The Honourable Paul Keating was on the jury that selected the winning design for the redevelopment of East Darling Harbour. This lecture gives his unique perspective on the selection process, the outcome, and the impact that the redevelopment of this historic foreshore precinct will have on our cityscape.



Powerhouse Museum
East Darling Harbour

Transcript

Kevin Fewster: Good evening, everyone. We're privileged to have the pleasure tonight of hearing from The Honourable Paul Keating, who's going to be speaking on policy towards the Harbour, and with general reference to the new East Darling Harbour redevelopment.

This is part of the 'Powerhouse Museum Design Quarter Talk Series', which is a regular event that we stage here at the museum to reflect our commitment to showcasing the best of design via collections, exhibitions, events, and public programs.

The highlight of our design year, of course, is the annual CD design festival, which is coming up in August. Which is coordinated by the Powerhouse, and is shaping up every year bigger and bigger. This year it's the 11th year, and I think we have something like 80 or 90 events.

Tonight's talk also reflects our commitment to encouraging a dialogue and debate about the way in which design shapes our lives, and our community.

East Darling Harbour development, of course, will have a very profound impact on the city of Sydney, and will transform this historic foreshore precinct, which have been cargo wharves since the mid 1840s. The new project will restore public access to the waterfront at Millers Point for the first time in nearly 100 years.

The Powerhouse Museum has been part of this precinct of Sydney's industrial and maritime history since 1893. Indeed, our relocation in the 1980s to this site formed part of the grand bi-centennial vision of Darling Harbour. We at the Museum have a national interest in the development planned across the bay, and we welcome the opportunity to look to the community to learn more about it, and planned development for Sydney Harbour here tonight.

Paul Keating, of course, former Prime Minister and former member for Blaxland is known to everyone here in the room. He was a member of the New South Wales Board of Architects from 2002-2005. During his Prime Minister years, he introduced the Better Cities program to improve urban design in Australian capital cities.

Mr Keating was part of the 10-member jury that selected the winning design for the redevelopment of: Hill Thalis, Paul Berkemeier, and Jane Irwin - some of whom I'm pleased to say are able to be with us, I understand, in the audience, tonight.

The first stage of the East Darling Harbour design competition I'm told received 137 entries from around the world, and five finalists were chosen to proceed to a stage two of the competition.

Mr Keating has agreed that he'll take questions from the floor at the conclusion of his speech, so can we all welcome him? Also, can I ask people to please turn off their mobile phones. It's interesting to see how many hands dive into pockets. Can you please turn off your mobile phones, and join me in welcoming Paul Keating.

[Applause]

Paul Keating: Well thank you, indeed, Kevin, and ladies and gentlemen. I was pleased to be asked by the Museum to make a contribution to its lecture series; and the director chose this question of things related to design, in this case urban design, with reference to East Darling Harbour in particular.

All too often, of course, in a city like this, we don't really have a chance to talk about these sorts of subjects. The conversation goes along in the latter pages of the newspapers, or in the articles, but there's not that much participatory discussion about these matters of moment.

With that in mind, I thought, well, why not come along and talk about it in the broad, because I think it really is where we are currently in our history - we have this enormous opportunity. But to do it, I think, one has to think about the approach to the harbour in general, to think about any one area in particular. And it's time, I think, now, to formulate a kind of policy.

The great problem for Sydney, of course, is it's had no central, or one, authority having primacy over the waterfront or the harbour in general.

Development has been, more or less, decided by municipal governments around its periphery; and, as a consequence, we've had a fragmented approach to it: it has had no guardian; the best protections it's ever had have been the sterilisations by the army and the navy and by industrial development during the phases of the industrial revolution and, of course, before the advent of urban financial markets, simply by the fact that people never had enough money to muck it up.

So, now - but, now, with the tsunami of money coming for any developable proposal, it's different now. Any two butchers on any corner can build 15 units somewhere; and, as a consequence, the government or the public - the public authorities have to deal with it and to deal with them.

So, I thought, what we may do is just talk about the harbour, itself. I've got notes; I don't really need them, but I'll go through them in case - just to give me at least some sense of structure in what I'm saying to you.

I often wonder what Arthur Phillip's view would have been the moment he turned - he moved up from Botany Bay and then turned, saw the gaping gap at South Head, and moved into it and saw these great bluffs - promontories - arise: North Head; Middle Head; these old stones, from the Triassic Period, punched into the air 20- or 30-million years later and then flooded, as the icecaps melted, to give us the harbour we have today. I mean he must have - they must have stood in awe of it - as, I think, any of us do as you go through it.

It's got a beauty; it's old - you know it's old. This is a very old - geologically, one of the oldest parts of the world; and, if you live in Sydney, of course, you know it. Those of us who do love the sandstone, the age of it, the fractures, the fissures, all the things that mark it out and give you that sense of where you are.

But rarely do, I think, we articulate what we love about it most; and that is the North Head, the Middle Head, the South Head. And you come down the harbour - we enjoy the natural qualities it has, preserved, over the years, by mostly the defence departments or related departments; and those rare excisions, like Neilson Park, with its Edwardian kiosk and the trees and the harbour beach. And we thank people for the fact that they did this so many years ago.

But we're also aware of the increasing encroachments on the foreshore from the built environment, which kind of sets the stage; and the show that's playing on the stage is 'Where do we go from here?'

I think we're conscious that, whatever totality Sydney Harbour seemed to Arthur Phillip and the first settlers, it's now, in aesthetic terms, more or less two harbours: there's the one east of the Harbour Bridge, and there's the one on the west of the Harbour Bridge.

Functionally, of course, they are one. In terms of ambience, though, they are two. And even the stone changes, west of the Harbour Bridge, and you get what's called Ashfield slate, rather than Sydney sandstone. The mood of it changes.

And the question is 'How should they be treated? What policy should inform our approach to it? And what should occupy the position of primacy in that policy?'

In my view, the policy should be to take every opportunity to return those parts of the foreshore, following the century-long industrial sterilisation, to that which most approximates the natural environment as it might have obtained before 1788.

And you might say, 'Well, why would we want to do that?' Because I believe that it is the residual natural nature of the foreshore which characterises Sydney Harbour and defines Sydney with it.

We now have a once-in-200-year opportunity to call a halt to the kind of encroachments we have seen in the past. A-once-in-200-year opportunity to leave something Arthur Phillip might recognise were he somehow, mystically, to return.

In other words, in short, I believe there's only one compelling heritage interest. There's all this phony talk about heritage – but a lot of it by the heritage industry, of course. But the most compelling heritage interest is, I think, the natural topography - the pre-colonial configuration of the foreshore.

Because, as I've mentioned earlier, in an open financial market, anything which is fundable, buildable, is bankable. This will always be the case from here, and with everyone wanting their view of the harbour. You know in this city, this is one of the few cities in the world where the panoramic view is the only view. Now this is…. you know, if it's got views of the harbour, that's it.

The sense of sort of cosmopolitan enjoyment one finds in a Paris street is not really appreciated that much in Sydney. It is in some parts, some parts of the city. Some people are not mad about waterfront images – I'm one of them. Nevertheless it is that big ticket view that gives a big ticket price and makes these things worse.

We know the industry's going to keep coming at us and there’s pressure on us to lift the densities to get more of the view. Therefore the remnant bits of the natural heritage are at the very heart and foot of the city. These are the very heart and foot of the city in my opinion defining things which if we get these right we can let the building environment take its course. A lot of stuff will go up, and a lot of stuff will be ripped down.

If you go to Melbourne, in those great grids and long roads that Melbourne has, and that flat terrain – they've done a lot with it in terms of the building environment. It is a garden city. But if you come to Sydney we will always find the development of our suburbs compromised by the craggy nature of the city's harbourside topography.

Whatever good we've done, and whatever we may say about the built environment, it’s those core bits that I think now deserve protection and need protection. This is why I think policy should be seeking to protect them, not sell them off or give them away or alienate them or lose the opportunity of knowing what to do with them.

Without such a view I do not believe there exists any logic to guide us. In other words, without that view, what do we do? We're left to scrabble over any piece of foreshore the development industry doesn't have the muscle or the confidence to quickly appropriate. In other words, if there's something the development industry might want to grab or that the government wants to sell to offload assets for budgetary purposes, we get drawn across to that fight whether it's the various ones we've had in the last few years such as over at Balmain, etc. But there would be no unifying policy.

This is why I believe we need a unifying policy, and not to be left scrabbling after bits and pieces where of course the public must come off second best.

Dealing with successive governments who look to offload public assets for budgetary purposes, or worse than that – those who are utterly confused as to what belongs to Caesar and what doesn't. Or what should belong to Caesar and what doesn't.

Our current unbelievable opportunity has its antecedents in three very significant events in the last 100 years. The first one, strange but true, was the bubonic plague and the rat infestation which promoted it in 1900. The second was the eclipse of the Scania-type sea freighter by the container ships. And the third was the advent of mass air transport, which removed migrant and regular public transport shipping from our harbours. I'll just go into each of them.

The rat infestation and the plague was so serious that it gave the government of the day a mandate it never would have otherwise enjoyed, and that is to resume every private bit of the waterfront between Woolloomooloo Bay and Pyrmont. As you know, the bulk of these rat-infested harbourside wharves were made of rubble, which of course were never sealed. They were natural places for rats to be, and they were sub-economic, undercapitalised, inefficient, just able to keep up with the sailing traffic of the last quarter of the 19th century.

The bulk of the rat-infested rubble wharfage in Woolloomooloo, Walsh Bay and then Cockle Bay, next to Millers Point, was where most of the problems came from, and the mass resumption allowed the newly created Sydney Harbour Trust to plan and build efficient, world-standard wharves, which it did, with the finger wharf at Woolloomooloo Bay, and the series of similar wharves around Walsh Bay, and then this long, piano-like series of finger wharves down along the stretch of Hickson Road, which, of course, the Harbour Trust had excavated. That is, the rock, cut away the rock to widen Hickson Road so as it could encompass a railway line to meet the growing traffic from abroad. And to connect that railway line to the goods yards at Darling Harbour.

In 1961, we know the Maritime Services Board, the Trust's successor, began the biggest reclamation in Australian maritime history, by removing the Hickson Road finger wharves, filling the sea space of Cockle Bay with sand and fill for Sydney's first container wharf. Containerisation quickly eclipsed individually packaged freight delivered by Scania-type vessels, so that much of the wharfage at Walsh Bay became redundant.

By the 1960s, as containerisation gathered apace, the old days of the wharfies using derricks to pick up individual bits of freight and drop them into the holds of relatively small Scania-type ships were coming to an end. But as containerisation grew and ships became much larger, it was apparent that the Sydney container wharf, leased to Patrick's, became sub-economic, and particularly in the use and employment of trucks, as, to make the business work, much of the trailers are now tandem trailers, unable to obtain access and egress through the city streets, and, of course, with no rail alternatives.

So the so-called working harbour – that is, the transport hub, hasn't gone because of government fiat, which is often claimed by the working harbour groups around the city. Rather, it has gone because globalisation is moving freight in quantities and on ships of scale serviced by stevedoring facilities that Sydney Harbour cannot physically accommodate. There is no place for wharves of scale for the ships of scale, and access and egress from those wharves to rail facilities to move these things around.

Sydney's working harbour is now much more connected with leisure, including more and more cruise ships – ships carrying people, not containers. There is a group in the city here, of course, who only define the working harbour as ships carrying containers. They've got a crew of about 15 people and they load containers on and off all night. There's nothing particularly good about this, but they seem to have some sort of objection to cruise ships full of people. And it is this trade, I think, that we should attend to. In other words, we'll have a working harbour, but the work will simply be different.

So with that background, let me return to what I think needs to be done east of the Harbour Bridge and west of the Harbour Bridge. East of the Harbour Bridge, in my opinion the importance of South Head and its promontory, as a key shore land in the immediate inner harbour is such that it should basically be returned to more or less its natural state, with the preservation of historic buildings.

At the moment, of course, it's littered with indifferent, 1960s-style brick buildings built by the navy. There’s the idea that, you know, you can't teach anyone in the navy anything in a navy school unless they are within sight of the sea.

[Laughter]

You know? And if you take them out of there, it's a shocking thing to do. Well, of course, it isn't a shocking thing to do. We should take them out and knock it all down, and knock it down so that it doesn't come back. And do it in such a way that we return the place to the natural species which were around it.

I mean, God knows what a wonderful sandstone face the thing has as you turn into the harbour and come down past South Head, past Lady Jane Beach then, and then the other... Oh, I can't remember the names of them all. There…. And yet we still see these…. And now they let them out for weddings and things. I mean, what? What are we doing with this stuff?

What we're doing is we're not getting it down, and now these sites have been turned over to this Commonwealth body, then what I think we should be doing is exercising public pressure to get the clearances on the places that matter, like that. And I'm talking about here North Head, Little Head, South Head and the environments thereof, not talking about, of course, the built environment in other places.

Woolloomooloo Bay, if I come down the harbour, Woolloomooloo Bay was the site of the most grotesque heist in New South Wales public history, with a finger wharf being appropriated to exclusive private use with the little yellow Kogarah Bay-style home units perched, or squatting themselves, on the adjacent wharf. And with the public water in between the two being a private boat harbour at the foot of the city.

Imagine what an asset Woolloomooloo Bay would be today with the restaurants on the finger wharf instead of being on the eastern shore with a boardwalk looking across the water up to the botanical gardens and St Mary's Cathedral. Instead of that, we've got a clutch of New York-style loft apartments with a mooring outside for their owners.

Now, I wasn't quick enough off the mark on this one. I had a decision by the Cabinet of New South Wales to take this down. Laurie Brereton, the Minister for Public Works, and Premier Neville Wran had agreed to take it down. The Labor Council of New South Wales put on a stink and said they wouldn't allow Labor to take it down. So I said to Hawke, 'Look, we'll buy it, and we'll get the army to take it down'.

[Laughter]

And at the time, I had other pressures, you know.

[Laughter]

And what happened was Wran quickly resigned, or abruptly resigned. Barrie Unsworth became the Premier. Bob Carr was Environment Minister, and Unsworth and Carr put a heritage order over it and stopped the clearance of it. As a consequence, it lay there fallow, and I think then the Government.... someone gave an option to a private developer, God knows why. The thing was sub-economic, and to make it economic, they had to build a concrete pavilion at the end of it, which Mr Laws and other people now live in, and alienate the wharf to the side, which of course lost the botanical gardens its natural gradient to the water.

Now, it was never to be done, and the idea…. You know, people talk about the great cathedral spaces. Well, there were never going to be any great cathedral spaces left. They had to be occupied by pigeon-style loft apartments. And as a consequence, we've lost that, and it's sterilised that bay.

So then they said to me, 'Well, why don't you move the navy out?' And I said, 'No, I'm not going to move the navy out. You think it's good enough to keep, they can listen to a bit of banging at night, as far as I'm concerned'.

[Laughter]

So, of course, it stayed, but that was one I lost. But I've had some wins and I'll come to them. Garden Island, outside of East Darling Harbour, is the next most important site in the city. This, I believe, should be reserved for Commonwealth usage. Not sold, no part of it sold.

I had a Cabinet submission from Robert Ray years ago, from the then-nominal owner of the site. I forget their name now, but it was the manufacturing or service arm of the Defence Department, and they said, oh, they were going to return more money to the shareholder by selling off bits of the bay. And I said, 'What?' Bits of the foreshore.

So when I looked at the plans, these were literally like the kind of sort of little home units – there were little yards and clotheslines and things along one side of it. And, of course, I would not let that Cabinet submission go forward, because a) it was not the job of the authority to raise money for the Commonwealth, and it would be raising money for the Commonwealth in the worst possible…. They wanted a dividend. 'Give us a dividend'.

I said, 'Well, forget the dividend. We'd rather keep the land'. This should not be sold. The colonial architect Greenway had visions of a pyramid surmounting Garden Island. His idea of, a bit like the Havel in Germany, Potsdam, the romantic park: you came down it. You had Clark Island and Shark Island and the old 19th-century notion that nature can be improved by architecture. You had out on these promontories these particular, if you like, ceremonial buildings, and this was the one he had proposed for Garden Island.

As with that other northern promontory, Bennelong Point and the Opera House, Garden Island juts into the harbour in a northerly direction about the same distance as Bennelong Point with Lady Macquarie's Point at the end of the gardens dropping back in between. Garden Island lends itself either to being a natural headland, or accommodating a ceremonial building. I have long believed that this should be the site of the Commonwealth Parliament and the Commonwealth parliamentary chambers, with perhaps parliamentary offices built, St Petersburg-like, in a low-level horseshoe around the historic Captain Cook Dock.

John Howard has effectively moved the government to Sydney. The Cabinet meets now mostly in Phillip Street. The funding for this comes out in all the appropriations. We know it costs a ton of money each year. And the Government returns to Canberra only for the parliamentary sittings.

We could formalise this event, or these events, by putting the Parliament at the centre, and on the most panoramic point of the largest and most international Australian city, and that's, of course, Garden Island. The Commonwealth spent $1 billion on the current Parliament building, but that was 20 years ago.

And if you buy a new flat in Sydney, you get straight-line depreciation for 20 years. I think it's 20 years. It's five percent a year.

We first moved into the Parliament in '87, that's 20 years ago, and if you applied straight-line depreciation at five percent, it would leave its written-down value at around $50 million. And the public debt interests holding costs on $50 million are $2.5 million a year. So for the nation's sake, we would be better walking away from it.

[Laughter]

And…. I'm telling you – it's no laughing matter.

[Laughter]

And in business and community terms, a Parliament in Sydney would be light years better for the country than one in Canberra. At any rate, the option should be retained. That's all I'm arguing for, retention of the option, by keeping Garden Island and its environs in public hands. It is the last great site on the eastern side of the harbour left.

I built the frigates in Melbourne and they're now put together like loaves of bread in slices and they're all bolted together. The days of monocoque hulls, where you do a hull as one construction, are finished. Hulls are now done in a modular form. And they are serviced in the places where they're built, in this case, in Melbourne.

So the idea that we need the hammerhead crane that used to lift the gun turrets off battleships sitting up there for battleships that will never come again and facilities for a navy which has substantially changed in character, is, of course, just part of the nonsense that the navy continues on with.

One of my former conservative colleagues, Bert Kelly, used to say, 'Of course, admirals like big ships'. But they also like good positions on the waterfront. So no government has been around quite long enough to insist upon their departure from Garden Island. But at some time that will happen. Strategic circumstances will cause that to happen and the site should at least be retained so that considerations about the capital can be made at the appropriate time.

But the idea that people from all around the country, fly into Sydney and Melbourne and fly up to the bush capital to do their business and fly back again – and you've got a bureaucracy up there which is of course not in a daily association with a major city and all its problems – is such that over time, the mistake of Canberra will become more apparent to people. And the option, I wouldn't even care if it's in Melbourne. I love Melbourne. Melbourne or Sydney. But if you want to impress the visitors, of course you come to Sydney.

[Laughter]

Now, west of the harbour, west of the harbour. Let me now turn to that, and the opportunity presented by the redundancy of the Patrick wharves at East Darling Harbour, and its connection to Walsh Bay and Goat Island. I'll take you through the digital images in a moment of what the land looked like before the Harbour Trust in 1911, and before the massive reclamations, which also lost us the unifying liver brick facade down Hickson Road to Erskine Street.

Not many people are aware, unless you were around in those days, that what you see at Walsh Bay, turned the corner, and then went down along Hickson Road to Erskine Street, which then that unifying facade became the walk-through to the wharves. And that went down when the Maritime Services Board did its best, or its worst, to create the container wharf.

Let me go just briefly through these. I'm not one for these sort of things. I'd rather talk myself, but some things – you do need to see about it.

This here is where it was in 1836. You can see this is called Cockle Bay. It's now a name purloined for use down the other end of the harbour, but this is actually Cockle Bay here. This is where the windmills were that ground the flour, because it had the wind from the west and from the north-east, and this was therefore called Millers Point, and this is called Windmill Street, because it came to it. And this is now, of course, Walsh Bay.

So this is how it was back then. That's another graphic illustration of it, perhaps amplifying what was there, but there was a point there when there was a bay here.

Here's another view of it, where you can see the gas works here, and the water in here, and the headland there. And with wharfage out along the edges, you can see the natural shape of it kind of there, but you can see the wharfages added there, there. And you can see all the little rotten, burrowed, rat-infested things along here, which finally got moved.

Here we are later again, and you can see the shape of it more or less as it was, with this water behind it here. And the bay here. And wharves cut into it, at angles here. This is, of course, in the 19th century.

This is what it was after. This is in 1951, 40 years after the Sydney Harbour Trust actually built all of these wharves in Walsh Bay, and these here, the so-called 'finger wharves', along Hickson Road, which had been excavated through rock to widen the street to take a railway line down the middle. And squaring up these things, you can still see the shape here – but squaring this up to make wharfage.

And this was a natural thing to do, you know. This was the city, this was the maritime district, you had Scania-type ships with derricks, and you had the ships that went, like the 'Bulolo', that went to Papua New Guinea. If you wanted to go to Adelaide or Perth, you would catch a ship around here, and you'd do that as well. And the migrant ships that came in, went to Pyrmont, to what's now Darling Island, number 13, number 20 Pyrmont. But this was the place of the commercial ships.

This was the facade down Hickson Road. There's the Palisades Hotel, and all of that went in 1961, more's the pity, because it had a lovely rhythm to it. And what these things do, in a scale building, what these defining elements do, they give you a sense of scale, and a look through to what the organisation of the building is behind it. So instead of just seeing one blank facade, you're able to measure its height and feeling by these things. Anyway, it crashed with the MSB.

Here is the reclamation, upon pulling the wharves out. You can see them there. And these are the caissons made of concrete, which were sunk to retain the new wall. You can see it's already been filled in here, and they're moving then towards the end of it. This is in the 1960s.

It was, before Sydney Airport, the largest reclamation in Australia. You'd never get any authority to do it today. And that's a reasonable test of whether we should keep it as is. Would you do it now? Answer, no.

This is it in 1986, not that long ago, where it still had these wharves here. This wharf there and this one here. It was actually wider than that. It actually went out to here originally, and the caissons exist around here. I've long argued that we should, to deal with this solid face here, we should articulate it by the water being allowed to come back in.

And I'll make the point later that I now think, we've now since heard, that Ports have taken the view that, what is now the overseas passenger terminal here, is going to be inadequate to Sydney's needs and might best be moved to Balmain, in which case this could become a useful open piece of water which could take the ferries, instead of all of them going - the Parramatta River ferries - instead of all of them going to Circular Quay. They could come here, and people could find their way – this is Napoleon Street here – could find their way back along to the Westpac building and then Macquarie Bank, KPMG and Wynyard Railway Station.

But look at the size of it. There is the original hill. Look at the size of it. It's enormous. It's the equivalent of George Street to Elizabeth Street in width. This is as it more or less is today, as one solid thing.

Now, this is where the wider view comes in. You can see the size of it. It's like a gigantic aircraft carrier. And look at the size of the city, the main core bit of the city. It's a very large proportion of that. But, of course, the hand of man is all over it. There are straight edges everywhere, and it has no articulation whatsoever down this long face.

Now I think that the post-industrial opportunity for Sydney is around these natural places in what I call the archipelago. And that is – the Aborigines call this place – Goat Island, Memel. And memel's an Aboriginal term for the eye. And this was the eye of the centre of these points, here, here. This is Ballast Point, which we've now succeeded in clearing. This is Balls Head. Balmain, of course. And the headland that used to be here.

We have now a once-in-history opportunity to... Having got the Carr Government under Andrew Refshauge to agree to resume Ballast Point, we've now cleared all of the tank farm and we're now at the point where, with the remediation about to be completed by Caltex, in an aerial photo like this in a few years from now, it'll look like this.

It may be more useful, people will be able to go down there and use it and have picnics, but when you come under the Harbour Bridge, you will see this point here as you see this point here. You start to see these natural headlands again west of the city, which was divided in two by the curtain of the Harbour Bridge.

This, Goat Island, becomes an important place. The government's allocated $9 million to do things to restore bits and pieces and clean things up. They're going to clean wharves off. This waits till later, because it's under a lease. But the important heritage buildings here, the first explosives depot done in stone in the 1830s, and a very important house here in the '40s, and the Harbour Master's house up here, are things which I think should be retained.

But all the tempy style residences along here, we don't need anymore. They should go. This sort of stuff should go. And we get back to its original shape, the heritage interest being the sandstone wall and face that would front this place, if you were standing on this.

So you'd look out here, you would see this, that, and you would see this. Where does a city of this size get that opportunity?

I was in New York recently. You go down Fifth Avenue, you've got all sorts, all the great couturiers are there and all the shops are very smart. But go down to the East River and that's just a hellhole, you know? They ought to be ashamed of the thing.

Whereas we have a chance with this here, the Opera House, the retention of Garden Island and this and this. After the great win of Ballast Point, the first important giveback to the harbour, God knows ever, to actually create the archipelago here.

So you'd come under the Harbour Bridge and you'd see, more or less, save for some changes, something like the natural shape it might have had when Arthur Phillip arrived. And we'll certainly see that here, and because of Jack Lang and his decision to keep this, we certainly see it there. And how wonderful is this Balls Head when you go by, when you're on it or you go by.

Now people say, 'Why worry about all that? Why don't we just worry about what's going on in here?' Because what's going on in here's going to go on and go on and go on and then we'll get the encroachments onto what's left. So I think the big fight to have is locking these places up so that the nasties can't get their hands on them. And by the nasties, I mean the developers.

So this presents more or less where I see. Now that's as it is now, looking at it from the north. And the government, very wisely, has decided that half of this site should be – half of this – should be allocated to open space in the public domain, and half of it to development. And as we all know, great sites like this, completely open to the public domain, particularly if they were parks or simply green, if they don't have usage and activity, they tend to just be stale places. So I believe that the government's decision to go half open and half developed is, I think, a correct one. The key is getting the correct design.

This is more or less the entry at the end of the competition which Hill Thalis, members of which – Philip Thalis, I think's, here tonight, and Paul Berkemeier and maybe Jane Irwin, have submitted, and it has water egress here. It has some here, but it's compromised by the shipping, which at that point in the competition was a given or a consistency which we had to, in a sense, work around.

I think that with that changing, we have an option to do some other things here. This was one proposal which was lodged later, with the hill... If I just go back, in the Hill Thalis scheme, the hill didn't come to the edge, this big cliff face was retained. In a scheme such as this one, the hill drops off the reserve at the top and rolls down to here, and it could have, for instance, a car park or something under it.

One of the important things, I think, about great streets, and Hickson Road has a chance to do that, is you can't define a boulevard by trees. They're defined architecturally. Grandeur comes with massing, it doesn't come with variety. So therefore, I am very much of a view that we should have a mass of buildings along here which define the street, and from the water the same.

Now, as you know, the government has since announced, Minister Sartor made very important announcements in determinations in February, which give primacy to the redevelopment of the hill, let water back in here, and to the extent possible, let water in here. Since that decision has been made, this port's view about the future of the ships here, and it's only one - remember that - only one, and we're likely to have quite an industry, only one port being reserved for somewhere else means that this can be opened up. And if it was opened up to ferry traffic, we would get tons of activity around this.

So all of a sudden, this place would be lively again, instead of simply just being a great park that maybe only the lucky residents can use. Or we have more fatalities of the kind we saw with that unfortunate girl dying, with her friends, in the boat crash with the Rivercat coming from the congested Circular Quay because we don't have…. there's too much congestion here, and yet with have this opportunity round here, and at this point, we don't look like taking it up.

Were that to be taken up, it would give a punctuation mark. First of all, you'd get rid of the sort of aircraft carrier sides on this, and we then can do something with footplates and buildings appropriate to the demand. Big institutions want big footplates. They don't want a lot of small little buildings, and if we had the punctuation mark here, we wouldn't have this moving into here, and we can get a height to the residential buildings, and a massing, so if you're on the water looking back, you actually see something new. You actually see some discernible space which you know is whatever, residential or whatever, with public grounds in the fore.

But also over here, you know that you've got the Westpac building here, you've got the KPMG building. I understand Macquarie Bank's going to come and take a site. And you would have these.

The revenue from this would largely pay for the restitution of this, and this would more or less self-fund itself.

Now, these are only ideas. They'll be all essentially governed by the philosophy of the government and the determinations the Minister had made, informed by the Hill Thalis scheme.

Now, I'll just go on. I think that's just another view of what... Sorry, I'll just go back a bit. I'm not very good at this.

[Laughter]

Anyway, I've done all the things I think I need to do about it. So there is this chance of being able to pull it. Now, I think the Government, they've allocated $9 million for Goat Island. If we could get them to allocate a little more, not a ton more, we could really do a lovely job on Goat Island and getting the natural species back there. We've already had a win on Ballast Point thanks to Bob Carr and Refshauge, and we now come to East Darling Harbour.

The three things that I think it has to have is the headland be recreated. In other words – let me go back in here – in other words, we cannot get this back, it's now full. But we can get a headland, or a version of this, with water to the rear of it if we want to. If we want to spend the money.

The second thing is I think we do need water – where are we? – back here – to relieve this otherwise fairly boring and flat face which was otherwise associated with the wharf. If you're on the water here - this is all right if you're a pigeon - but if you're just on the water, and you look at this, it would look just like any wharf in Rotterdam. You know, the fact that it might have a Hunter's Hill style bowling green on the top doesn't change the fact that from the water, it'll look like any wharf in Rotterdam.

What will change it is doing this and letting the water back in here big-time and getting this massing along here, and a punctuation point there.

Now, in the jury, the jury made some recommendations to the Hill Thalis proposals, which Mr Sartor has more or less taken up in his quite historic determinations. And from here on the process will become very important to see whether or not we can translate those designs or these features into a coherent whole, such that when you come through, and we're now getting a walkway through here, you'll be able to come round and the whole thing will make sense to you.

Whether you drive along Hickson Road or whether you actually do it on foot, but the whole thing will look like a contiguous whole. And we will then use the opportunity of removing, of closing the wharf that belonged to Patrick's and the sort of, if you like, the cannibalism of the place in the '60s with the MSB along this site. We actually put it to good use. We turn a bad deed into a good deed by being able to use it, and we give the city back the kind of waterfront it used to always have.

So I think that's enough from me for the moment. You can see where I'm coming from. Basically, the built environment's going to continue to change. Properties will be aggregated, new ones will be built. One hopes design improves, quality improves, etc.

But if we go to the larger picture, if you like, of the harbour. I'll just try and find that one again. I know I'm not doing real good here. This one. Back to this site, we'll at least be able to lock up this, to lock this away. Bearing in mind these have gone to development. To lock this up, lock that up, and determine what should happen down here. This, I think, is a second-order issue compared to what happens around here.

And the government, I believe, the Premier, wants to do something good and important here, and he has the kind of opportunity that Joe Cahill had here, not to build a building, and certainly not to build the greatest building of the 20th century, which happened to come our way, fortuitously, but to do something really significant about this last bit of land on the great spur of Sydney, which is never going to be expanded, and can't be reproduced.

So I'll leave my remarks at that and invite questions. Thank you.

[Applause]

Kevin Fewster: Thank you, Paul. I've got to say, Paul, if it costs $500,000 to move a wall in Parliament House, the logic of moving the entire building up here would seem to be overwhelming.

Paul Keating: It costs you nothing to walk away.

[Laughter]

Kevin Fewster: Questions from the floor, please.

Paul Keating: Where's the working foreshore brigade when we need you? Working harbour?

Audience member: Oh, thank you. Can you hear me? I think it's probably a good thing that the Patrick's berth will close, if for nothing else than the sort of congestion and so on, difficulty of transport. I was interested in your remark that possibly the passenger terminal should move further west.

Paul Keating: It could be here. It could be around here. It could be there.

Audience member: Yes. Bear in mind that where you're looking there, White Bay, was the original purpose-built container terminal, and that's been closed and I understand although some ships can go there, there are some quite extraordinary conditions applied to stop the residents being disturbed, so that trailers, for example, can't reverse, because they go, 'Beep, beep, beep', and things like that.

There is still rail access, potential rail access along that wharf, which is useful. And I wonder whether, looking further ahead in history, we might regret shutting down the working harbour quite as much as seems to be happening because if we're going to put realistic carbon charges onto transport, we might find an increasing need to move goods around the country by sea, and while the big international ships, of course, need to use the expansion of Port Botany, we may find we regret shutting down the rest of the commercial harbour completely. Thank you.

Paul Keating: Well, let me just deal with that. You see, this was a world-standard set of wharves at the turn of the 20th century, and they remained useful up until the development of the container ship, because they suited Scania type vessels of 15,000 to 30,000 tons, mostly really in the range of 10,000 to 20,000 tons here.

These were even smaller, these were smaller vessels than 10,000 to 20,000 tons. These were 7,000 to 10,000 ton vessels when they were finger wharves. These were like the 'Bulolo' that went to Papua New Guinea, for instance. You know, the Burns Philp steamship company, and they would have been probably 8,000 tons.

The fact is that you've got container vessels today, the bigger, efficient ones, which are 100,000 tons and plus. And they could not usefully dock here anymore. They could dock there, one or two of them could dock there, but then where does the freight go? How does it get through this? Particularly when you've got efficiencies of scale, remember, and no railway. Though there was a railway in the old days, here at Darling Harbour. That's gone.

So therefore this thing is marooned in a sense here. Do you really want trucks with containers on running along Sussex Street or double-tandem trucks running along Sussex Street or trying to negotiate the city up through, you know, Erskine Street and Market Street and York Street. I mean, it's impossible, really. And that became apparent to Patrick's themselves.

So it's not as if the government wants this to be other than working, but the fact is it's not going to work for the kind of vessels which now operate under the kind of rules of globalisation and managed trade. So yet we are seeing an opportunity with the cruise ships. And wouldn't it be a sensible thing for a city like Sydney, with its proximity to the Pacific and the South Pacific to run a cruise business somewhere around here?

Now, there's got to be more than one ship site, as now, here. That's a terminal now, that one there. There's got to be more than one ship site. So there's only here we can effectively use for that, but we should use it, in my opinion. Otherwise, if it lays fallow for long enough, someone will be down with a development proposal to put a shopping centre down there or something else. You can just put your money on it.

So I think the government's taking a lot of stick about the working harbour, quite unfairly. And you still see the major ships coming here and up to there to dock, to bring the fuel, bring oil. You still see the car vessels dropping off motor vehicles along here, the car carriers. We're still going to see those. We're still going to see the passenger ships, which are getting bigger and bigger. They can't even get under the bridge. Some will go to here, to the overseas terminal, but others will come under here.

So I don't think we'll say it's not 'working', but this idea that, you know, Sydney Harbour is Lloyd Rees, out in 1936 painting an 8,000 ton Scania-ship with derricks and wharfies sitting on piles or rope. I mean, OK, I liked it too, but it's gone. It's not coming back.

And this kind of romanticism about it – and there's a lot about it to be romantic about. I love boats. When I was a kid, I used to come down here to 20 Pyrmont, and I used to go on these ships, the 'Strathnaver', the 'Strathaird', the 'Strathallan', the 'Strathmore', 'Orsova', 'Orcades' - all of them. I loved the things. And I actually wanted to buy the last one, the 'Himalaya'.

[Laughter]

From P&O for $3.5 million, and Hawkie said 'No'. ‘No,’ he said, 'I'm not going to encourage you with your toys'.

[Laughter]

So I had to let it go to the wrecking yard in Taiwan, but I thought as a keepsake from the great period of migration to Australia, along here we could have put the 'Himalaya', or the 'Orcades', or one of the 27,000-tons, those things. I mean, I understand the mood perfectly, but now, this period of sterilisation for these places is finishing.

And we just don't want some obsequious authority cuddling up to the New South Wales Treasury over the years, saying, 'Oh, we found someone to buy this piece here for $78 million, and someone's going to buy this...' You know, let's get a plan. What the Government's decided to do, quite honourably, is have a competition, be public about it and in here, have a public competition, public discussion. I mean, there's nothing more democratic they can do. And even after the competition entries had closed, they then put them up at the Lands Department for comment and suggestions.

So this very iterative process has actually taken place and it's now being managed by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority and by the News South Wales Department of Planning.

So there's a good chance we're going to get something from it and we've got the benefit of guidance from the competition entries and the winners – Hill Thalis. So there is thought about this thing, and therefore I think that...

And the other thing is, look, let me make a partisan comment. I don't do this, you know, normally.

[Laughter]

But the Labor Party's done everything here.

[Laughter]

It built this. It built the Harbour Bridge. It built the Opera House. It built what Askin used to call 'The road to nowhere', up here. It's reclaimed Ballast Point. It locked up Balls Head. And it will do this. There's nothing surer. But they do need some support, and we do need to get the right result. And the right result's going to take some doing.

My agenda's as clear as day. I'm prepared to say to the people who believe in industrial archaeology that the primacy in terms of heritage should be, where it's possible, that which obtained before we destroyed it, or tried to destroy it, rather than the remnant bits of that archaeology, like the hammerhead crane at Garden Island, for instance. Or bits and pieces of cranes along here. Ugly things that just shouldn't be there. And then down here.

So I'd love to see the hand of man. I'd like to see this rounded off, broken up, articulated, and so we have a place and we've got people coming and going.

I mean, one of the great pities of Sydney, if you go to places like Venice and the Grand Canal, which is a very narrow little spot compared to any of this, and you see this efficiency with which people move around on ferries. I mean, we could run a ferry from here, around to Pyrmont, Rozelle Bay, Blackwattle Bay and back. And it doesn't have to be a big ferry, but it means that all the traffic that otherwise comes down here by buses or changing at Central and then coming back down here again, you would avoid.

[Small portion of audio not recorded/transcribed here] …. whole area of residences now, this is a new thing. And for residences, we should have transport facilities, and more of them should be on water than they are. Now, that kind of working harbour, I think, is the one I'm interested in.

Audience member: Mr Keating, could we float back to the working harbour and possibly expand it a little from the one you've expressed interest in? Because you've only spoken about container vessels and large container vessels, and their impracticability within Sydney Harbour. And I believe absolutely everyone agrees with you on that particular point.

You also mentioned that we shouldn't worry because we're going to see these large car vessels continue coming into Glebe Island and under the NSW Ports plan – that is not going to happen. That will finish next year, and all of those vessels will go down to Port Kembla.

Paul Keating: That could be true.

Audience member: Similarly, what has been coming into Sydney Harbour for many years now – it's a long, long time since the last container vessel came in – we've been receiving small container vessels that ply the Pacific mainly, and can't get berths at Port Botany, because they have no fixed schedule. We've seen break bulk, that's uncontainerised cargo, coming into Sydney Harbour. And we've seen the roll-on, roll-off cargo, including cars.

All of that - the small container vessels, the roll-on, roll-off, the break bulk - would go to Port Kembla. It doesn't seem to be a sensible plan because at the moment, 80 percent to 90 percent of that cargo reaches its final destination within 40 kilometres of those wharves. Why carry it three times as far? Why carry that cargo three times the distance back to Sydney from Port Kembla. We have fuel problems, we've reached ‘peak oil’. We have climate problems, we're trying to conserve – why should we carry it three times as far?

I agree, and almost everyone will agree, that Darling Harbour has its problems. But the other two berths, Glebe Island and White Bay do not have those problems. White Bay does have a rail head, not functioning at the moment, but available.

We also need to look to the future, and it's most probable that within the next decade or so, the thousands of trucks that are rolling backwards and forwards between the capital cities on the eastern seaboard could be carried by sea, on large fast vessels that will travel between these capitals overnight.

Unless we have central wharfage within Sydney Harbour, that cannot happen. There will be no purpose carrying them down to Port Kembla or up to Newcastle to take it on to Melbourne.

If we want to get the trucks off the road, if we want to conserve, we need wharf space in Sydney Harbour. Port Kembla, when fully developed, is going to give us roughly one third of the wharfage that we have in Sydney Harbour now, yet it's supposed to carry everything that is happening in Sydney Harbour.

The port's plan has its problems. Mistakes have most likely been made. I believe we really need to reconsider. And reconsidering Sydney Harbour as a full working harbour as it is today, does not eliminate all the possibilities that you've been speaking about tonight.

Paul Keating: Well, I don't think anything is mutually exclusive, but if you remember what I said, you can't make a sympathetic case for a bulk ore carrier or a bulk materials carrier coming here, or a car carrier coming here, and not make a similar sympathetic case for the tourist ships that may come here, it's my opinion.

Now you've accepted that this is sub-economic for large container vessels but not for the roll-on/roll-off vessel. But do we want to see this proportion of the spur at Sydney alienated from public use and from future development to accommodate one or two roll-on/roll-off vessels? In the great scheme of things of magnitude, it's just not a proposition.

So East Darling Harbour makes its own case. Over here, I don't have any hard and fast views about it, except that these are no longer ports. I mean, when I was young, a boy, all those ships I mentioned pulled up here at 20 Pyrmont and 13 Pyrmont. These are now residential. This is all residential now.

There is a rail head here, that is true, but again, what's going to take the pressure off Sydney traffic on the highways is the rail system. One of the things I did as Prime Minister was, in a document called Working Nation, or One Nation, before it was purloined by nutters in Queensland, was to put $8 billion in the rail system.

That made a very great difference to the roads. What it did was, by lifting bridges and straightening track, and by improving certain places, you can put a container on the rail in Sydney at 6:00pm in the evening and it will arrive at 5:30am in Melbourne. It took tons of these things off the roads. Ditto for the north coast rail.

And I also, because they had a different gauge in Queensland, built a new spur line to the port of Queensland to give Sydney competition and then connected it to the main southern line, which was standard gauge, and improved it along the north coast, so the same thing would happen. And a lot of trucks have disappeared off the roads.

But as you know, what the industry wants is a purpose-built railway running from Melbourne to Brisbane up the back of NSW to be able to take those kind of tonnages off roads in the future. And I think it's rail which has got to be the great saviour of the road system, but I don't see much of a case for putting more container traffic down here. Though whether or not the car carriers go to Port Kembla, you may have a point.

Port Kembla mightn't be able to take them, and I don't have any real objection to the car carriers coming here, but I think I'd have an objection if we're saying that bulk ore carriers or small bulk carriers, with a crew of 15 or 20, 15 people, get some sort of primacy, but a 40,000-ton ship with 600 or 1,000 people onboard gets pushed down the queue.

I mean, I just think that if we can encourage the whole of the tourist industry out of Sydney by sea, in those vessels, we should, but we're not going to do that by just limiting ourselves to one place here or one place here. We certainly need some facilities, and maybe you can make them so that these wharves remain some sort of multipurpose.

I don't think they should be alienated to development, residential, if you like, or commercial. There's the White Bay power station here, that probably does lend itself to some sort of a shopping development or something. I've got no problem about that.

But I don't have hard and fast rules about these things, except that this is the opportunity to do this, and to do that, and to do this, and when are we going to get that opportunity again? Can we see this coming up again? And if we lose it now and this gets poorly developed…. You know, we just took the view that we just develop it with towers all the way along it, etc, then the heritage for the city is diminished. I just think this would be a very sad outcome. So trying to find a balance….

Port Botany has had to be developed as a primary container port for the city of Sydney, and Port Kembla will carry some other cargoes. Admittedly there are problems about transport out of Port Kembla, and it does need more rail facilities, but that's something we can do. But this, you can't do again. You don't get another go at this. This is what was bequeathed to us, and we're lucky at least a lot of it is still in reasonable shape to be occupied and enjoyed.

[Pause]

Audience member: What sort of public transport – not ferries, but trams or buses – is planned for Hickson Road, and where will it connect back into the existing grids, so that people can easily get down there to enjoy it and walk around and then get back into the public transport system? Has that been planned?

Paul Keating: Well, I don't know if it's been planned, but it is a live issue and it is a real issue. And there has been a discussion about connecting up with the light rail through here, which comes back to this part of the city, and doing something along here, Sussex Street, to get down onto this site. The site could certainly... This road, Hickson Road, I think would probably be improved, certainly could accommodate and may be improved, by a light rail facility through it, which would also take a lot of pressure off Town Hall and Wynyard Stations for people moving this way, and we would....

But getting through this bottleneck here, down here, is difficult. It may mean that somewhere like Sussex Street, or the northern end of it, gets lost to that kind of traffic. These, I think, are real issues, and the transport studies are still, I think, being undertaken. But there's no doubt there's going to be more people down this end of the site as a higher rise goes in. This area is developed with Westpac and KPMG etc down here, and there will be residential along here. So there's going to be more people, and more people require movement, and they require transport.

I accept that water transport and water traffic is just one thing. Other than that, we're left to buses with all their limitations or maybe a light rail system is worth thinking about.

Kevin Fewster: One last question you can ask Paul now.

Audience member: How can we identify what should be the right solution in regard to sterility, with all that you've been talking about in the various areas of the Harbour, east and west? Can we trust the simple process of a jury panel to begin the process of excluding sterility for one? Could you comment on the problems you see in coming up with the right solutions in regard to sterility for one?

Paul Keating: Well, I think that we do have a government of goodwill towards this area. That's point one. We have a competent planning agency and operating agency in dealing with what will be the future development here, and I've got every belief that the public area will be planned in.

That is, it will be determined by the government agencies and by the government and not by developers, right? And I don't use 'developers' in a negative kind of sense, but not left to any residual outcome. That the public area's planned in. So, here, this is a possibility.

Here, you can see what I said about this. Look at this bay. This is a very large factor in it, you know? And all the people that go down there and have their photo taken at lunchtime, along these restaurants, could have their photographs taken along here in the sun.

[Laughter]

And they would have had a better view looking out here to, without having these wharves here - these things here.

I wanted to, as Treasurer, I refused a Japanese group, the Nara Hotel Group, the right to buy this site, and I used the foreign investment power to block them. And when I got to Tokyo, I got a very hostile reception at the Japan Press Club, where a number of journalists said to me what have I got against Japan and Japanese development? And I said, 'Nothing'. I said, 'Look, I will make a proposition to you. Get this down. I will give you this site to any Japanese development company if the government of Japan will give an Australian developer a piece of the Imperial Park in Tokyo'.

[Laughter]

And they said, oh, they didn't understand.

[Laughter]

I did. This is our Imperial Park and I wanted to, of course, in an earlier day, I wanted to put this underground, this road. Take the Cahill Expressway down, put this underground, bring the Botanical Gardens and the Domain back as one, and see this extended back down to its natural shoreline by subsuming that wharf in the green space here and building a boardwalk around here and turfing the navy out of the parking station.

[Laughter]

But once Clover and the rest of them told me, no, no, I was wrong, and that we had to have this with its great cathedral spaces, I decided, well, I'd leave the navy here. And, you know, they're always banging away down there, annoying all these residents.

But you can see what a dreadful.... I mean, this is the greatest heist ever. There's nothing like this in Sydney's history, this one here. And this has now become a private boat harbour here, just a little private…. There's a great big boat occupies the front of it, so you've got to go around it to come in, and if you come in, you couldn't swing a cat in the thing, more or less. Or certainly, turn a boat, because there's not much ground left.

And on the other side, the navy use this, so this can't be used, so the whole thing is a great shame. This is the last public access point on the eastern side of the Harbour Bridge. The rest of Sydney is owned privately, all these are owned privately, and this was it. So now, if you don't have a ton of money, what you get is you get a chance to walk around this and take that in.

You can now sit and have a coffee down at East Circular Quay, and have at least some access there. You can go to the institutions like the gallery, etc, and you can go down here, but what you can't do is sort of get on it as a sort of right, as a sort of basis of quiet enjoyment. You can get on it if you want to pay, down here.

And even the botanical gardens themselves. I mean, I'm always having a potshot at Tim Entwhistle about the movie theatre he has down there, and all these entertainments are on here. Whatever happened to the notion of contemplation and quiet enjoyment? That's what the botanical gardens were for. You walk through them and end up asking as many questions about yourself as you do the place. But you don't get a chance down here: it's rockland.

[Laughter]

It's a rock venue. We've just given it away. When I used to be a kid, I used to speak down here for the Labor Party on a soapbox. What chance would you have now? You'd have to beat the rockers down here. And over here, more and more of this gets gobbled up as the years go on. So I'm very pessimistic about the public spaces.

This is what, I think has driven Philip Thalis and his colleagues, that was to try and put a line through this place so that we don't get these encroachments from the private domain into the public domain. I mean, I'm very sympathetic to those principles, but let's not have another one of these again. This cannot happen again. It should never happen again.

And this is why we have got, I think, as democratic a process, as consultative a process up here as it's possible to have. You know, there's tons of articles in the Sydney Morning Herald about it, in the popular press, on radio. We've had these entries, etc.

Now, you can always have more, there's no doubt about it. But at least the government's getting on and doing it, and I wanted... This government's just been returned to office. It's got four years, a four-year mandate, and in that four years this could happen. Something good down here can happen. And I just think rather than take the cynical view that governments are all no good and they're all out for themselves, and all the rest of it, you know, just getting behind a government to do this, with a new premier is, I think, an important thing to do.

And I think we can do very well with it. And when it's finished, you'll boat your way along here and you'll see something completely different to now – a headland here, looking at a headland there, looking at one there and looking at one there. I mean, cities of this size just never get those opportunities. They just never come our way.

So I don't know whether there's any perfect way, in answer to your question, of determining what's good and what's bad, but I think attending venues like this and having discussions like this are helpful, I hope, and just marking some space out, marking things out.

You'll see the point I've made about Bennelong Point and Garden Island here. These are the two promontories and this, you know, Greenaway mightn't have been the only person but he always thought this thing should have a ceremonial building. I think he was right.

But you know what'll happen. Some toolshed in 1890 will have to go down here and you'll get the Heritage mafia fighting you to knock it over. They will. They're nutters.

[Laughter]

They're absolute nutters. They have a complete confusion between ends and means, about what is important. And if we were to build, let's say, we were to build a Commonwealth Parliament here, wouldn't it be worth the price of a couple of machine sheds? You know, however built? In brick, with however the radius was done in steel. Not unnecessarily knocking them out, but if they have to be knocked out, they get knocked out.

We could have taken the view here that this was Fort Denison, it was a fort, you know, when the Russians were coming, we protected ourselves and we had to keep it. Well, we wouldn't have that. So, you know, there are ons and offs and balances and a good society tries to get those things right.

[Laughter]

Kevin Fewster: Thank you very much, Paul. I thought that it was only fair that we drew a halt then. There are two journalists sitting in the front row. They're both getting writer's cramp, I think, from the wonderful things that Paul's been talking about. Please join me again in thanking Paul Keating for a wonderful, wonderful talk.

[Applause]


TAGS
+ Design competition