Councillor Chris Harris

The NSW Department of Housing is planning to build a facility to provide permanent accommodation to around 50 homeless people on Pyrmont Bridge Rd in Camperdown (site pictured on the left).  Based on the successful Common Ground model from New York, formerly homeless people will be housed alongside low income key workers in a building where facilities to help them get back on their feet, such as medical clinics, drug and alcohol counseling, employment services and 24 hour security, will be located on site.  As well as a large number of highly successful projects in the USA a Common Ground style residence now exists in Adelaide and plans are underway for new developments in Melbourne and Brisbane, as well as here in Sydney.  While most organisations that provide homes for the homeless require their clients to undertake drug and alcohol counseling or other such programs prior to being housed, Common Ground has a “housing first” philosophy.  Under this approach clients are given a home and then begin such programs as they move in, dramatically increasing the success rate of the programs as clients are not constantly worrying about where to spend each night. Not only does Common Ground provide basic dignity, security and a way forward for the homeless, it also comes with a lower price tag, and is therefore a better use of tax payers money, than less permanent solutions like crisis accommodation.

While there has been some concern amongst local residents about how this development will affect their neighbourhood, I welcome the project and will be working with my fellow Greens to make sure that it achieves the best possible outcomes for the community – both for those to be housed by it and for those who live nearby.  

The Greens have already achieved some positive changes in the way the project will proceed.  A small area of vacant land will need to be used to allow Common Ground to be built on the site, a fact that has upset many locals as it is one of the only accessible areas of green space nearby.  We discussed this matter with Housing Department staff and secured a commitment that if the development goes ahead there will be no net loss of green space, with an under utilised car park nearby being converted to a park in conjunction with the City of Sydney Council.  Housing NSW initially planned to erect a wall to divide the park into separate areas for residents of separate buildings but have pledged to remove this from their plan since we highlighted the unacceptable “us and them” dichotomy this would create.

There is still more work to be done however and the Greens are continuing to liaise with Housing NSW to highlight the plight of the public housing residents of the Joanna O’Dea building, adjacent to the Common Ground site.  This building, also owned and managed by Housing NSW, is in poor repair and the residents, many of them elderly, have a range of ongoing concerns about security and maintenance.  It would be a most inequitable situation for Housing NSW to build a brand new building with advanced security next door while ignoring the needs of the Joanna O’Dea residents and we will thus be making sure that their concerns are met while the building of Common Ground goes ahead.

By listening to residents and by talking with the state Government we are working to make sure that this important project results in the best outcomes possible for those whom it will house as well as those who will be sharing their community with them.

In recent months there has been media attention, and many letters from concerned residents, about the plan by the City of Sydney to build a skate park on a site under the Western Distributor at Millers Point (pictured right).  This is a proposal that I wholeheartedly support, and I want to take this opportunity to explain why I hold the position I do and to hopefully allay some of the concerns that local residents have.

I support the creation of the skate park because skateboarding is a healthy, sustainable outdoor recreational pursuit, the kind of thing we should all be trying to encourage young people to partake in. It is already very popular in the City of Sydney, as shown by the numbers of skaters congregating in Martin Place, Cook and Phillip Park and in other city spaces on a weekend.  Young people use our public spaces in this way simply because the City of Sydney has failed to build dedicated skating facilities. To me this is totally understandable however I’m aware that not all the users of these areas feel the same and there is the potential for conflict.  Hence my desire to give skateboarders their own space in the CBD.  In any event, the City of Sydney has an obligation to provide free or low cost facilities for young people and I note that the City spends tens of millions of dollars each year on parks and other passive recreation facilities for every other demographic.

While there are a number of skate parks on the edges of the city already, in Glebe and Waterloo and other areas a little further afield, the majority of these are primarily bowl or ramp parks and are used for a different style of skating to what the street skaters in cities  practice.  The proposed Millers Point site would be designed with the urban terrain features that street skaters seek out and would allow them to participate in their hobby without the potential to come into conflict with pedestrians.

Three major concerns have been raised by residents about a skate park at this site, which is underneath the southern access freeway to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  Firstly noise, which is a legitimate concern but which I feel many residents are more worried about than they need to be.  There are many popular skate parks in Sydney that are much bigger and much closer to residential buildings than the Millers Point skate park would be. Cammeray (pictured above) and Five Dock skate parks are two examples that immediately spring to mind and neither of these results in large numbers of noise complaints according to council staff.  These two skate parks are also located adjacent to roads much quieter than the Millers Point site – I live in one of the buildings overlooking the site and its hard to imagine that the sound of skaters would be even audible over the sound of the 160 000 cars per day that pass along the road below which the proposed park will be located.

Another concern that residents have is pedestrian safety.  However the net effect of this skate park will be to make collisions between skaters and pedestrians unlikely as it will give street skaters a dedicated place to skate that is not part of a pedestrian thoroughfare.  The park will also be located next to a dedicated cycleway running all the way from Town Hall which will give skaters easy to access the park along pedestrian-free paths.

The final concern expressed by many is that of anti-social or illegal behaviour.  This is an area where skaters are often unfairly stereotyped.  I have received many letters making statements to the effect that “while most skaters are law abiding and responsible, a number aren’t” and that because of this irresponsible minority, the park should not go ahead.  I think you will find an irresponsible minority in any group in society, but this usually doesn’t result in the entire group being branded and marginalised because of it.  For example, there has been plenty of news coverage in the last few years of violent or unsavoury behaviour by elite swimmers and football players, yet I don’t recall any incidence of residents objecting to a new pool or football field being built on the grounds of anti-social behaviour by those who use it for its intended purpose.

Graffiti is a specific example of an antisocial behaviour that many residents worry will be introduced into the area if a skate park is built.  However graffiti is not necessarily connected with skating and is fairly easy to control.  Graffiti artists generally only want to paint on relatively prominent surfaces (large walls above about waist height) and respect the work of other artists, very rarely painting on top of pre-existing artworks.  The proposed skate park will be mostly low terrain features that graffiti artists wouldn’t want to paint on and I will be suggesting that Council seek out local young artists to create innovative public artworks, consistent with the area’s usage, on the more prominent walls (as has been done with Cammeray skate park).  Perhaps a modern age Michelangelo could even paint the underside of the freeway – with the RTA’s permission of course!

The presence of skaters will actually make the area a safer place.  Currently the proposed park site is rather empty outside of peak hour and this has the potential to make it unsafe.  If the area has something to attract groups of people it will gain the benefit of passive surveillance and lose the isolated feeling that can make parts of big cities unsafe. 

I have spoken to Councillors and staff from councils that have popular skate parks, such as Waverly’s Bondi Skate Park (third image from top), Canada Bay’s Five Dock Bowl (second from bottom) and our own Fernside Park at Waterloo (below), and they report that the atmosphere around them is almost always positive.  Children as young as four, skating under the supervision of their parents, share the space with older children and teenagers and a vibrant sense of community is created.  I would suggest anyone worried about the presence of a skate park in their neighbourhood spend half an hour watching one of these places on a weekend and see for yourself how far removed they are from the noisy hubs of anti-social behaviour that some believe them to be.

So in conclusion, I will be urging City of Sydney to move forward with this project, however the park will still likely not be opened until early 2011.  Until we have decent facilities like this park in place for our young people we will continue to observe the thrills and spills of our local skaters in Martin Place and elsewhere in the city.

Thanks to skateboard.com.au for the images.

Post Script:  Shortly before I wrote this article, the local “City News” paper published a story on the plans for the skate park and the residents reaction to it, linked here.  A week later a letter from a resident critical of my position on the skate park was also published in city news here.  The following week the same paper published this response from me.

Recently, many of my Greens colleagues and myself have received an email that appears to be circulating widely which makes a number of arguments disputing the science of climate change.  The arguments are the same ones that climate change deniers have been using for many years and though they can be easily countered with basic scientific facts, the arguments keep coming.  In the interest of not shying away from debate, below is my response to these all too common but false arguments.  Most numerical data on climate change used here comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th assessment report (2007), available at http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.htm#1.

• False Argument “CO2 does not hold any more heat than any other gas”

The Truth - This is a statement that is flawed in a number of ways and can be countered with basic high school level chemistry.  A wide range of gases, liquids and solids absorb, re-emit and store heat in different amounts, depending on a wide range of properties. 

An easy to understand example of one of these properties is colour – place a black stone and a white stone in the sun and the black stone will very soon be hotter than the white one as black objects absorb more heat than white objects.  Although carbon dioxide is the same colour as other atmospheric gases, it has other properties not detectable with the naked eye that means it absorbs and holds large amounts of heat, unlike other gases such as oxygen and nitrogen (the main two gases in the earth’s atmosphere).  Skeptics will not be able to present any evidence to dispute this basic chemical fact.

With that bit of basic chemistry and the undisputed fact that human activities, primarily burning fossil fuels, are putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the reality of climate change falls very simply into place.

• False argument “CO2 is not a pollutant, it is essential to life”

The Truth- CO2 is both a pollutant and essential to life, the same as many other chemicals.  Iron is essential to humans, yet a person with the disease haemochromatosis builds up excess iron in their bodies and this has severe negative health effects.  On an even more fundamental level water is essential to life, yet no one argues that floods or tsunamis are not destructive because of this.  The argument that because CO2 is essential to life it can’t be harmful is just as ridiculous.

• False argument “CO2 makes up such a small percentage of the atmosphere so it can’t be harmful”

The Truth - while it is true that CO2 is only 0.0387% of the atmosphere by volume its effect is disproportionate to its quantity.  Like many other substances big increases in CO2 can induce large negative effects even if the overall increased amount is still a small proportion.  Another example of such a substance is fluoride. Fatal fluoride poisoning can occur in a person who only takes in an amount of fluoride salts equal to only 0.0125% of their body weight yet fluoride in the water supply in even smaller amounts has yielded improved dental health in the population.

• False argument “Atmospheric CO2 levels have been higher in the past”

The Truth - current atmospheric levels of CO2 are higher than they have been any time in at least the last 650 000 years, a period far longer than that in which human civilisation has existed.  It is true that millions of years ago CO2 concentrations were higher than they are now, but they had a dramatic effect on the world.  Living organisms thrived under these conditions because they were vastly different to the organisms alive today and had specific adaptations to deal with these conditions.  However organisms not adapted to live in those high CO2 conditions, such as humans and most other life of today, would have a much harder time of surviving because of massive climatic differences and other effects, just as a lion adapted to live in the African savannah would have a very hard time surviving in Antarctica.  Likewise penguins survive in Antarctic environments because of specific adaptations, but these adaptations leave them most unsuited to the African savannah.

• False argument “Ocean levels have only risen 30mm since 1870”

The Truth - this figure is way off.  According to the IPCC, sea levels have risen by over 80mm since the 1960s.  Since 1993 sea levels have risen on average 3.1mm/year representing an acceleration of the 1.8mm/year average rise since 1963.

• False argument “Ice caps are expanding”

The Truth - while there has been expansion of some Antarctic ice sheets in the last few decades, due to the reductions in ozone depleting gases in the atmosphere and changed weather patterns around the Southern Ocean, overall global ice coverage is shrinking.

• False argument “The planet is not warming, it is cooling”

The Truth - global temperatures on average have risen 0.74 degrees C since 1905.The image below, produced by NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, shows the changes in surface temperature in 2001 relative to the average for 1951-1980.  11 of the 12 years from 1995-2006 (inclusive) were among the warmest 12 years since records began in the 1850s (this data only goes to 2006 because it is from the IPCCs 2007 report, there has been nothing to indicate that the trend stopped in 2006).  It is often said that because 1998 was the warmest year on record the world has cooled since then.  However there has always been year to year variation, the same as there is day to day variation – one does not deny temperatures will be warmer in summer if the 15th of November is a few degrees cooler than the 14th.  The record of 1998 as warmest year ever will without doubt be broken soon.

•  False argument “Solar power cannot produce large amounts of energy”

The Truth - this argument is out of date, and becomes more out of date every year as technology advances.  Throughout the world solar thermal power plants, which produce steam that drives conventional turbines, with capacities measured in the hundreds of megawatts (MW) currently exist and plans for many more are on the drawing board.  Energy can be stored cheaply (eg in vats of molten salt) so that solar thermal plants can run overnight or at other times when the sun isn’t shining.  For a recent article on the state of this industry, see http://www.smh.com.au/business/handicapped-by-19thcentury-technology-20100202-nb3t.html. 

• False argument “The maximum size for a wind turbine is 3MW”

The Truth Wind turbines with outputs of up to 5MW currently exist.

• False argument “Climategate shows that the science of climate change is fraudulent”

The Truth – “Climategate” was not the falsifying of figures by the IPCC.  Rather it involved staff at a single British university who had their computer systems illegally hacked and a variety of emails taken out of context.  These emails were used to try to show that the researchers had been selective about what data they used in order to support their research on climate change.  Even if those allegations proved correct, this is one single isolated case – it does not invalidate the mass of other research (2500 scientists on the IPCC report alone) that has shown overwhelmingly that climate change is occurring.

• False argument “The IPCC admitted to lying about Himalayan glaciers”

The Truth - the IPCC have admitted that one paragraph in a 938 page report was inaccurate.  Most documents of that size, exposed to as much scrutiny as IPCC reports are, would come up with many more errors.

I hope this information might come in useful next time you need to counter uninformed statements denying the science of climate change. Feel free to send it on to your networks.  It is also worth remembering that there are many vested interests (by fossil fuel and mining companies amongst many others) in pretending that climate change isn’t real when it is.  On the other hand there are far fewer organisations, with far less resources, who have an interest in pretending climate change is real when it isn’t.  Some organisations, such as renewable energy companies, stand to make money as a result of action on climate change but these sort of enterprises only emerged after the science of climate change became well accepted.  To imply that climate change is a conspiracy, started decades ago to create a market for what was at the time fringe technology, is simply ludicrous.