CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | Contact
As Sydney begins it’s first wave of social cleansing in Waterloo and Redfern, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian says she’s pretty confident it will all be worth it, but we’ll see.
This comes after the NSW government announced that thousands of elderly and at risk Australians that depend on public housing will be relocated out-of-sight from prospective property buyers, in response to the unsustainable multi-decade property boom that now appears to be faltering.
“Stop being so pessimistic. The market should be good” said Berejiklian.
“Meriton, Mirvac, Lenlease… All these guys have been promised the acreage, and now it’s up to us to make it worthwhile”
The Premier then told the media present that it was their duty as well to make sure this slightly fascist form of gentrification worked out in the developers favour.
“If this thing goes bust, it’ll be a result of your sensationalist speculating”
The decision to socially cleanse inner-city Sydney came somewhere in between the three different Liberal Premiers that New South Wales has had over the last five years, and is a policy based of the success of the lock-out laws that killed the city’s iconic nightlife economy.
However, unlike the fruits that were harvested for the property developers who have since made billions selling off Kings Cross, it appears the demolition of thousands of inner-city houso flats and subsequent redevelopment of South Sydney might not be worth the stigma that comes with a government blatantly telling poor people that they aren’t pleasant to be around.
That’s mainly because the current property downturn is both sharper and more widespread than the two most recent slumps. And the record decline of 9.6 per cent in 1989–91 is almost certain to be surpassed, as the Southern property market begins to rumble.
As the Premier prepares to start herding the undesirables onto westbound buses, like Bob Carr did during the 2000 Olympics, it is not yet known if any of their services will also be relocated as well, and whether or not they will have to get a 2-hour train into town from Mt Druitt to visit the doctor that used to be down the road.
