Clover Moore pours $80,000 into a pop-up ‘H2O water bar’, open for just nine days
CLOVER Moore has a wacky new way to liquidate the City’s assets, by splashing a whopping $80,000 of ratepayers’ money on a pop-up water bar that will only be open for nine days.
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CASHED-UP Clover Moore has found a wacky new way to liquidate the City’s assets — by splashing a whopping $80,000 of ratepayers’ money on a bar that serves just water and will only be open nine days.
The Lord Mayor has come up with plenty of weird methods to pour public funds down the gurgler during her 12 years at Town Hall — from her weeds in Martin Place to a proposal for a giant plastic milk crate sculpture costing $2.5 million at drugs-riddled Belmore Park.
But ratepayers might get a familiar sinking feeling when they learn details of the latest splurge by City of Sydney — which is flush with $700 million in the bank.
On Thursday night, Ms Moore will open an “H2O water bar” at Paddington Reservoir Gardens on Oxford St — with waiters in white coats serving 17 different types of natural spring water free in test tubes.
The waters are from NSW, Tasmania and Queensland springs and the bar will be open on just nine days before the end of February as part of the City of Sydney’s Art & About series.
It will be set around a laboratory-style art installation.
“Sydney’s latest must-visit tasting bar is serving something more precious than vintage French bubbles or Japanese whisky: our natural water supply,” one advertising blurb reads.
City of Sydney confirmed it contributed $80,000 to the project, which will features a series of talks, debates and performances about water.
“It will be presented in the underground section of Paddington Reservoir Gardens, one of the first times this section of the venue has been opened to the public,” a City spokesman said.
“This is a significant community venue and its activation supports the local economy, attracting people who will go on to support local restaurants and bars.”
Councillor Edward Mandla criticised the spend.
“Normal people go to work to earn money. Our Lord Mayor spends her day pondering how to spend someone else’s money in the kookiest fashion,” he said.
“To me beer tastes like beer, wine tastes like wine and water is that thing that you have to drink lots of mostly between the beer and wine.”
The artist behind the project, Janet Laurence, hopes it will create awareness about water supplies. She was on the City’s public art advisory panel that directed a planned $9 million spend on the yet to be built Belmore Park milk crate sculpture, a giant steel arch outside Town Hall and bronze bird statues in the CBD’s north.
“Water itself is a treasure and we don’t realise that,” she said. “Around the world the shortage of water is getting really quite drastic.”
Sydney has been OK on that front recently — the city’s dams were 94 per cent full yesterday.
Ms Laurence insists drinkers will also enjoy the different-tasting waters at the bar.
“Waters taste different according to their source. It’s to do with geology and geography and the origins of that particular water,” she said.
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