Not so long ago, along Hickson Road near Sydney’s Darling Harbour, a sign appeared on the fence surrounding the wharf. "This is a working port," it declared. It went on to advise that there would be noise – the clanking and clunking of cargo vessels docking and cranes unloading – 24 hours a day. "This will not stop," it warned the prospective buyers of the new apartments in the smart new blocks opposite.
But it did stop, of course, and the once busy Sydney Harbour port is set to become ‘Barangaroo’, a new residential enclave on the waterfront for yet more of Sydney’s rich. The ships, and the people who work on them, are being banished to Botany Bay.
Paul Keating called the new name "Aboriginal kitsch", referring as it does to the wife of Bennelong, the indigenous leader "adopted" by Sydney’s early European settlers. One of the alternative names for the precinct was ‘The Hungry Mile’. That’s how desperate wharfies described it, as they scrounged for work along the waterside strip during the Great Depression.
‘The Hungry Mile’ would have accurately reflected the hard-scrabble history of the site, but as Elizabeth Anne Macgregor, the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (and, along with Keating, a member of the naming panel), told the Sydney Morning Herald, "Would you want to live somewhere called the Hungry Mile?" The subtext of Macgregor’s comment was obvious: imagine what it would do to the property values.
In the end, the whole Barangaroo saga – with its erasure of an unfashionable part of our urban history and its replacement with politically correct tokenism – was a victory for the spivs.
The term "spiv" once referred to a minor criminal, a race-track huckster who used crude charm to defraud the gullible or trade on the post-war black market. These days, it has become an apt description for many of our business leaders and politicians who practise their own confidence tricks.
They no longer sport pencil-line moustaches and porkpie hats, but their tell-tale signs give them away – their faux Italian pointy-toe shoes and the hairstyles sculpted into those absurd little tufts.
The highlight of their repertoire is economic rationalism, the phenomenon by which every good and service is rationalised down to its pure market value, regardless of its social importance. To deploy my favourite quote from Oscar Wilde – perhaps my favourite quote of all time – they "know the price of everything and the value of nothing".
So, in the case of "Barangaroo", the contemporary spiv sees only the skyrocketing land values of waterfront property and cries "Eureka!" The spiv disregards the social benefits of keeping Sydney Harbour as a working port, where cargo ships ply their trade, preferring instead to hand over the picturesque waterway to the plutocrats and their pleasure-craft. Very soon, with the connivance of the NSW "Labor" Treasurer, Michael Costa, they will be salivating over the privatisation of the publicly owned ferry fleet.
Twenty years ago, as a young reporter on the Herald, I used to attend North Sydney Council meetings. At one meeting, Robyn Read, a councillor and urban planner who later became the independent NSW State MP for North Shore, warned her colleagues that when they approved planning ordinances that drove all light industries, such as shipwrights’ workshops, out of their municipality, they also drove out the last of the low- and even medium-income workers.
I went back to my original, faded news clipping to recall Read’s exact words. "Blue-collar industry keeps people on low incomes close to the city," she said. "I’m not prepared to support the wiping out of all industry in the area, because it may be of greater benefit to the people than yuppie development."
Within a decade, Read’s prophecy had come to pass. Working-class families have been squeezed out of North Sydney and most other accessible inner urban centres across Australia, as useful amenities such as delicatessens became cafes, and hardware stores become cafes, and even second-hand bookshops become, well, cafes.
The spivvy cult of lifestyle has replaced genuine quality of life, in which people were able to maintain a sense of community living close to their workplaces.
For the market spivs who influence economic policy, a home is not a place of comfort and community in which to nurture family, welcome friends and occasionally strangers, not a place reflecting one’s personality and passions. Rather, it is an "appreciating residential asset".
The spivs have increasingly infected governments and public services with their corporate ethos. Even the subtle changes are insidious.
Browse the Commonwealth Government website and you soon spot the pattern: Tourism Australia, Snowy Hydro Ltd, FarmBi$, Education.au Limited, Business Club Australia, Work Solutions, Austroads Inc. The State Governments are at it too: Energy Australia, Sydney Water, RailCorp, City West Housing, Treasury Corporation, Transgrid, WSN Environmental Solutions and Queensland Transport (with its Brisbane Broncos sponsorship logo).
Whatever happened to the Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board, the Electricity Commission, the Department of Public Hygiene and the Department of Main Roads?
They sounded too stodgy, too bureaucratic, too public service for today’s corporatised world. Politicians engaged a team of management and image consultants and paid them generous fees to refashion these organisations into agencies with snappy corporate names and half million dollar salaries for their "chief executives" and "general managers". The public went from being citizens with a right to decent taxpayer-funded services to "customers" and "clients", and along the way we hailed the architects of such corporatisation as "reformers".
Where they could, the spivs inflicted public-private partnerships, or wholesale privatisations, on an unwilling citizenry. As if the loss of our national bank and airline were not enough, the spivs extended the scam to wring a profit from everything they touched. When Macquarie Bank took over Sydney Airport, it started gouging travellers for the use of luggage trolleys.
Both Liberal and Labor politicians have been bedazzled by the modern corporate spivs and, on retirement, many join their ranks, selling the skills and contacts they acquired in their taxpayer-funded careers to the highest bidder.
And yet spiv culture is at odds with public sentiment. Opinion polls tell us repeatedly that the public is increasingly hostile to the greed and self interest of big corporations and the pirates who run them. I suspect the days are numbered for those who seek to skim as much as they can off the nation’s collective wealth.