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Lord May­ors Clover Moore and David Bor­ger spoke at length about their vis­ion for their respect­ive cit­ies

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. Sydney Town Hall has a seat­ing capa­city of about 2000. There were at best 100 people in the room. An indic­a­tion of how much Sydney-siders care.

These sorts of present­a­tions invari­ably involve a cer­tain elev­ated level of ima­gin­a­tion and delve into pipe dreams, so a healthy dose of cyn­icism doesn’t go astray.

Both speak­ers made use of a tac­tic whereby they presen­ted their vis­ions as an altern­at­ive to an unlikely dysto­pia they described in detail (to make their ideas seem mar­vel­lous no doubt). Mrs Moore’s vis­ion was paraded as a series of com­ple­ment­ary themes relat­ing to the envir­on­ment, trans­port, recon­cili­ation, arts, and cul­ture. Her ideal Sydney in 2030 was one con­tain­ing dis­tinct but con­nec­ted “vil­lages”, ima­gined from the ground up as sus­tain­able eco­sys­tems. There would be open spaces, access­ible and afford­able (i.e. sub­sid­ised) pub­lic trans­port, and dense liv­ing in eco­lo­gic­ally sound and engin­eered build­ings. The much mooted under­ground rail con­nec­tion between Sydney and Par­ra­matta would make the jour­ney a 10-minute trip.

Bor­ger ran­ted against West­field and other prop­erty developers, and trum­peted his achieve­ments as Lord Mayor of Par­ra­matta. Irrit­at­ingly he raised some ideas for Par­ra­matta 2030 that would already be under­way if the state gov­ern­ment (which he is a part of as Mem­ber for Gran­ville) had not scuttled them for sup­posed eco­nomic non-viability (such as the Parramatta-Epping rail link). He saw Par­ra­matta as a dis­tinct city centre with its own vibrant cul­ture, some­thing more than an after­thought for gov­ern­ment offices. He was scath­ing of those who viewed it as a Westie backwater.

A mildly inter­est­ing point that was raised when he recalled an anec­dote about com­munity con­sulta­tion. Sur­veyed cit­izens were given a hypo­thet­ical $100 and were asked how they would spend it to improve Par­ra­matta. The most pop­u­lar response was to clean up the Par­ra­matta River. Appar­ently this demon­strated a “dis­con­nect” between the people and those elec­ted to rep­res­ent them. Although improv­ing the River was import­ant, it was appar­ently not at the top of the coun­cil­lors’ pri­or­it­ies. This was “proof” that com­munity con­sulta­tion worked and should be exten­ded as part of broader coun­cil decision-making.

Anne Sum­mers remarked that she was pleased the vis­ions were both “people-centred” (as opposed to what, I’m unsure). The most appar­ent prob­lem (for me at least) was the cost of the plans. The solu­tion accord­ing to Clover is more co-operation between the vari­ous levels of gov­ern­ment (i.e. the fed­eral and state gov­ern­ments need to give her more money). David says that coun­cils should be amal­gam­ated to real­ise greater eco­nom­ies of scale. Broadly, both want greater powers and respons­ib­il­it­ies for regional-style authorities.

I am scep­tical that these ideas will be adop­ted in any sub­stan­tial way. Sydney/Parramatta 2030 seems to be noth­ing but inner-city liv­ing. The Lord May­ors’ con­tempt for sub­urban liv­ing was palp­able. I simply don’t see how it would work.