Ours is a government of many plans. Indeed, such is the profusion of plans, so vast is their coverage and so thick and fast their arrival one almost suspects deliberate obfuscation. (I’m reminded of that scene in Harry Potter where a conspiracy of owls sends a million letters into the muggle house’s every orifice). In all this multiplicity, though, all this rampant “building Sydney’s future”, there’s just one discernible idea. Innovation.
Tech-hubs have deluged inner Sydney, designating everything from Eveleigh through Central to White Bay an “innovation corridor”. But if western Sydney was feeling any FOMO in the innovation department, it shouldn’t worry. Pretty soon, if the plans are to be believed, and just upriver from the new flood-prone Powerhouse-to-be, Parramatta will have its own 250-hectare “health and innovation district”.
Cumberland Hospital, which gets swallowed whole in the Westmead Place StrategyCredit:Tony Walters
It’s all set out in the 81-page draft Westmead Place Strategy. The name makes it sound harmless, a collection of landscape fixes for that woebegone hospital campus. Be not fooled. It’s not about place, it’s not strategic and it’s certainly not harmless, less concerned to fix the hospital than expand it to 10 times its already considerable size. It’s not even innovative. Far from it. This is grubby old business as usual.
What it really is, this Place Strategy, is a cloak for stuffing as much development as possible into the fragile, treasured and partly world heritage-listed Cumberland Hospital precinct.