Is Chris Minns leading us into a Portaloo apocalypse?

There is a Portaloo outside my apartment. The neighbouring property is being demolished and rebuilt, and among all the indignities I must suffer during the construction, the Portaloo is the worst.

Sometimes, the Portaloo is moved onto the boundaries of the building site. Sometimes, it lives on the nature strip. Either way, the fetid blue box is directly in my line of sight every single time I leave or enter my home.

How long can you hold your breath for?Credit: iStock

I used a Portaloo once, at an event, and it was, frankly, traumatic. Profound claustrophobia combined with a powerful odour plus a fear of the whole thing toppling over did not make for a comfortable toileting experience. It is not a memory I wish to revisit, and yet here I am, walking past one every day.

To add insult to injury, I can occasionally see the tradies entering or leaving the Portaloo, and I know what they’re doing in there, and I have to think about that on my morning walk, too.

Of course, I already know these tradies, intimately. They have been on site next door every weekday now for what has actually been a year, but feels like a couple of decades. I hear them calling to each other and playing their music and having long conversations about joists.

If I leave my house late morning, things get really awkward. About 11.30 each day, they congregate under the tree in front of my car, and I have to walk right through their picnic to get to the street. I tiptoe past their hairy thighs and enormous steel-capped boots, trying hard to be discreet as they wolf down their shnitty sandwiches and bacon and egg rolls, and slurp from energy drinks with menacing names like Monster and Mother and Red Bull.

The regular tradies are polite, but their visitors to the building site are often not. At least once a week I leave my home to find a new, unfamiliar truck parked across my drive, with the driver nowhere to be found. Off I trot to the building site, past the Portaloo, to find the foreman.

“There’s a truck blocking my car again,” I say, wearily.

“Oh, no!” he says, his face a picture of outrage, although the truck is clearly in his eyeline. “I’ll get them to move it.”

On one occasion, my adult child climbed into the driver’s seat and reversed straight into the truck. This was not a deliberate act of protest; they just didn’t notice it there. When I expressed my displeasure to the truckie – “You shouldn’t park across my drive! My kid backed into you!” – he just laughed and said, “Yeah, mate, not my fault they can’t drive.”

It was enraging, but he had a point.

The noise is endless. The drilling! The hammering! The beeping of the cranes that make me startle every time. Still, I’m not suffering alone. There are building works all over the city; I cannot drive my kid to school without passing a dozen or more construction sites. Some drives feel like an obstacle course, pulling over for a truck here, stopping for a roadblock there, dodging a new pothole over there. I had three flat tyres in 18 months, all punctures from nails.

I felt like puncturing something myself.

And with Premier Chris Minns’ new housing targets – 375,000 new homes in five years – it is only going to get worse. How many Portaloos will plop up on the streets of Sydney? How many cans of Red Bull on the lawns? How many young women in hi-vis vests and full makeup wielding stop signs? How many trucks blocking driveways in the dawn?

Still, construction is a necessary evil. We need more homes, and more rental properties, and so we need more new developments. What we don’t need, however, is the constant redevelopment of existing homes to make them bigger, better and shinier. Must I put up with drilling for two years because you want a new, fancy kitchen, off-street parking and a laundry chute? Are we all not suffering enough?

Apparently not. Though the foundations have been laid, the construction of my neighbour’s house hasn’t even begun. And so, I will brush the concrete dust off my car, ask the tradies to move their truck, and drive past that Portaloo once again.

Kerri Sackville is an author, columnist and mother of three. Her latest book is The Secret Life of You: How a bit of alone time can change your life, relationships and maybe the world.