Paul Keating, you're terrific - Piers Akerman

Paul Keating, please take a bow.Your damning assessment of the weekend’s Superboat Grand Prix staged on Sydney Harbour was absolutely correct.

Only a State government as deluded in its thinking as the blinkered Iemma team could have possibly believed that the tranquil waters of the Harbour should have been closed to regular boating activities and turned over to this exhibition of adolescent fascination with noise and speed. Not only was one would-be competitor killed in a pre-race incident but crowd numbers were barely a tenth of what the government claimed to expect. Given the government’s notorious inability to guess how many people will require a train or a bus, or even show up to watch the annual homosexual parade, relying on its experts to assess the numbers of super-power boat enthusiasts was always going to be problematical. But Mr Keating, whose elitist obsession with areas of the arts may have contributed to his own government’s downfall, knows a thing or two about boats and has a keen aesthetic sense of the place Sydney Harbour occupies in the hearts of nearly all Australians. Twenty years ago he was railing against the ugliness of the buildings imposed by over-paid architects around the Harbour’s foreshore and calling for the Harbour to be made more accessible to the public, now he has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the ordinary families who enjoy the opportunities the Harbour provides for gentle recreation. The State government, which wanted to charge citizens to stand within the grounds of the Botanic Gardens to see the power boats, should be ashamed. Mr Keating spoke for thousands of boat owners when he said there was no place for super power boat racing on the Harbour. “The whole thing is an outrage that these boys with their toys can monopolise the harbour to the exclusion of everyone else's quiet enjoyment of it,” he told The Sydney Boring Herald. "The boating fraternity in particular, particularly the plastic boat manufacturers, think that whenever they produce another Tupperware boat they have an inherent right to space on Sydney Harbour to park it or run it. The big plastic boats that drive up and down the harbour at 30 or 40 knots that capsize the boats of little people will simply be encouraged by an officially sponsored speedfest." Those who regularly use the Harbour were locked out of vast sections of the waterway, scheduled yacht racing was cancelled almost without notice as the State and organisers of the noisy extravaganza made no attempt to discuss their plans with the clubs that pay for the privilege of racing around the buoys. Further, the official encouragement of excessive speed on the waterway was just plain stupid. Already there are far too many accidents caused by the owners and drivers of large powerboats who have no sense of the damage wrought by the huge wakes their vessels create as they roar through otherwise tranquil waters. On this issue, I stand with Paul Keating one hundred per cent.