Tom Minear: The inferiority complex Australians should bin

After seeing New York’s mayor bragging about finally rolling out rubbish bins, Tom Minear argues it’s time for Australians to stop using the city as a stamp of approval.

It was only after moving to New York that I considered all the inane ways Australians try to use the city as a stamp of approval.

Anything and everything is apparently “New York-style”: pizza, loft apartments, burgers, turn-up-and-go rail services, bagels, policing methods. The adjective is almost always either unnecessary (our food is often tastier) or over the top (we still turn up and wait for trains) but we nevertheless reach for it as though we don’t believe we can be better than the best.

New Yorkers have no such inferiority complex, which is what you have to bear in mind to believe that the story I’m about to tell you is real, not the plot of a satirical comedy show.

Rubbish piled up in New York's streets. Picture: Tom Minear.

Last week, in a 1937-word press release, New York Mayor Eric Adams unveiled “new anti-trash technology” that marked the “next phase of the city’s war on trash”. “People didn’t believe it would be possible,” he bragged, but it happened “four years ahead of schedule”.

This “superweapon against trash” is a garbage truck with a robotic arm, the kind that has been roaming Australia’s streets for as long as I can remember. But its arrival in New York is the next step towards waste being “containerised” – that is, stored in and collected from rubbish bins like almost every other major city, rather than dumped in bags on the street.

New York’s new weapon in the war on waste. Picture: New York City Department of Sanitation.

A member of the New York State Assembly was quoted in the press release as saying that rats would soon be “begging for food”, while my favourite line was from Kathleen Corradi, the Adams-appointed “rat czar” who proudly declared that the city’s “steadfast commitment to containerise waste is inspired”.

Here’s a demo of New York City’s new automatic side loading garbage truck lifting large on street containers. A pilot program is expanding to all of Community Board District 9 in West Harlem. pic.twitter.com/d9NmXaupOC

— Emma G. Fitzsimmons (@emmagf) February 1, 2024

The mayor’s office previously declined my request to interview Corradi, perhaps having realised that while creating such a post might look like action to New Yorkers, it would only draw attention overseas to a decades-long failure to solve a rather disgusting problem.

Rubbish piled up in New York's streets. Picture: Tom Minear.

If all that wasn’t enough, Adams also invited the media to see the truck in action. Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’s hit Empire State of Mind – the mayor’s go-to hype song – blared as it picked up a bin. Emblazoned on the side of the truck was a slogan: “The Future of Trash is Here.”

All I could think was that New York finally had something I could call “Australian-style”. But then the New York Times called it “European-style” instead.

Originally published as Tom Minear: The inferiority complex Australians should bin