- by Denis Doherty
- The Guardian
- Issue #2141
On Saturday March 22 a rally was staged as part of the campaign to protest the NSW government’s lack of concern for low-income housing. Protesters marched across the road to the Fish market and placed a fifteen-metre banner on the market reading ‘Build Public Housing.’
The NSW government is building a brand-new Fish Market in Sydney. The building with a fancy roof that appears to resemble fish scales is costing nearly $1billion. The building is huge and extends 140 metres into Blackwattle Bay.
This project will free up a sliver of land along the Anzac Bridge which will be converted into residential tower development. Some of the towers will reach 35 storeys.
The site is deemed ‘state significant’ so little council oversight is permitted on environmental or social grounds.
The development will exclude public, social and build to rent housing. Instead, the project will house those on good salaries in private housing.
Nearby community groups Pyrmont Action, Friends of Ultimo, and Hands off Glebe decided this was unacceptable. There has been a letter writing campaign going on in the surrounding suburbs for some time to call on the government to devote most of this land to public housing.
Speakers from the local groups handled the issues surrounding this site, each emphasising the imperative for more public housing with 60,000 on the waiting list. Kobi Shetty, the state Greens MP for Balmain called it “scandalous” that the government had spent nearly $1 billion to “free up land for the well-heeled people of Sydney.”
A caring government would snatch up freed public land to tackle the housing crisis. Instead, the current NSW government has abandoned public housing and seems just as keen to privatise as the former LNP government was.
