This week, the CFMEU construction union declared a Green Ban over Sirius, a 1980 NSW Housing Commission block, in the brutalist architectural tradition, in The Rocks in Sydney, defying state government plans to demolish it. It was a repeat of the early 1970s when similar action by the Builders Labourers Federation halted state plans to demolish rundown public housing in The Rocks, relocate long-term residents and redevelop the area with tall towers. That deadlock was broken in 1975 when the government agreed to Resident Action Group demands that the area remain a residential and historic precinct and for a building to rehouse displaced residents. Any such building required a social mix, with 1,2,3 and 4-bedroom units and aged units. Nor was it to be a sheer rectilinear block, they specified.

Tao Gofers, former Grade 4 NSW department of housing architect, designer of Sirius