Joe Hildebrand: How a golf club and the Greens got it so wrong
A golf club ignoring a family’s pleas for a way to memorialise their gut-wrenching tragedy and a Greens council wanting to downsize the local course - welcome to a lesson in indecency.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
All politics is local. As much as academics or activists might pontificate ideology or international causes, for the vast majority of people the way they see society and who they trust to run it is based on what they see outside their own front door.
And today, everyday residents in two very different Sydney suburbs would be appalled at efforts from two very different political animals to tear up the fabric of their community.
And both, strangely enough, involve golf courses.
The first is the shameless attempt by the Oatlands Golf Club to stick almost 200 apartments on the course after claiming it couldn’t accommodate a tiny memorial for the three Abdallah children and their cousin.
Even by the golf club’s own high water mark of heartlessness – set when it first fought back against the Abdallah family’s incredibly humble request – this is a breathtaking level of barefaced money-grabbing gluttony.
Moreover it is so embarrassingly crude. Others in business and politics at least have the table manners to veil their actions behind a fig leaf of community interest or at least wait a respectable amount of time.
The Oatlands club, by contrast, has managed to say with a straight face that a memorial garden of just a few square metres to mark one of Sydney’s most gut-wrenching tragedies was inappropriate for the club and community and then less than six months later seek approval for five multi-storey apartment buildings in almost exactly the same spot.
Even if the development is approved by the Sydney Central City Planning Panel, it is hard to imagine any property that would be more accursed. They’d have better luck building it on an ancient Indian burial ground.
Surely it is only a matter of time before club members stage some kind of coup against the management for their ongoing outrages against common decency. If not, the residents and electors of Western Sydney might find another way to depose them.
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the political and putting spectrum, a thoroughly decent public golf club is under threat from the ideological left for merely daring to exist – which at least gives it something in common with the state of Israel.
And the Marrickville Golf Club has long been a promised land for the working man’s meditation, the only course for miles at which anyone from any class, colour or creed could hack away to their heart’s content.
An old mate of mine who grew up in Mascot says it was the only club within bull’s roar that he and all his working-class mates could get into for a game.
This was, of course, when Marrickville was working-class heartland. But as the area has become more gentrified and thus more overrun by Greens politicians such working-class traditions have become under threat.
Now there is a renewed push by the Greens local council candidate to cut the golf course in half from 18 to nine holes, apparently for reasons that are as ideological as anything else.
A bizarre letter to the local government minister even felt the need to acknowledge that “golf is a legitimate sport” before then going on to decry it for not being green enough.
“Golf is also largely environmentally unsustainable and polluting, being highly water-intensive and reliant on vast amounts of chemicals. In the case of Marrickville Golf Club, many golf balls and golfing tees end up in the Cooks River and the fertiliser that is used to maintain the greens washes into the river.”
Now I have never played a round of golf, nor even swung a club in anger. The closest I have ever come is watching Happy Gilmore whenever I’m drunk enough to find it funny. But that is not the point – or rather it is precisely the point. Just because I don’t play golf, or even understand it, why on earth should I be able to deprive others of what gives them pleasure and relaxation.
I should also declare that while I am not a member of the club, I do live very near the course and during the long, harsh months of lockdown it was actually heartwarming to see and hear people out exercising one of the few freedoms they could, laughing and chatting with each other. It was a precious little ember of normality in the neighbourhood.
Nor is the course home merely to a few elite club members as the Greens seem to believe. Anyone in the public can access it and they do: from dog walkers (including the federal Labor leader) to kids running around jumping in puddles after a big rain, to tradies rocking up with a bucket of balls after work, to literally anyone in the community or anywhere else.
Certainly all the locals I know love it.
If the Greens want to get more in touch with mainstream sentiment then they might want to focus their energies on another candidate in the next ward who suggested holding a workshop to make pepper spray to be deployed on the police.
From greed to Greens, it’s hard to imagine two extremes more utterly out of step with mainstream suburban Australia.
Hopefully next Saturday’s local government elections will only prove that.