We have failed you. Your grown ups have been playing at mud pies in a pernicious adult sort of a way and the game has got very murky.
A sludge of global companies pretending to be 'fair dinkum' aussie ones has invaded our public institutions by stealth all the while facilitated by our public officials and politicians. I am afraid we have not been able to prevent the desecration of your homes and your futures - this terrible state of affairs has happened on our watch and has been perpetrated by our democratically elected representatives whom we have voted for. Right now the premier Mike Baird and his road minister Duncan Gay and others are overseeing the triumph of violence and stupidity in New South Wales. They literally are dripping with guilt
Yes, we voted for these destroyers some of whom are parents and grandparents to some of you.
I am so sorry.
There were a few of us who tried to broadcast warnings as to what was looming but we were pilloried as "Cassandras" and as with the mythological Cassandra we were not to be believed or heeded.
Unfortunately that very Australian 'she'll be right, mate' approach to life acted as a barrier to us actually seeing what was happening in our parliaments and their back rooms, committee rooms, or whatever you like to call them. Most people did not imagine for a minute the extent of the destruction that was to come - and come it has.
The felling of the beautiful trees on Anzac Parade and Alison Road is basically Sydney's Penn Station moment.
(Image: Penn Station, mashable.com) |
Anyway, Pennsylvannia Station was one of New York's most magnificent stations of the twentieth century until the 1960s. It was a grand entrance into New York for anybody and everybody.
Penn Station had been built in 1910 and then inexplicably in 1963 it was demolished according to the wishes and desires of Big Developa and Big Pollie to make way for ... wait for it ... a monstrous sports stadium and entertainment centre which some of you may well have heard of ... Madison Square Gardens ... sounds familiar to what is on the cards for Sydney.
Sigh.
Just as with our Anzac Parade and Alison Road, there were plenty of protests held, and plenty of passionate people making the case for the station to remain, and of course there were plenty of police and sadly plenty of vested interests political and otherwise licking their lips and getting ready to line their pockets with $$$.
(Image: Penn Station, mashable.com) |
(Image: Penn Station, mashable.com) |
However the battle for Penn Station and its preposterous destruction did prepare New Yorkers for other planned onslaughts in their city one of which was the outrageous proposed destruction of Grand Central Terminal in 1975.
(Image: Grand Central Terminal, www.wikipedia.org) |
(Image: Grand Central Terminal, www.downtownmagazinenyc.com) |
On a side note, I have just started transcribing Anzac First World War diaries in a voluntary capacity for the NSW State Library and I have to tell you that I have not got very far. Reading the diaries makes for the saddest reading I have ever done.
I feel each sentence is reaching out to me across the last 100 years from the damp fetid terrifying trenches of the Somme in France to make sure that I bear witness to the fact that war is not for the ordinary man or the ordinary woman or the ordinary child but for the ever present greedy Big Corpa and politician-puppets that we have always had with us.
The sentences envelop me in a pall of sadness, and this is all the more acute right now when I look at what our hypocritical politicians are doing to these young men's memorial on Anzac Parade. And then that pall of sadness turns to anger when I think that those dead Anzacs did not give their lives so some rich 'fucker' like Mike Baird could destroy Sydney. (Whoops, but not sorry, children, grrr).
These trees play such an important part in our city; environmentally, socially, 'memorially' ... and we need them. Countless generations of Australians and visitors have marvelled at our magnificent tree-lined boulevards. No longer - they have gone ... sigh.
I am so sad, I am so sorry.
Ok, children, why don't we now have a look together at this Team Sydney Destruction ... oh I probably should use their preferred nomenclature, ok, Altrac Light Rail consortium.
This group has agreed:
This group has agreed:
"... to build a 12 km light rail route in Sydney, Australia, worth AUS$ 2.1 billion (US$ 1.5 billion) in order to help reduce congestion. It will comprise of a 12 km track, 19 stops, a bridge over the Eastern Distributor toll road, a tunnel under Moore Park, Control Centre facilities, housing for the light rail vehicles, a maintenance depot, and substations with other service buildings along the route."
... jeez that's a lot of infrastructure to plonk in Sydney.
Anyway, I hear you ask, 'who are Altrac Light Rail Consortiom?' ...
... and that is a good question indeed.
Answer: a melting pot of greedy corporates which have seen an immense opportunity for making a billion or two, and following best Big Corpa practice like the good corporates that they are, have employed the use of friendly independent sounding business names to confuse what are essentially corporate subsidiaries so as to project a nice familiar trustworthy local feel not normally associated with the faceless parent mult-national companies that actually run stuff in our homeland.
Anyway, I hear you ask, 'who are Altrac Light Rail Consortiom?' ...
... and that is a good question indeed.
Answer: a melting pot of greedy corporates which have seen an immense opportunity for making a billion or two, and following best Big Corpa practice like the good corporates that they are, have employed the use of friendly independent sounding business names to confuse what are essentially corporate subsidiaries so as to project a nice familiar trustworthy local feel not normally associated with the faceless parent mult-national companies that actually run stuff in our homeland.
So here we go, let's have a peep at them, and see what we know so far:
Altrac Light Rail Consortium (previously Connecting Sydney), consists of:
(Screen capture: Daily Mail UK) |
2. Alstom
... a dodgy French company which has been "at the centre of corruption charges in the UK ...
... and the US and was fined $800 million last December after an FBI investigation into bribery."
... and then because they were in such a pickle with their piggy bank, Alstom had to sell the energy and grid part of their company and allow themselves to be acquired by General Electric, a US company, which meant Alstom's role in their brand spanking new partnership with DCNS, yet another dodgy french company (which has just landed the $50 billion Australian contract to build us 12 submarines by 2030) was taken over by GE.
3. Capella Capital
... in a relationship with Lendlease (isn't everybody?) and was the sponsor, infrastructure developer and financial advisor to Altrac.
3. Capella Capital
... in a relationship with Lendlease (isn't everybody?) and was the sponsor, infrastructure developer and financial advisor to Altrac.
4. Transdev Sydney, oh boy, here we go ...
(Image: Transdev, the parent) |
Oh là là , what a tangled web we weave.
This is the world of globalisation and Trans-PacificPartnerships and secrecy and cloak and dagger government and powerful people's machinations and pretence too because Big Corpa knows that we are becoming less and less trusting of them each day, hence their pathetic trick of pretending they are home-grown enterprises.
C'est nul! (french for 'it sucks!')
This is the world of globalisation and Trans-PacificPartnerships and secrecy and cloak and dagger government and powerful people's machinations and pretence too because Big Corpa knows that we are becoming less and less trusting of them each day, hence their pathetic trick of pretending they are home-grown enterprises.
C'est nul! (french for 'it sucks!')
(Screen capture:Paris Champs Elysees, car-free thoroughfare, BBC News) |
I am sure you can- it would not be pretty - the French would not be happy.
Yet here in Australia reports detailing 'misappropriation of public funds, falsifying documents and money laundering' by these companies now entrusted with remodelling of our city have not shocked our elected government.
I am letting you know, children, that it is a serious state of affairs when the act of bribing government officials and politicians to land lucrative development and construction contracts becomes the order of the day (plat du jour) and does not raise a mention from our premier or his cabinet.
Why should we settle for these corrupt multi-nationals building our future irrevocably changing our city for the worse? From what we have seen so far, their track record appears poor and untrustworthy.
Why are our politicians happy with them?
Why have operations not been halted immediately?
The perception of conflicts of interests is at an all time extreme, and you have to wonder whether our very own politicians are not actually agents for these multi-nationals themselves. It truly does appear as though the 'mafiosi' or something similar has ensconced themselves very snugly into our Parliaments and Cabinets, and have morphed into our politicians.
But sadly, children, I am afraid there's more, because the french reach doesn't stop with Altrac ... sigh.
A hop skip and a jump from Anzac Parade and Alison Road we have the Inner West and the catastrophe that is being rolled out there - WestCONnex.
(Slideshow & song put together in 2015 by yours truly with apologies to Roberta Flak)
Yet again the venality of polticians and developers is on show. Yet again politicians and developers have conspired to gut a great city simply because the dollars $$$ smell oh so sweet.There is nothing good about WestCONnex ... absoloutely nothing.
(Screen capture: Junkee on WestCONnex) |
(Screen capture: Sydney Morning Herald) |
And sure enough we don't have to look very far to find one.
It turns out that our Gladys, Treasurer of New South Wales, and our Duncan, Minister for Roads, Maritime and Freight, also aka Sydney Motorway Corporation (a private corporation created purely to avoid freedom of information demands with these two NSW cabinet ministers the only shareholders), have awarded the contract for the operation and maintenance of the WestCONnex motorway to Fulton Hogan Egis O&M Pty (FHEO&M).
And guess what?
It turns out that the 'Egis' part of this group is a subsidiary of Caisse des Dépôts, which guess what ... has shares in Transdev which guess what was formerly 'Connex' ... oh boy, so with all the different parents and children of Big Corpa it turns out Sydney Light Rail and WestCONnex are siblings or cousins, or maybe both.
I am afraid, children, that Mike Baird and his government do not care about you and me, nor do they care that they do not have a proper city plan. They have made that quite clear. I think we can all assume their departments to be full of experts who at some stage over the recent savage surgery of our beautiful city would have advised the government that the plan for Sydney is a disastrous 'white elephant.'
Our politicians know just as well as you and I know that the current light rail and WestCONnex plans will be ludicrously costly and will turn out to be utterly usesless. Yet notwithstanding this knowledge they continue with their crazy modus operandi because powerful people with money have asked them to do so.
Communities and community spirit are not commodities to privatise willy nilly or sweep away like rubble under the private-public-partnership carpet.
Sydney's political and business elites are transforming the city's landscape in a way that would have been unimaginable five years ago. The posturing of Mike Baird and his refusal to address the calamaties that have been created through his neo-con mindset expose the conceit of a man who actually believes the spin that he is a cool celebrity premier. As he flagrantly destroys large tracts of land in the Inner West along with the beautiful trees on Anzac Parade and Alison Road, we are losing invaluable public space as well as the vital fabric of inner city communities.
We are now in a strange situation in Sydney where defending democracy, human rights, the environment and our communities has become radical - exactly when did that become radical?
Mike Baird is our democratically elected representative, and as such he should be obeying us. He is not, so we should simply throw him out.
Once again I am so sorry for what has happened on my watch, but I promise you, children, that I will fight and keep fighting for your futures even if that means a spot of civil disobedience alongside old and new found friends.
Yours in tears and motivation,
Sue Abbott
Scone
NSW
What a horrible and predictable story. The only bright spot is you transcribing letters by Anzac troops. These shall not be forgotten years!
ReplyDeleteAfter the clip of the Midnight Oil song, a few times over, I thought of Juarès, originally by Jacques Brel, but I love this version by Zebda about the antiwar Socialist politician from southwestern France, murdered by bellicists before the "Great War". We remember that Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by their German counterparts after the war...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUoxRR5aRlI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUoxRR5aRlI