News Limited and the Surry Hills glitterati rising up angry
Unless you’re a revhead climate change denialist, or you read The Daily Telegraph, you’re unlikely to have heard of Warren Brown, but he’s a big man in the shrinking world of the dead-tree media.
Warren is the Terror’s cartoonist. He also the writes the motoring column and he’s rising up angry about light rail, which the Telegraph, officially, doesn’t like. He apparently lives in the Olivia Gardens apartments, an architecturally undistinguished ’80s complex that lies in the path of the most direct light rail route between the east end of Devonshire St and Moore Park, which the trams will cross in order to reach Anzac Pde.
Warren’s livid about the fact that the light rail will come in through his front door. The Terror gave him a whole page for an editorial spray on the subject of his domicile’s impending doom, complete with the obligatory News Limited spray about Clover Moore’s “incomprehensible eyesore” cycleways and the rainbow crossing. What a hoot – a Murdoch journalist doing a nimbyist rant.
The Sydney Morning Herald ran a rather more balanced story featuring one Magdalena Toth on the possible horrors of having one’s investment property resumed. My heart bled.
At a recent community briefing, Transport Minister Berejiklian had to face down a howling mob of Devonshire Streeters. The anti-light rail push is being organised by People Uniting Surry Hills. They reckon the old suburb is facing nothing less than “destruction” , which evokes images of the US Air Force laying waste to Cambodia.
To hear PUSH and the Terror tell it, a citizens’ revolt is raging. I’ve haunted these once-mean streets all my life but it was a couple of years since I’d walked Devonshire, so I decided to check it out.
There wasn’t much to see. I had expected homes and businesses festooned with placards and banners but there were none. I encountered no barricades; no piles of burning tires; I was stopped by no armed patrols. PUSH’s posters were displayed by two businesses and two residences and a few were taped to trees. They had those little tear-off strips with contact details, but only half a dozen had actually been taken.
But perhaps the revolt was an online, virtual, cyberspace affair. When I got back to the office I checked. There was an online petition with a couple of hundred votes – which amounted to less than a third of the number said to have attended the community meeting. It was not much to show for a couple of week’s effort.
Then there were a few very amateurish videos uploaded by someone called “Sam Bourke”. Samuel? Samantha? Was this also, perhaps, somebody who worked for News Limited?
Their lead video, complete with ghastly music, was a real hoot. When I looked, it had only had 15 viewings. Surry Hills was “set for destruction, one more nail in the coffin”. Twenty five traffic intersections were going to be “closed or blocked” they said. This is a real stretch of the truth. There are only six significant intersections of which two already have traffic lights. Most of the “intersections” aren’t intersections, they’re junctions, and most are basically lanes, which, by a curious accident of Surry Hills history, are often called streets. Nor is it clear if any of them will be closed.
There’s a hysterical claim that the light rail route will result in “Cutting away a huge section [of] Moore Park North”, “probably as much as a football field”.
But the video belied it, showing a vast open park that then gets exploded with a bit of cheap stock animation. There was also vision taken with a cyclist’s sports camera labelled “walking tracks removed” showing tracks in no danger of removal at all. Curiously, the video also showed some unthreatening images of attractive light rail vehicles.
Actually, the light rail easement across Moore Park will be about 250 metres long and probably about eight wide. That’s less than a quarter of a maximum size rugby field and the line would pass between the existing playing fields with heaps to spare.
The PUSH group was also making the preposterous claim that Ward Park, on the south side of Devonshire St was somehow threatened, when in fact the light rail will run beside it on Devonshire St itself.
Afterwards I slipped into a forum on light rail for Oxford St, upstairs at the Beauchamp Hotel.
A couple of the PUSHites were there, shoving the line that Oxford St should get the light rail because Devonshire St didn’t want it. Trouble is, the greatest light rail priority is to serve the big trip generators: UNSW, Randwick Hospital, the Racecourse and the cricket ground – Devonshire St is simply the best way to get there – after which light rail on the direct Oxford St route to the city is pretty much inevitable.
PUSH spokesperson, Venietta Slama-Powell – a publicist by trade – had a spray at the end. She talked about “Great, huge, lumbering” trams threatening Surry Hills but, curiously, focused mostly on the horror of having traffic disrupted by light rail crossing roads. That sounded very much like Warren Brown and The Daily Telegraph.
