Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Compensation for what?

In Robert Standish's novel Mr On Loong, about the sole 
Chinese resident on one of His Majesty's Caribbean colonies 
before and during WW2, one of the characters explains the 
thinking of your typical planter and merchant.

"If two of them are walking down a street", he says, "and they 
spy a pound note lying on the footpath, they will both make a 
grab for it. Afterwards, the one who missed out will go around 
saying he was robbed of a pound.

"Even the one who got the note won't acknowledge that he made a 
pound, because the note belonged to him the moment he saw it!"

It is probably 40 years since I read Mr On Loong but the 
scene has stuck in my mind, to be instantly brought to the 
surface by the news of the Land and Environment Court's 
outrageous decision on the Ballast Point industrial site in 
Sydney.

For those of you who do not live in the harbour-side city, the 
former Caltex refinery and depot at Ballast Point covers 2.6 
hectares of contaminated land that Caltex sought to off-load in 
1997.

The oil company granted the property developer Lang Walker an 
option to acquire the site for $16.5 million. It is harbour 
frontage land and Walker hoped to build lots of expensive units 
there, after decontaminating the land, of course, and always 
assuming he could get planning permission for such a development 
in the sensitive harbour foreshore area.

But you don't get to be what the Sydney Morning Herald 
called a "property tycoon" without being canny, and Mr Walker 
probably had a shrewd idea that if the project for 138 waterfront 
units was unable to proceed he'd still be able to make a packet 
from Government compensation.

Which is no doubt why Walker only exercised his option to buy the 
site two months after the State Government announced it would buy 
the site for public land. The cost of decontaminating the site, 
incidentally, has been estimated at $2.12 million.

Walker's only outlay was a $825,000 deposit which has since been 
repaid. But like the characters in Standish's novel, the money he 
might have made if conditions had been different somehow already 
belongs to him. He has been robbed of it!

If he had been able to get permission to build homes on 
contaminated land, if he had been able to get planning permission 
for almost 12 dozen units on the harbour foreshore, if the 
housing market had held steady, and probably several other ifs, 
then he stood to make, according to his own estimate, "up to $80 
million".

So he sued the NSW Government for that much in "compensation". 
Compensation for what?

Walker was not out of pocket. He had not lost a penny. But the 
money he could have made, if everything had gone according to his 
hopes and wishes, he (as a good capitalist) sees not as 
hypothetical money but as his money.

He is being denied it, and he wants compensation for it.

To the amazement of most people, but not of close observers of 
the capitalist system, Justice Robert Talbot of the NSW Land and 
Environment Court sided with Walker, and ordered the Sydney 
Harbour Foreshore Authority to "compensate" the poor fellow to 
the tune of $60 million from the public purse.

As Roger Parkes, chairman of environmental group the Ballast 
Point Campaign Committee, observed: "The magnitude of the payout 
verges on the obscene".

"Verges" nothing, Roger; it is obscene.

Recognising that the logic at work in the Court's decision is not 
the logic of normal people, Roger Parkes called for the decision 
to be appealed against "to ensure common sense and some sanity be 
introduced".

But when did common sense and sanity ever have much influence on 
capitalism, eh?

Preparing for new colonial wars

In the same issue of the Sydney Morning Herald (July 12), 
Hugh White argued against the Defence Department's call for the 
Australian Government to buy two 27,000 tonne specialist ships 
called LHDs. The ships are specifically designed for making large 
scale amphibious landings against hostile shores.

They are for full scale war against North Korea or even China, 
although White does not admit this. He does declare them to be 
unnecessary and unwarranted.

Instead, he advocates getting a larger number of 12,000-tonne 
amphibious ships, which he says would be "fine" for the kinds of 
"lower-level operations" we would encounter in our immediate 
neighbourhood, "such as East Timor and the Solomon Islands".

These smaller vessels "would be capable of handling tougher 
fights against the kinds of forces" we might find closer to home, 
it seems.

So that's the choice: preparing for war on a really large scale, 
or preparing to be the heavy handed neo-colonial local bully. 
Peace or even defence are apparently not options.

To back up his case, White lets us in on the interesting fact 
that "France and Britain are building ships of this size [27,000 
tonne LHDs] to provide expeditionary forces for remote operations 
in places such as Africa".

What African country is threatening France or Britain? Or is it 
rather that these imperialist powers cannot get African countries 
to do their dirty work for them, or even to do as they are told, 
and are looking to "expeditionary forces" to enforce the new 
colonialism that London, Paris and Washington are now trying to 
impose around the globe?