Holy Toledo, Batman!
- Author:
- Lawrence Gibbons
- Posted:
- Friday, 4 December 2009
Publisher’s Note:
Having moved to Sydney from the States in 1995, I am sensitive to generic slurs against all expat Americans. The US is a vast nation of diverse regions: California is as far away from Ohio as Sweden is from Egypt. And the regional differences are almost as vast.
Less than twelve hours after this fortnight’s edition of the City Hub hit the street, a “Septic Tank” (as we Yanks are called locally) became Premiere of NSW. When the City Hub went to print the night before, Kristina Kerscher Keneally (KKK) was the Planning Minister for the State. Who would have guessed she would be elevated to the State’s top office the next day? Unsurprisingly, the anti American rhetoric is running thick and fast.
KKK moved to Sydney in 2004 and has lived in Australia one year longer than I have. My concerns about her cultural background are now doubly troubling.
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Kristina Kerscher Keneally should know a thing or two about shopping centres. Born and bred in Toledo, Ohio, KKK’s hometown sports more mega box stores, faceless chain outlets and struggling shopping malls than any one Midwest community ever could support. Holy Toledo sits midway along the rust belt that girdles the Great Lakes: somewhere between Detroit’s decaying sprawl and Ohio’s largest city — Cleveland, which locals call “the mistake on the lake.’
Now NSW Planning Minister, KKK’s local electorate includes Green Square and Redfern-Waterloo. Combined, her South Sydney neighbourhoods comprise the inner city’s largest urban revitalisation project since Lord Mayor Frank Sartor worked hand in hand with the State Labor government to redevelop the Sydney Harbour Foreshore around Pyrmont. His reward was to be catapulted into cabinet as Planning Minister with control over the Redfern-Waterloo Authority and the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, until KKK was anointed and Sartor was replaced.
Say what you will about her, Labor’s newly appointed real estate agent is no ordinary blonde bombshell. All year long her Department has been busy crafting a new shopping centre policy for metropolitan Sydney. Under the guise of “increasing competition” and “reducing prices for consumers” the Minister’s proposed new laws would grant developers the right to erect massive shopping centres and retail barns the size of football fields without considering their impact on Sydney’s local village precincts. They would be proud of her in Toledo.
To study how large, chain-store operations can destroy a local community at the expense of local business, KKK’s planning department should visit the Minister’s hometown, where big box stores are devouring one another and shopping malls are struggling to survive. In downtown Toledo, the former, massive nine story Macy’s Department Store (which housed a dry goods store for sixty years before Macy’s opened) sat derelict until the City government was forced to maintain the vacant site. As one urban planning expert commented, “The strip malls of Toledo have literally stripped downtown Toledo of its people, and its character–at the expense of the all-American taxpayers.”
With two mega Wal-Marts having recently expanded in Toledo, locals are fighting back, rallying and demanding comprehensive ‘Big Box’ store ordinances to help communities gain more leverage in the development process. But here in NSW, the State’s Ohio-born Planning Minister is proposing new regulations that will make it easier for Australia’s global retail developers and mega chain store operators to put local, small shops out of business. As The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported on its front page, “[Proposed new laws will] give big developers and supermarkets free rein to open stores. Under the plan, no consideration would have to be given to the effects on small businesses or the proximity of other shops when decisions are made to approve large new stores. The term ‘neighbourhood shop’ would be deleted from local environmental plans.” Once adopted, the State’s planning guidelines will ensure that Sydney’s traditional village high streets, including Marrickville Road, Parramatta Road, the Princes and the Hume Highways all go the way of the American Midwest: malled to death.
Born in the shadow of Detroit, KKK envisions a new Motor City where consumers can drive to malls and big box stores to fill up their cars. In April the Minister told the Herald that her new centres policy would stimulate economic activity “by co-locating business, shopping services and entertainment in centres using transport and other infrastructure more efficiently”. And yet in a world planning for reduced energy consumption, studies in the US consistently find that people who live near small stores are more likely to walk to the shop. While local neighbourhood shops reduce greenhouse emissions, large shopping centres have the opposite effect. Study after study has found that people who live near local, small shops drive less, walk more and use less petrol. Big box stores, chain stores and superstores waste land resources, contributing to urban sprawl and suburban blight; to say nothing of the social cost of spending your money at a mega chain store. Dollars spent at a local shop stay in the local community. One recent American study showed that for every $100 spent at a local-independent business, $73 stays in the community versus $43 at a non-locally owned business.
Large chain stores suck money out of the local community, while local small businesses provide colour, character and a unique cultural experience. Local small businesses generate local jobs; large retail barns create a workforce of minimum-wage slaves. Having escaped the urban blight of America’s decaying, poorly planned rust belt, the Planning Minister appears hell bent on bringing the same unsustainable, car-dependent sprawl she grew up with in Ohio here to Sydney. Having witnessed the effects of rampant, unregulated retail growth on local small businesses in her home town of Toledo, Ohio, Kristina Kerscher Kenneally plans to bring the same poor planning policies to Sydney, regardless of the social, environmental and economic costs to the Australian community. In a world where ubiquitous chain stores are hell bent on creating a homogenous retail experience, Sydney could wind up looking a lot like Toledo.
The flying nun's career takes off!
December 6th, 2009 @ 3:05 pm
But some Americans can be slurred, right? A religious feminist from Ohio is fair game.
Did the author of this mean spirited rant get up in the morning (clearly from the wrong side of the bed) and decide to write something really nasty? What’s with the us of the middle initial? Ah, “right wing” (boo), American but not Californian (suspicious), religious, so she must be a racist redneck member of the KKK.
Just pathetic City Hub, you are making yourself look petty, miserable and ridiculous, like a cranky old misogynist.
But tell me, what is “alternative media?” Does it mean that you just join in the pissant chorus of negativity daily being unleashed in the Murdoch and Fairfax press? If so, you are poor, pale echo.
Like Murdoch and Fairfax, you are spending an awful lot of time attacking Labor – which until Thursday was led by the Left. Since the only alternative to Labor is a more right wing party (now ruled by climate change deniers), that’s obviously who you (and Murdoch and Fairfax) prefer. That puts the Hub right out of step with its inner city demographic. Apart from the property owners, whose money grievances you are championing in your fight against the Metro, the rest of us are actually still quite lefty progressive.
And here’s the best bit. KKK (sic) is about to scrap the Metro! As rumour has it anyway, and I think its a safe bet. Conservatives can always find something else to do with tax money rather than provide better public transport for the less well-off, as you know.
Pyrmont will be “saved” from the horrors of the Metro. A “right wing” woman from Ohio can be your hero.
That should cheer you up.
December 8th, 2009 @ 1:58 pm
Hmmm… I read this one after I posted a comment on the other KKK story…
Seems like City Hub “is hell bent on producing” an “homogenous” media environment too, as its opinions on Ms Keneally are identical to the Murdoch and Fairfax press, as the poster above notes!
I agree about the KKK comment too. You are quite appalling, Mr Publisher.
Its one thing to criticise policy. But needless character slurs are horrible to read.
That’s the last time I pick up your paper.
December 10th, 2009 @ 9:47 am
Wow, that really is a strange article, as the two posters above have already noted!
Clearly the author has some problems with his fellow Americans (the ones from the “non-progressive” bits). But he is the one sounding like the reactionary.
Has there been a coup at City Hub? I seem to remember it was trendy left once. A lot of it now sounds like its written by the ghost of PP McGuinness.
December 11th, 2009 @ 2:15 pm
After I posted the above, I read Elizabeth Farrelly’s (rather derivative! Wow, considering what she is being paid, why is she copying City Hub?) story in thursdays Herald. She repeats some of what was said here, some of what was said in another City Hub article on this site (Terrigals) and uses similar personal and vituperative language (“KKK”) to attack Ms Keneally. There were some comments also on the Herald’s web site, including one from that other Hub writer who seemed to be having a wet moment at the thought that the great Ms F agreed with him… (yes, imitation is flattery)
With all due respects, and I’m happy to let you enjoy your moment in the sun, but I’m glad that finally, the inner city elite have seen the light, and that it shines clearly, as so many posters at the Herald indicated, directly onto the Liberal Party.
Which is where it always should always have been. Which means that Labor can finally rid itself of those whiney, nimby, self-hating, base-destroying blue-bloods and get back to doing what a left wing party should be doing – looking after the less well off, the vulnerable, the migrants and the working class.
Yes, the westies, those racist, red neck, obese, SUV-driving planet destroyers that Elizabeth (see her book Blubberland) and City Hub so despise.
Many of the latter abandoned Labor because those elite parasites had tacked their self-interested bourgeois agendas onto Labor. But (phew!) finally they’re gone. So congrats, you’ve got Tony Abbott and Nick Minchin (any irony here, City Hub gents?) and a State Liberal Party ruled by a fluffball with with a team of nobodies, all committed to further privatisation of essential services, welfare cuts, workchoices, development at all costs, and all with closer links to the big end of town.
And why is everyone going at the new Premier like a rottweiler? So vehement has been the torrent of abuse from all corners of the establishment media (yes, that’s you City Hub), that I’ve finally got it figured…
Elizabeth directly takes Kristina Keneally to task for not being “green” and anti-development, but instead being committed to social justice. Ahh, that’s the problem! This is the true voice of the blue blood, the person who has it all, and is annoyed that others lower down down the economic scale might want a piece of the action.
December 14th, 2009 @ 3:36 pm
What are you people actually reading? The publisher, myself, and other editors have different views across a number of topics, but nothing that we say about Keneally’s appointment has anything to really do with being card-carrying supporters of any particular viewpoint.
To say that the author must be misogynist because of this apparent conspiracy against Keneally (and please make up your mind whether we’re working for the left or right wing on this one) is a self-evident spuriosity.
It would be utterly sexist to give her a free pass just because she has ovaries. People who may have thought installing a woman would deflect some of the ongoing fallout over the Neroesque performance of NSW’s ALP are the sexist protagonist’s here and have, in my opinion, done feminism and the movement for gender equality a far greater disservice than anybody who on the basis of past performance and an evident agenda are happy to openly criticize Keneally and demand that she be held to account.
And if somebody who has experience and insight from living in America can offer additional perspective on where she may be coming from, then why should they keep their lips sealed simply to avoid raising the uncomfortable possibility that we have again been ambushed by a dud with an agenda?
Kudos for the possibility that she is going to can the Rozelle train line? That’s a bit rich, considering she supported it until it became too politically impossible to do so. And let’s not mention her stated intent to look at overturning Nathan Rees’ outgoing expansion of the state’s National Park estate.
If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, handles a press conference with less aplomb then a duck, then something’s fowl.
And as for anybody thinking that rejection of Keneally is an embrace for O’Farrell, I really don’t know what you’re smoking but I’d advise you desist. Any kind of decency, skill, or social responsibility from the state opposition over the past decade would have provided some kind of buffer against the s#^!flood that now engulfs Macquarie Street and the rest of this state as a consequence.
If O’Farrell becomes Premier by default, simply because NSW Labor are less welcome than leprosy and yet the population is still not ready for a government of Greens and Independents, will that be the day that democracy strikes a triumphant pose? Or will that day simply punctuate the terrible sentence imposed on this nation’s most populous yet worst represented state?
Her proud claim to preparedness for the job as Minister for Planning was the she had read one of the relevant acts. Is any recent claim by a politician more worthy of a golf clap?
December 14th, 2009 @ 3:37 pm
What are you people actually reading? The publisher, myself, and other editors have different views across a number of topics, but nothing that we say about Keneally’s appointment has anything to really do with being card-carrying supporters of any particular viewpoint.
To say that the author must be misogynist because of this apparent conspiracy against Keneally (and please make up your mind whether we’re working for the left or right wing on this one) is a self-evident spuriosity.
It would be utterly sexist to give her a free pass just because she has ovaries. People who may have thought installing a woman would deflect some of the ongoing fallout over the Neroesque performance of NSW’s ALP are the sexist protagonist’s here and have, in my opinion, done feminism and the movement for gender equality a far greater disservice than anybody who on the basis of past performance and an evident agenda are happy to openly criticize Keneally and demand that she be held to account.
Kudos for the possibility that she is going to can the Rozelle train line? That’s a bit rich, considering she supported it until it became too politically impossible to do so. And let’s not mention her stated intent to look at overturning Nathan Rees’ outgoing expansion of the state’s National Park estate.
If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, handles a press conference with less aplomb then a duck, then something’s fowl.
And as for anybody thinking that rejection of Keneally is an embrace for O’Farrell, I really don’t know what you’re smoking but I’d advise you desist. Any kind of decency, skill, or social responsibility from the state opposition over the past decade would have provided some kind of buffer against the s#^!flood that now engulfs Macquarie Street and the rest of this state as a consequence.
If O’Farrell becomes Premier by default, simply because NSW Labor are less welcome than leprosy and yet the population is still not ready for a government of Greens and Independents, will that be the day that democracy strikes a triumphant pose? Or will that day simply punctuate the terrible sentence imposed on this nation’s most populous yet worst represented state?
Her proud claim to preparedness for the job as Minister for Planning was the she had read one of the relevant acts. Is any recent claim by a politician more worthy of a golf clap?
December 18th, 2009 @ 11:29 am
Danny, what you’ve done there is a common media trick of the Lib/Nats, conservative ‘think’ tanks, most cornered flaks – you are asserting a falsehood or a misrepresentation, e.g. that Farrelly (nice disrespectful use of ‘Elizabeth’, Danny, considering you generally attack men by their surname or a more neutral third person pronoun) is attacking Keneally for being committed to social justice rather than green projects, thereby false-triumphantly dismissing the writer and artificially lauding the Premier. The thing is that the supposed commitment to social justice is a veneer easily served by platitudes and hope bubbles, rather than actual outcomes. Keneally did nothing to serve social justice in her time as planning minister, even though she easily could have. And however people might choose to frame issues relating to the environment, they are really among the greatest social justice issues that our and future generations will have to confront.
Your alpha-numeric penthouse is built on sand, mate.