Murder on Lower Fort
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| Banner image for the Facebook page Save Our Homes |
MURDER ON LOWER FORT
John Stapleton
Whichever celestial being anointed
Pru Goward as NSW Planning Minister had a divine sense of humour.
You couldn’t have created a bigger
debacle at Millers Point in Sydney if you had been planning it since birth.
In mid-September of 2014, in a scene
being repeated a number of times across the historic suburb nestled in next to
the southern flanks of the Harbour Bridge, it took 12 policemen and several
housing officers to remove squatters from one of the houses on Argyle Place.
Posters and banners on surrounding houses sent the message: “Save Our
Community”, “Save Our Heritage”, “Save Our Homes”, as did blown up posters of
newspaper articles: “The state government is offloading 100s of harbourside
homes at Millers Point without economic modelling or an up-to-date social
housing plan, raising doubts over the integrity of the controversial sale.”
As the squatters briefly stood their
ground in Argyle Place, a band of protestors and other interested parties
watched silently or heckled the police, who were just doing their jobs and
should never have been placed in the situation they were; and the housing
officers, many of whom don’t agree with what they are being asked to do.
After a standoff lasting several
hours the students drove off in a late-model Rav-4. In truth they weren’t the
genuinely homeless. They were just protesting the bully tactics the NSW State
Government has used to rid the Rocks of public housing tenants; and to sell-off
some of the most spectacular real estate in Australia.
With just a modicum of common sense
and common decency the protests, the waving banners, squatters, distress of the
residents and hostile media coverage the state government has generated could
all have been avoided.
There were already 60 empty houses at
Millers Point when the pogrom began. Most of those houses have yet to be sold.
Yet the State Government has mounted a determined effort to move the old public
housing tenants on, uniting a once divided “community” whilst creating a wave
of sympathetic media coverage. Prior to the then Housing Minister Pru Goward’s
announcement of the sell-off there were three community groups dedicated to
fighting the rumoured sale of the suburb. The sight of the scheduled six-star
casino Barangaroo rising from the mud literally at the end of their streets was
laying a deep unrest. But none of them could agree on tactics and no one had a
good word to say about anyone else. Then Pru Goward came along. The warring
groups united against a common enemy; and in fact have run a brilliant social
media and street protest campaign. The media has been on-side; and the
organisers have given them all the material they needed to write “brutal
Liberal government attacks working class community” stories.
In the last few days, amidst all the
banners and posters, photocopied, A-4 sized photographs of elderly residents
have been placed in strategic locations around Millers Point, each of them
accompanied by stories from their lives: “Everyone had their hotel, but no one
used to be exclusive because they knew their mates would be at a different pub
at a different time”; “I reckon to move from here, after 50 odd years in
Millers Point, will just about see the end of me”; “Boxing Day we used to take
over Kent Street, we didn’t ask permission, we’d block off one end all the way
up to where the Bridge is now, and we used to play cricket games”; “My five
children have fond memories of growing up here”; “I am so stressed, feeling a
nervous wreck, shame on the government”.
Yet another of the many ironies in
the Debacle of Millers Point is that a significant number of the remaining 300
or so tenants, trapped in derelict or run-down properties, quite a few with
rotting carpets and leaking roofs, want to go. They’ve got their hands up, but
the department doesn’t have the housing stock to shift them.
The NSW Liberal Party could have
adopted a civilised air. At any one time about a quarter of public housing
tenants have a request in for relocation, to go and live with their girlfriends
or boyfriends, to be closer to children or parents. Much the same result as the
100 houses the government has already emptied could have been achieved simply
by asking people politely. A pre-existing desire amongst some to move to better
maintained properties and natural attrition in an elderly population would have
all combined to give them at least the 100 they now have; if not more. Instead
the NSW Planning and Housing Departments have managed to alienate everybody,
the tenants, the media, the housing workers themselves, and the police who have
to deal with the consequences of their ineptitude.
From overseas research uncovered in a
standard literature search in their Social Impact Assessment, the government
knew that resettling an elderly population, as at Millers Point, would lead to
increased morbidity rates. The NSW Housing Department, presumably under orders
from the Minister, shamefully attempted to conceal this information from the
general public.
In other words, Pru Goward knew
perfectly well that some people would die as a result of the policies she has
implemented, first in her role as NSW Housing Minister, then in her role as
Planning Minister.
How does that not make her culpable?
How is the work of her lieutenants in attempting to conceal the research from
the public not a breach of the legislation controlling the behaviour of public
servants?
Did Goward have the grace, dignity or
plain old-fashioned common decency to come down to Millers Point and tell the
people who lived there why their lives were being so mercilessly disrupted? To
explain to them why it was important that their homes be sold from under them?
Of course not.
Did the Leader of the Opposition John
Robertson, whose party initiated the sell-off, stoop so low as to try and shore
up votes amongst the beleaguered elderly; to come down to the Harry Jensen
Community Centre in Argyle Place to assure them that the Labor Party would do
all it could to help them.
Of course he did.
Beyond providing a case study in
appalling media management, for what not to do if you’re a departmental media
masseur, there is much to be learnt from the debacle at Millers Point. In a
sense it is a microcosm of all that is wrong with public housing in NSW.
There has been a flurry of media
stories emphasising the long links that some of the inhabitants have to the
area: “my father was a waterfront worker”, “I can remember as a child in the
wool season, the big horses with the bales of wool”, “the row of terrace houses
that I live in now, it is supposed to be the first row of terrace houses in the
country, we moved in here in 1946”.
The large number of tenants with
historical links to the area due to the fact that many of the houses were
originally rented from the Maritime Services Board, prior to the properties
being handed over to the Housing Department more than 20 years ago. But in
truth a significant number of the people who inhabited Millers Point had little
historic connection, they just happened to have been washed up there on the
tides of fortune. The latter-day policy of dumping the mentally ill into
Millers Point, rather than finding them appropriate accommodation, exacerbated
the difficulties in the area, meaning that for years many of the elderly no
longer felt safe outside their own homes.
One banner flying from a terrace balcony
reads: “Why should only the Rich Live in the City? Working People Need Homes
Here Too.”
Not everyone likes to admit it, but
with the exception of the long-term residents who ended up under the mantle of
the Housing Department through the transition of properties from the Maritime
Services Board more than 20 years ago, there is some truth to the quip “the
working class who never worked”. The upwardly grasping middle classes who
throng the Rocks at the weekend, admiring, above all else, the real estate,
often ask loudly as they eye the less salubrious local housing tenants: “How do
they do it?”
The answer is easy enough. People
usually end up in public housing because something has gone badly wrong in
their lives.
While the mythologising of a local “community”
with historical links to the area has struck a chord with many Sydneysiders,
there are many who ended up in Millers Point by happenstance. Apart from a few
happy drunks at the bus stops, who make easy material for time-poor
journalists, the flotsam and jetsam of misfits, the mentally ill and the
dysfunctional who also make up a significant percentage of the Millers Point
population have been ignored. Yet another slate in the largely unwritten
history of Sydney’s underclass is being wiped clean, without any documentation
to prove who they were, or why they were.
One of the apartment blocks, known
perhaps not so affectionately as Manic Mansions, was inhabited by aging
alcoholics, addicts, schitzophrenics, squatters and ex-cons.
It is already half empty. The
squatter was made homeless with the assistance of the police. The ground-floor
alcoholic, whose windows had long been smashed and his doors broken, who hadn’t
had the electricity on or paid rent in years, has been relocated, as has the
former inmate. One of the building’s “methadonians”, whose biggest task of the
day was to make it to the Clinic to get his dose, has also been shifted on. His
old apartment remains empty. Stimulated by the squatting actions by community
activists, patrolling security guards now check it regularly. A banner, only
half unfurled, hangs from one of the windows: “Save Our...”
Some of the people in this cluster of
homes have never so much as swept their floors from the day they moved in. They
don’t value the properties because they have no value. They live next to one of
the most beautiful harbours in the world, but barely ever so much as look at
it. “Housos with million dollar views”. Some of them barely raise their eyes.
But whatever went wrong in their
lives back then, back when, the people being hosed out of the Rocks today are
leaving with nothing but their own bitterness, disillusion and sense of loss;
despite the decades that some of them have lived there.
Public housing was meant to be a step
up out of poverty, a way for working class families to get onto their feet and
get into the private market, to better themselves.
The people now being shuffled on are
no better off than when they arrived. Public housing hasn’t worked to lift them
up; it’s barely worked to maintain them in a slowly deteriorating state.
The reality is that public housing
estates have become little more than taxpayer funded slums, concentrations of
people with alcohol, addiction, mental and physical health problems. It is here
people can live out fractured, de-motivated lives without the financial
motivator of having to work to pay the rent, and where they can slowly settle
into their graves after lifetimes of under-achievement. There haven’t been the
supporting services; there has been no motivation for self-improvement.
Some of the alternative housing stock
in other public housing areas being shown to squatters by the NSW Housing
Department made homeless by Goward’s pogrom would not be fit to hang a cat in,
much less prove to be places where people could get their lives back on track;
and are little more than exemplars of all that is wrong with social housing,
so-called. The cliché of groups of stoned miscreants from housing estates
hanging outside methadone clinics haggling small time drug deals is all too
true for all too many parts of Sydney.
It is in the housing estates that the
rhetoric concerning the poor and the vulnerable creates a race to the bottom,
towards the holy grail of welfare, the disability pension. It is here that the
destructive rhetoric of victimhood has had its worst impacts. The shift in tone
by the Abbott government, towards ideas of self-reliance and notions that we
are a resilient, hard working people, is fine as far as it goes; but needs to
go further. We all deserve to be the best we can possibly be. There has to be a
way where all the negatives of public housing estates, the concentrations of
“social disadvantage”, their unsafe nature, the lack of care that the tenants
take in their properties, the appalling malaise that characterises so many of
them, could be turned around. It is, after all, taxpayers’ money; and the
taxpayer is entitled to expect that their money is being spent improving the
lives of others, not making them worse.
There is much to be said for
combining the best of the social and private markets, that is, for selling
public housing to the tenants themselves at a discounted mortgage rate
equivalent to their rent. In this way those now so badly bereaved, sitting in
the evenings at the Harbour View Hotel in Millers Point drunkenly lamenting
their lot in life, waiting with dread for a relocation officer to settle their
fates, would be proud owners or part-owners of an asset.
If one thinks of the houses as living
creatures, they are better off being sold to people who have the financial
resources to care for them, who will appreciate them.
But one of the savage ironies of the
sell-off of Millers Point is that the prices they are fetching, for some of the
most stunning real estate in the country, is a comparative pittance to what
could have been achieved with an orderly, dignified, civilised sell-off.
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| 11 Lower Fort Street, Millers Point Picture courtesy of Real Estate dot com |
Number 11 Lower Fort Street, a grand
Victorian Terrace known as Ballara, has five bedrooms and three bathrooms. It
is a double fronted four story terrace tucked in next to the southern end of
the Harbour Bridge, has views across to the Opera House from its front windows,
and from the back views across to the yacht dotted Lavender Bay, best known in
Sydney history as the home of painter Brett Whitely. There is a jacaranda tree
in the large backyard, and the views across to Luna Park are only partially
obscured by Pier One. It is a pleasant, easy walk to the Opera House, the Sydney
Theatre and Dance Companies, the cafes dotting the finger wharves along Hickson
Road and a number of fine dining establishments. In other words, in a real
estate obsessed Sydney, it’s just about impossible to get a better location.
And it can’t be built out. The $3.9 million it fetched at auction in
mid-September of 2014 will come to be seen as a bargain.
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| One of the views from 11 Fort Street, Millers Point. Picture courtesy of Real Estate dot com |
Next door at Number 9, Viewforth, the
“Save Our Homes” and “No Surrender: Not for Sale” posters still adhere to the
front walls of the house, although for how much longer remains to be seen.
Further down, closer to the harbour, at Number 3, Davesboro, where the views
are even more spectacular if that is possible, the windows are already boarded
up, and builder’s skips in the front yard filling up with rubbish.
Just up the private lane at the rear
of these spectacular houses, spelt out in adjoining t-shirts hanging on a
clothing line, are the words: “THIS IS MY HOME”.
It’s impossible to get a more
historic, more superbly located or visually rich part of Sydney than the Rocks.
Just around the corner from Number 11 Lower Fort is where the first bubonic
plague victim died at the turn of the 19th Century. And a few short steps away,
on the former site of the Live and Let Live Hotel, the Stevens Buildings 1900.
With its four floors and 32 rooms, it was the first walk-up block of flats in
Sydney. Some of the surrounding sandstone block buildings date back to the
1840s. Throughout the 19th Century the area was known for gambling
dens and brothels. During the Great Depression the docklands was called The
Hungry Mile by harbourside workers searching, often fruitlessly, for a job;
while in the 1970s the unions imposed green bans blocking redevelopment of the
area. In the future Miller’s Point will become known as one of the wealthiest
enclaves in the whole of Australia. But in its rich history, 2014 will go down
in history as one of its most shameful episodes; with the Planning Minister,
Pru Goward, front and centre.
John Stapleton worked as a staff
reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald
from 1986-1994 and for The Australian
from 1994-2009. He has written many hundreds of newspaper stories centred on
Sydney. He is currently commissioning editor for A Sense of Place Publishing,
which plans to publish historian Melissa Holmes A History of the Rocks next year.
