With Sydney finally dead, Mike Baird's work is done
Let's look at the legacy of the premier who bravely stood up to the weak and made the state safe for mining, property development, and casinos. Especially casinos.
All over Sydney people are hard at work today.
That's because
the long-rumoured surprise resignation of NSW Premier Mike Baird on Thursday means that they'll need to rapidly change the Baird/bad slogans on their protest signs ahead of
Saturday night's Keep Sydney Open rally – and given that his most likely replacement is Gladys Berejiklian, this is going to require some seriously inspired pun-work.
While the personal circumstances surrounding Baird's resignation are understandable – and here's genuinely and sincerely hoping that his father, mother and sister's health battles are brief and successful – it's important to keep a clear eye on what Mike Baird's legacy has been for NSW generally and Sydney specifically. Because they have been huge.
Sure, Baird is hardly the only conservative politician to see no problem with
being a committed Christian while doing things like
closing women's shelters,
reneging on promises for domestic violence funding support services for the Family Court, and
turfing pensioners out of public housing – even though they are things with which Jesus would, perhaps, not be entirely down.
Speaking of democracy and transparency, after trumpeting the success that the Independent Commission Against Corruption had done in bringing down Labor's Joe Tripodi it rather inconveniently started implicating current and former Liberal figures. This was
Operation Spicer, whose investigation into the freewheeling operations of Sydney Water Holdings drawing
federal Senator Arthur Sinodinos into a scandal involving illegal donations to the NSW Liberal Party, although nobody is accusing Sinodinos of corruption.
So faced with this ongoing problem, Baird ensured that
ICAC was rendered toothless in late 2016 (with Labor's gutless help, it should be pointed out), by abolishing the position of commissioner Megan Latham, forcing her to reapply for her job, and adding a new three-commissioner model which effectively means ICAC can only investigate matters of which the state government approves. Problem solved!
And of course there is the ongoing triumph that is WestConnex – the brilliant plan to funnel all the city-bound traffic of the western suburbs onto the single lane of Newtown's King Street – which has been characterised by
cost overruns, disputes over
the practicality of the design, and scandals over
undervaluation of compulsory property acquisitions leaving homeowners unable to afford to buy elsewhere.
Of course, this would have been more difficult if local councils had been around to fight it – so democracy was streamlined nicely with
the forced merger of three of the most troublesome councils into the new Inner West Council, which is still being overseen by an administrator rather than one of those annoying elected mayors. And said administrator, by a remarkable coincidence,
just happens to be Richard Pearson, formerly of the NSW Department of Planning, which oversaw the WestConnex development. Why,
what are the odds?
But perhaps the greatest legacy of Baird's storied rule was how he took one of the planet's most vibrant late night cities and turned it into a ghost town.
The Lockout Laws – which affected all the pubs, bars and music venues of the CBD, Darlinghurst, Kings Cross but mysteriously stopped just across the road from the Barangaroo casino – made entire industries economically unviable at a stroke, killing Oxford Street, closing down venues, and doing likely irreparable damage to Sydney's rich legacy as a hotbed of live music.
The claims that the lockouts were necessary because of the level of drunken violence on the streets seemed fair enough, at least until one noticed that the Star City Casino in Pyrmont, outside the lockout zone, had a
rich history of the high levels of underreported violence yet remained mysteriously lockout-free.
So thank you, Casino Mike.
Thank you for taking Australia's global city and turning it into a suburb that closes when the sun sets. Thank you for ensuring that the profiteering of the property development classes aren't undercut by annoying poor people. Thank you for protecting rapacious mining companies from the predations of communities trying to protect their water. And thank you for ensuring that a generation of creative young Sydneysiders move to Melbourne instead.
So enjoy your free time, Mike. Kick back. Relax. Maybe
catch some greyhound racing. After all, you've earned it.
