely feral and leaving behind a humongous mountain of rotting carrion and VB cans. Thank God the B-Triples are hard at work on the Hume, making sure that the supply of bullets and beer never runs out.
Nationally 2013 is an election year and expect not only lots of very ‘BIG’ promises but a style of campaigning that echoes the massive hoopla of the recent US election. Let’s not be sizeist but people of large stature like Clive Palmer and Gina Reinhart will no doubt have a ‘BIG’ influence on the final result. Mining after all is our major money earner and the backbone of our economy – and it can only get bigger.
‘BIG’ mining will definitely be all the rage in 2013, and who cares if the boom is due to end in two or three years time. Let’s rip up more of the Hunter Valley, let the frackers run riot in Centennial Park or anywhere else there’s a sniff of coal seam gas and let’s all dig deeper, pockmarking the landscape with even bigger and bigger holes.
Let’s not worry if Sydney’s ever increasing population of people and cars creates more ‘BIG’ congestion because that is a positive thing and just the excuse needed to rip up Parramatta Road, bulldozing hundreds of homes and businesses in the process and creating our own LA style twelve lane freeway.
It was that bastion of American capitalism Donald Trump who once said, “if you’re going to be thinking, you may as well think big” and that surely should be the philosophy for those planning the future of Australia’s biggest city. Well, we already have the Opera House and The Bridge and our NYE cracker night is right up there with the biggest in the world. But what we really need is something really, really ‘BIG’.
It might sound crazy but let’s pull out all stops, bugger the budget and give the Burj Khalifa in Dubai a run for its money. Hey, we’re not only talking the world’s tallest building but a structure that keeps growing year by year and can never be overshadowed by a taller construction elsewhere. Let’s not get too biblical but it could well be our own Tower of Babel, a virtual gateway to heaven, with pilgrims from all over the world flocking to enjoy its ever towering sky lounge and revolving restaurant.
Surely 2013 is the year for everybody in the Harbour City to think ‘BIG’ – as the great self help guru David J Schwartz once said, “life is to short to be little.”
