To pave our parks with gold, put up a parking lot (or convention centre)

Has there ever been a government more disdainful of its electors? Just when a perfect storm of COVID lockdowns, sharpened inequality and hyper-dense living has intensified our yearning for open urban parkland, the NSW government moves to make such parks less likely in the future and more vulnerable in the present.

As to the future, three official documents – a bill, a state environment planning policy (SEPP) and a strategic plan – mean new parks are less likely to be created, well or at all. The Design and Place SEPP will make development controls bendier (“principles-based”) and more strongly developer-led. The Infrastructure Contributions amendment to the Planning Act will thieve a large part of the development levy that currently enables councils to ameliorate the local effect of massive development and send it straight to government revenue. And the new Crown Lands Strategic Plan 2031 makes such lands easier to develop and commercialise.

That’s bad enough. But the Greater Sydney Parklands Bill presents a still more immediate threat.

Parramatta Park is glorious but increasingly compromised.Credit: Wolter Peeters

Sydney has a fine array of great parks, mostly created in historical times by our wiser and more generous forbears. Until now, these parks have been separately administered, largely by their own trusts under their own statutes.

The new bill draws almost all of them (excluding Hyde Park and in the city centre and Sydney Park at St Peters) beneath a single administrative umbrella: a vast jurisdiction covering thousands of hectares across the entire metropolis.

From left to right, they are: the lovely Fernhill Estate edging the Blue Mountains at Mulgoa; Western Sydney Parklands (a 20-kilometre strip of remnant green belt from Mt Druitt to Campbelltown); the glorious but increasingly compromised Parramatta Park; Callan Park in Rozelle and, in the east, Centennial Parklands (including Moore Park, Centennial Park, the Entertainment Quarter, aka Fox Studios, aka the old Easter showgrounds, plus ES Marks athletics field, and Queens Park, bordering Bronte).

Of course, you could see this amalgamation as efficient and well meant. Certainly that’s how Planning and Public Spaces Minister Rob Stokes wants it seen. Addressing a community forum earlier this year, he referenced Foucault, as you do in talking to lefties, on “the asymmetries of power” and insisted this bill reflected his personal and enduring “passion to do what I can to protect and extend Sydney’s parklands”.

Scenting scepticism and dwelling heavily on words like “collective” and “collaborate,” Stokes punned that “the trust has gone” from the community-government relationship but insisted the GSP Trust would restore same.

Now, eight months on, nothing in the draft bill suggests his promises of transparency, collaboration and protection were genuine.

The bill says the Trust “may” extend and acquire parklands, may consult with community groups. But the test of a good law isn’t whether it allows people to do the right thing. Decency needs no enabling. Laws exist to curb greed, power-lust and self-interest – and this one does none of that.

What does it do? Apart from establishing a vast and unwieldy governance task, it enables the Trust (which already exists) to “grant a lease over any part of the Trust lands for any … commercial purpose, that would directly or indirectly help the Trust achieve its objects”. Such leases can be up to 50 years and need no approval from Parliament or the community. All that’s required is a ministerial tick.

Further, the Trust may commission a government sector agency to “manage, maintain, improve or develop the GSPT estate”. And it may outsource any of its functions to a private corporation. So is there anything to stop a government-sanctioned Disneyworld, sports hotel or 20-storey convention centre popping up beside the duckpond? Probably not.

Not surprisingly, then, Sydney community groups of all stripes, fearing commercialisation by stealth, have mobilised in opposition.

It’s not just about a few coffee carts or restaurants. At Callan Park, there are fears the wonderful and immense Kirkbride complex plus Broughton Hall might be hived off for a business park or function centre.

At Moore Park, the bill seems to sanction the 2019 unsolicited bid from Carsingha Investments (a consortium of Gerry Harvey, Mark Carnegie, John Singleton, developer Greg Paramor and others) to build a $1.2 billion commercial precinct with buildings up to 20 storeys on the old showgrounds.

At Parramatta, already compromised by the new Lend Lease Eels stadium and its replacement pool on Mays Hill, the Greater Sydney Parklands Trust’s first act was to fell 60 mature trees for a car park. There are fears that more land will be excised for an Eels hotel. A reasonable compensation would be to extend the park to include the heritage-rich Cumberland Hospital site but since the profit-hungry Sydney University already proposes to develop that site, this is not on the cards.

True, these fears could prove unfounded. This bill, in its vagueness, could prove benign. A minister could stack the GSP Trust with philanthropists who would take decisions solely in the interests of posterity. It’s possible, but history suggests otherwise. In law-making, reliance on human decency is pointless and presuming government decency is borderline irrational. But that’s what this bill, which closes off protections of openness and heritage and opens the way to commercial exploitation, does exactly that.

Back in February, Rob Stokes declared he’d understood that “the neoliberal idea of getting the parks to pay for themselves is not good enough”. So the fact he’s doing precisely that makes it hard to trust the new Trust at all.