Piers Akerman: NIMBYS will kill off our living harbour with their shipload of selfish objections

For more than 200 years, Sydney has been blessed with a living harbour — home to a naval and merchant marine, a fishing fleet, a recreational fleet, and flotillas of ferries. It is far too important to be destroyed by NIMBYs, writes Piers Akerman.

NIMBYs, the Not In My Backyard clique, are a wretched blight on the suburbs in which they are found.

Usually wealthy and self-styled as progressive activists, they wield disproportionate power in local and state politics, and are responsible for degrading the local character of their environs into a bland melange of featureless conformity.

Like parasites, they attack the vitality of their host and leave a hollowed husk of what was once a vibrant community.

Sydney Harbour belongs to everyone — not just the moaning NIMBYs.

Under pressure from a relatively small number of whining and whingeing curtain-twitchers, diversity of culture and occupation is being extinguished and stultifying conformity descends like sludge.

Sydney was once blessed with a living harbour. For more than 200 years, the vast waterway was home to a naval and merchant marine, a fishing fleet, a recreational fleet, and its waters were a thoroughfare for flotillas of ferries linking Circular Quay to wharves from Manly to Parramatta.

Now, NIMBYs and equally woke bureaucrats are killing the living harbour.

Since 1853, a thriving shipyard has operated out from McMahons Point on Berrys Bay, just to the west of the Harbour Bridge.

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Down its historic slipways, thousands of boats of all sizes and purposes were brought into existence at the yard, now known as Noakes, from the charming wooden ferries that chuffed about under steam to modern craft.

Critical to national security, police and naval vessels are maintained there, as well as a historic fleet, heritage craft operated by charitable institutions, the huge and powerful Sydney-to-Hobart yachts, and multimillion-dollar power boats as well as smaller mum-and-dad yachts owned by grassroots Sydneysiders.

With coronavirus locking people in, the yard’s 85 permanent employees and 12 apprentices have been fully occupied, and owner Sean Langman has just taken on a further 10 hands to cope with the work.

Operating on lower margins and higher volume, the yard provides much-needed work for an extremely dedicated and enthusiastic workforce.

Hobart, the historic capital of Tasmania, which has done far more to protect its heritage and has benefited more from its appreciation of its history than any other state, approached the issue of its waterfront and the handful of remaining working shipyards from a totally different perspective.

Sean Langman at Noakes Shipyard in McMahons Point. Picture: Adam Yip

When its small NIMBY tribe demanded the right to walk around the waterfront unimpeded by slipways and working wharves, and made claims about the landscape, the council firmly declared that a view is a privilege not a right. That ensured that the historic Battery Point yards operated by Max Creese, John Muir and Percy Coverdale — all builders of numerous legendary yachts now treasured as heirloom museum pieces — stayed in the hands of watermen who will keep them as working shipyards and features of the city’s waterfront.

The noisy clique of McMahons Point elites demanding that Noakes restrict its operations, and attempting to block it from upgrading its current facilities with a better-than-world’s-best practice floating dry dock to ensure the best possible environmental standards just don’t appreciate what they have and don’t see how selfish they are.

Perhaps they’re envious of real people working to create objects of utility and beauty — and, of course, none of them were there before the shipyard was built.

Such is their ignorance and their malevolence that some are laughably demanding in their complaints to council that a handful of small dinghies be included in the total count of boat spaces at the yard, which was fixed by consent at 26 in 1990.

Langman, who was born on a boat in Rushcutters Bay, has kicked around the waterfront all his life. Boats, particularly wooden boats, are his passion.

Standing against the sandstone walls at the rear of his shipyard are several seriously historic timber yachts slowly being restored by his apprentices as they learn their art from stem to stern.

Now he’s trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare as North Sydney Council, Roads and Maritime, and the Environmental Protection Authority wrangle — with not one of them showing any appreciation for the living history they should protect and the living legend who is fighting to preserve our valuable heritage.

Sydney Harbour is of national importance, the shortsighted NIMBYs of McMahons Point don’t own it and their demands must be torpedoed.