Champagne yacht harbour
(Image: Adobe)

There are so many Sydney NIMBY stories that eventually they all start blurring together. (NIMBY, of course, stands for Not In My Back Yard.) The snippy neighbours who move in near a historic pub and start complaining about the noise; the insta-“community” groups that pop up to oppose a skate park or a bus route or a playground.

The most recent one (which isn’t that recent — it comes up every six months or so) is the case of the harbourside residents trying to outlaw Sydney’s party boats.

But my favourite is the story that employees of inner Sydney’s local councils tell new hires. It’s a vital part of the induction process for the workers who sit through community meetings and take hour-long phone calls from people with the time, money and entitlement to indulge their worst impulses.

In 2015, Warringah Council approved a development application for a boarding house in Cromer on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. The eight-unit development, designed to house 13 people, became the object of a massive community campaign that exposed something very ugly in the Northern Beaches.

“I don’t trust the type of people staying in boarding houses. Most are filled with ice addicts, heroin junkies, paedophiles and jail birds,” read one of the more than 800 submissions opposing the boarding house.

“I’m all for affordable housing, but they need to be in the right area and this is not the right area,” another resident told a packed council meeting.

In a newsletter sent to all parents, the principal of the local public primary school warned of “the possibility of children being placed at risk from unknown persons” if the boarding house went ahead. Then social housing minister Brad Hazzard, who represents the area, claimed in his submission that the boarding house was “inconsistent and incompatible with surrounding residences”.

News outlets usually frame NIMBY stories with a wink — “aren’t these people ridiculous?” — which is fair enough. It’s easy and it’s true. But it misses the deeper point. NIMBYism is never about the stated reason — the skate park or the housing development or the bus route is never really the issue. 

If overdevelopment was the problem, the community action groups on the northern beaches and in the eastern suburbs would be up in arms whenever Mirvac, Lendlease, Deicorp, Meriton or any other of Sydney’s predatory developers announces another megaplex of sweatbox apartments on the Western, Southern or Liverpool Lines. If community cohesion was the problem, they would have turned out to oppose the eviction of public housing residents in Millers Point, the Sirius building, and now Waterloo.

The building is not the problem — the problem is who the building is for. Sydney’s NIMBYs, like the rich everywhere, resent and fear when something is made free, cheap and accessible because it undercuts the primacy of wealth, which they possess and value more than anyone.

Why should a public park exist when I pay good money for my golf club membership? Why should people on welfare get to live in my expensive suburb? I spend big to enjoy myself, why should those people get to for free?

Of course, people know better than to say that out loud, so some other reason subs in. It doesn’t need to be convincing or even coherent, it just needs to send the message to the undesirables that they’re not welcome. A train station at Bondi Beach will increase crime. A mosque in Carlton will increase traffic. Turning half of an 18-hole golf course in Marrickville into a public park will destroy the community. A boarding house in Cromer will attract paedophiles.

I’m not a boat-party person. I’ve been on exactly one, and I wore jeans. But I understand the appeal — if you can’t afford harbour views, you can rent them for an afternoon. You can pretend that this city — where rents and mortgages and groceries and tollways and HECS debts and everything, everything, is spiralling out of reach — has a place for you.