Conspiracy or cock-up?

When it comes to governments, said the famous American economist J. K. Galbraith, what looks like a conspiracy is usually a cock-up. It’s safe to say he’d never been to New South Wales. Over here, sadly, the government specialises in both.

Look at the Heads of Agreement that Leichhardt Council is being asked to sign in return for taking over the bulk of Callan Park. And keep in mind that this government’s aims for Callan Park have always been to shut down the site’s public mental health facilities, and sell off portions of the park for development.

There are two sleepers in the Agreement that the jousting over the financial swindle involved in the deal has diverted attention from. Both of these ‘landmines’ would, in fact, advance the government’s traditional agenda.

The first is the shrinking of the area originally offered to Council. Last October the NSW Planning Minister, Kristina Keneally, promised Council 40 of the 61 hectares at Callan Park. Since then, the ambulance service has put in a bid for the most modern mental health buildings on the site and more than 10 acres (or 5 hectares) of open space adjacent to these buildings. Apparently they want it for administration and car parking.

The Heads of Agreement asks Council to accept this shrinkage. The ambulance service may have a plausible argument for this takeover, but we haven’t heard it. And it’s hardly likely that their case is better than that of people with a mental illness. The targeted buildings are state-of-the-art cottages and wards, built in the 1990s for people who were recovering from the worst of their mental illness before they returned to the community.

Everyone, except apparently the NSW government and its bureaucrats, knows that these beds are needed – and needed now. Emergency departments are overcrowded with mentally ill patients and there are just not enough beds at Concord, the smaller psychiatric hospital which was supposed to replace Rozelle Hospital at Callan Park. The consequences of this shortage are homelessness, imprisonment and premature deaths for hundreds of our fellow citizens.

You have to ask: is the ambulance administration takeover meant to be the final nail in the coffin of a humane approach to mental health at Callan Park?

The second trap in the proposed Agreement is just as bad. In return for the shrunken portion of Callan Park, Council has to prepare a plan of subdivision of the site as a precondition of the 99-year lease. The Agreement claims this is necessary to secure the leases of the other tenants. This is simply not true. The University of Sydney and the NSW Writers’ Centre have leased parts of the site for 15 years without subdivisions.

Carving up the site would open the door to disposing or selling off chunks of the site – something which state governments have wanted to do for the past two decades. Yes, the Callan Park (Special Provisions) Act now prohibits any sale of Callan Park land, but dividing it up into disposable parcels would simplify any later change to the Act and future sale.

The community and Council have opposed subdivision in the past. The last example was three years ago when NSW Health and the University of Sydney proposed subdividing Kirkbride, the sandstone complex in the heart of the site, into six separate lots. The reasons for that subdivision were never explained.

It is conceivable – just – that these two clauses in the Agreement are the work of some over-ambitious bureaucrats in the ambulance service or Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, involved in the drafting of the document.

But whether the clauses are conspiracy or cock-up now scarcely matters because the dangers are out in the open. The opposition to them will grow and not go away. That, unfortunately for this government, is very NSW too.

by Hall Greenland. Hall is President of Friends of Callan Park