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Chris Harris left a card under my door explaining his policies and warming us up to the 2007 elections. He represents the The Greens who are good at heart but regularly seem to have trouble maintaining a consistent strategy. Most of their ideas make sense but some are just nutty or simply pandering to populist bandwagons.
In a Green Left article we can see that Chris Harris voted against allowing Rupert Murdoch to buy a space for the MX newspaper on Sydney streets. The argument was that if newspapers can pay for council blessings then before long the smaller papers that can't maintain similar levels of protection money will be pushed out of the way. Indeed, there have been issues with the smaller left-wing newspapers being told they are not entitled to have a card table on public property (with the excuse being public safety -- hardly plausible), whereas the MX distributors can pile up stacks of newspapers right in the doorway of Sydney's largest railway station and have several people actually standing in the doorway obstructing the through traffic of railway travellers (who also pay their way and are usually travelling to or from their jobs when they are being obstructed).
Well MX has certainly shown its impact on the environment which you can see on any windy day where unwanted MX newspapers blow up and down the streets until they settle into a gutter or garden bed. At least they are bio-degradable I guess. Of course the Sydney Council wants to raise money and the MX wavers probably bother non-residents more than residents anyhow. However, the worse picture is the silencing of minority opinions as independent newspapers get pushed out of the picture.
Good on Chris for standing up against Murdoch, too bad he still beat you.
We can also find evidence that Chris opposed the "Congestion Tax" proposal,
"A congestion tax has been introduced in other cities like London or Singapore where there is already a robust public transport system", said Ms Rhiannon and Cr. Harris."The answer to Sydney's traffic congestion was never going to be the Cross City Tunnel and it wont be a congestion tax either unless we first build more publicly owned, publicly operated surface transport.
"Inner Sydney's bus network is strained and we have half a rail network. People will get out of their cars when they can get onto a world-class public transport system.
This one I can't understand. The public transport vs private transport balance is one that swings away from equilibrium in either direction. If public transport is bad then people move to private transport which moves the money toward private transport oriented infrastructure (e.g. petrol stations, mechanics, parking lots, etc.) and away from public transport infrastructure (e.g. bus shelters, railway lines, railway stations, etc.). On the other side of the street, a good public transport system means people will not see it as valuable to spend money on cars and the money will go into tickets and upgrade of the rail, bus and ferry infrastructure. Positive feedback in either direction so once it starts swinging one way, it requires great force to swing it back.
As it turns out, a public transport system can carry more people more efficiently and faster and safer than any private transport system. That just happens to be one of those properties of the physical world that economists carefully avoid. A congestion tax puts pressure on all private transport through the city encouraging people to use the public transport system, more public transport users (and more tax revenue) gives more money to spend on public infrastructure. This is completely consistent with the Green philosophy. For some reason Chris Harris wants the spending without the revenue.
Speaking of spending, Clover Moore tends to support anything that boosts revenue because she is so enthusiastic about spending lots of money -- that's another story.
Anyhow, you have to consider that the powers that be on the state level would never allow such a tax at any rate so all the proposal ever represented was a statement of principle... and it is a principle that the Greens should have firmly come out in support of.
Chris Harris also supports car sharing
The opening speakers of this event outlined the benefits of car sharing, primarily from the perspective of the motorist: car sharing keeps the convenience of car travel without the burdens of car ownership such as car maintenance, washing, insurance, registration & finding a park (car share fleets have designated parking spaces in the most sought-after locations). Car sharing on a large scale potentially reduces traffic congestion: less idle cars parked, more room for traffic. Chris Harris, Greens rep for Sydney City Council was interested in the positive flow on effects of large scale car sharing: increased community interaction, reduction in noise and air pollution, and land use implications (car travelling cities use up to three times more land than traditional pedestrian cities). Sydney City Council is enamoured with the idea and has assigned 10 premium city car spaces to car sharing operatives.
Surely a congestion tax would be of benefit to car sharing as well? The car sharing operation would only pay for one car worth of congestion and this is shared amongst all users of the car. Since they are offering subsidies to the car sharing industry in the form of free parking spaces, why not offer further subsidies in the form of making share cars exempt from the tax? Sounds like a positive step for the environment.
In general, Chris Harris seems to be consistent about being anti-development. He tried to stop Pyrmont Point becoming crowded out with monstrous apartment blocks (it happened anyway). He has campaigned for a smaller slab of apartments in the old Carlton United Brewery and has taken sympathy on the shopkeepers in Oxford Street who have lost business while traffic is funneled toward the new tollgate tunnel.
It's a reliable place for a councillor to stand: many residents like things to stay the same so they vote for anti-development because that is voting for what they know.
When it comes to Sydney city, development has already gone nuts. Trying to be anti-development around here is just making a profession out of failure. Frankly, looking at places like the now-disused Carlton Brewery, when comparing a rundown industrial site against a monolithic slab of apartments I would have to say they are equally ugly but at least the apartments will be useful to someone.
Comparing a short slab of apartments against a taller slab of apartments... who really cares? Build as tall as you can before it gets wobbly and falls over. People on the street only see the first five or six floors, they can't tell the difference between ten stories, twenty stories or thirty stories. People who live in the apartments just see the other block of apartments directly across the road from them (or UTS which is just another thirty story concrete slab, much the same really). Where does the environment stand in all of this? Nowhere...
As for the traffic funneling, the real problem was that the contracts were signed in secret with no public scrutiny of the details. As Lee Rhiannon pointed out in parliament
Remember that we still do not know the finer details of the tunnel deal. The Greens will give it another go and continue to call for the release of the contract. We know that the Government will persist in claiming commercial in confidence, but it should remember the basic lesson of public relations: when there is a disaster, admit all problems and then things can only get better. That is why this Government must come clean about what it has signed off on in this contract. Many tunnel documents have been released. In 2003 the Greens were successful in gaining the release of hundreds of documents. But the crucial financial and planning information remains secret. The Government constantly uses the excuses of public interest privilege and legal professional privilege to keep people in the dark. That is why the current situation is so dangerous.
This is not any particular side of politics other than the ugly side known commonly as corruption. Being anti-development will not solve this problem it only defers it... sooner or later we need infrastructure development and when that time comes, we need a trustworthy process to organise and plan that development. Every politician who pretends to working in the interest of their voters should be pushing hard for a full investigation of how a corrupt contract could come to be signed by a public official and punishments should be meted out.
Sylvia Hale quotes Paul Sheahan:
The officials who signed off on this vision of building the tunnel and blocking the major artery of William Street and other streets in and around the CBD have all moved on-the former premier Bob Carr, the former lord mayor Frank Sartor, and the former transport minister Carl Scully-leaving the public to pay for this tunnel, one way or another.This is how public assets are turned into private banks in NSW.
Every time ordinary Australians see their government rip them off in obvious ways, they lose faith in the system and see first hand that crime does pay for some. Crime is the only name for it but yet the people concerned can walk free and even head off to do damage in other areas.
Well good luck to Chris Harris for attempting to oppose this particular planning disaster but until we actually achieve a non-corrupt, transparent planning system with public consultation, open tendering and non-secret contracts we can expect to see it happen again. Just being anti-developments is not the answer, we need someone who is in favour of well thought out and sensible development and in favor of a high quality process.
Another of Chris Harris claims to fame (stated on the cards of recycled paper that he pushes under people's door) is that he
campaigned for the gay and lesbian community to have representation on council.
Searching on the Internet has not revealed the exact details of this campaign but since when did members of the gay and lesbian community have less votes than the rest of the community? If Chris proposes to give gays more votes than everyone else, how does he propose to test them for sufficient gayness or lesbosity? What is Chris going to do with the bisexuals? I suppose the bi's should get one and a half votes where hetros only get one vote and full blooded gays get two.
Hmmm, some bi's might not swing both ways in equal proportion... maybe we have a sliding scale of votes.
I mean really, of all the ridiculous suggestions, this would have to be the height of populist naivety. We already have a system of representation: everyone gets a vote, they vote for a Lord Mayor and some councillors and those people become our representatives. That's democracy.
The only people who don't have representation on council are the people who vote for someone who loses and the people who vote for someone who breaks their promises as soon as they get into power. Oh yeah, and the people who don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay council to let them distribute newspapers and annoy innocent railway travellers. Hmmm, and the people who don't have insiders on government planning committees to broker special deals for their business.
So there's the instant rundown on Chris Harris -- less slippery than Frank Sartor, not as big a disaster as Carl Scully and brave enough to make a token stand against Rupert Murdoch.
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