MEDIA COVERAGE

People power and Pyrmont

(SMH Editorial)

For all its portrayal as a David and Goliath contest, the battle over 1.8 hectares of Pyrmont foreshore, including the 1.3-hectare Water Police site, has been settled with grace, common sense and the satisfaction of antagonists. The State Government will get $11 million for the handover. That is well short of the $30 million windfall anticipated had developers been allowed to build 13 storeys of offices and apartments, but a reasonable price for extraction from the political hole the Government dug for itself. The City of Sydney must dip into its healthy coffers, but that is the cost of election pledges.

Sparing the site for parkland in one of Sydney's more densely populated precincts is a success for people power, a victory for amenity over profit, a triumph for open space over congestion. And having been mostly invisible throughout the fracas, the Premier, Bob Carr, can resume extolling his vision of continuous foreshore access from Woolloomooloo to Blackwattle Bay without the embarrassment of a lost jigsaw piece.

A neat finish to an otherwise sorry saga of community discontent. Right? Only in part. Questions remain about how the dispute got as far as it did, and whether the Government would have been so willing to negotiate a settlement had the construction union not imposed an interim green ban on the redevelopment of the Water Police site. Certainly, there was curious timing in the order of the Planning Minister, Craig Knowles, to freeze progress on development while the City Council studied traffic and open space. The order quickly followed the union intervention. In this cycle of public debate over what constitutes overdevelopment of the inner city, the Government was unlikely to want to pit its will against the union's in a stoush reminiscent of the 1970s.

Mr Carr's foreshore walkway vision is commendable, but fulfilment needs more than rhetoric. Occasionally, the Government must put a brake on the profit motive too readily pursued by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, the government agency given charge of this city's finest natural asset. The alternative is to surrender even more of the people's harbour to the benefit of those privileged enough to afford exclusive access. Had development proceeded, after all, the biggest losers in terms of views and access would not have been the well-heeled, but the public housing tenants at the rear of Water Police site.

The Audit Office last November concluded that foreshore planning was piecemeal and lacked overarching guidance. With some justification, the Government reacted by arguing that the criticism was out of date because the appraisal ignored changes intended to ensure better co-ordination by incorporating land use, transport and infrastructure planning under Mr Knowles's one ministerial roof.

The challenge, of course, is to ensure the model serves public interest. Settlement of the Pyrmont dispute illustrates the achievable. Its dynamics, however, leave lingering suspicions as to whether the NSW Government has grasped the realities of foreshore opportunity with the same clear-headedness shown by the Commonwealth in relinquishing harbour defence lands for public use.