A 70-year-old woman from the suburb of Griffith rang this week.
She has lived in her house in Griffith for more than 40 years. Now the house nexxt door is to be bull-dozed and replaced with three three-bedroom, two-storey units.
Her house is on the southern side of the new units in Lefroy Street and even if the units themselves pass all the solar-efficiency tests, her house, in particular a special sunny spot in her garden, will be shaded.
She does not want to make her name public. She is fearful. However, she makes the point that she will have the option of making a private protest at the ACT election next February.
Precisely how she does that is anyone’s guess. But there is an interesting political change of wind here.
For more than two decades, people have associated the Greens and the conservation movement with Labor. The unions imposed the green bans. Gough appointed the first Minister for Environment. The Franklin campaign went Labor’s way.
But before that, conservation was more a movement of well-heeled conservatives. Sir Garfield Barwick (he who gave the advice to sack Gough) was chair of the Australian Conservation Foundation.
The conservation movement supported the preservation of areas of natural beauty and, in the cities, buildings of cultural elegance.
These were not then especially Labor concerns. The working class did not have the time, money or inclination to wander in natural places. Working life had enough physical struggle. Moreoever, the working class had mass tastes, caring less for artistic individuality in buildings and dwellings.
But for Gough on one side and the greed-is-good brigade on the other, conservation could easily have remained a conservative cause.
And in any event, the Fraser Government had as good a record as any on conservation (banned whaling, sand-mining on Fraser Island and declared the Great Barrier Reef Marine National Park, for example) and would perhaps have saved the Franklin if Mal had not been laid up in bed at the critical Cabinet meeting.
The in-fill program in Canberra, in small way, is showing that the the Labor-Green nexus is not permanent. Perhaps an odd sort of grey-green movement will emerge. It may be branded as being utterly selfish made up of people who have bought into elegant suburbs early and with enough money and time to go bush-walking, and fit enough, too, well after retirement.
In the meantime, Labor will continue to stand for jobs for the masses, even if those jobs are in industries which threaten natural beauty, or in replacing graceful suburbs with tight little boxes for the working class to live in.
Federally, we see the conservatives moving away from dry dogmatism. We also see Labor’s environment Minister having a tough time against some of his log-and-job colleagues.
In Canberra, Labor, through happenstance, will avoid much of the in-fill fall-out.
Most of the in-fill aggro is in the inner seat of Molonglo, which embraces elegant Red Hill, Yarralumla, Forrest and Griffith (upon which developers have their eyes). It also contains the Northbourne Avenue corridor and the mediocre inner northern suburbs whose location near Civic make them ripe for developer plucking.
However, Labor’s three MLAs most vulnerable to in-fill back-lash (another noun created by combining a verb with a preposition) are not in the firing line.
The Minister for Planning, Bill Wood, is standing in Brindabella. The chair of the planning committee, Wayne Berry, will stand in Ginninderra. And his predecessor, David Lamont, who will stand in in-fill contentious Molonglo, no longer has much to do with in-fill.
Alas, a delightful eperiment in Hare-Clark effectiveness has been dashed. Under the multi-member Hare-Clark system a single issue is more likely to cause voters to vote against a sitting MLA than under the single-member system, because a dyed-in-the-wool Labor voter can put the sitting Labor MLA last and still put another Labor candidate first.
Similarly, for an issue on the other side.
It may be that the in-fill anger will be expressed through votes against the Government generally or through voting for independents or anti-in-fill Liberals.
Liberal Greg Cornwell has taken up the cause, partly because he is Opposition spokesman, but perhaps because there are votes in it. And given he is as much in a contest against his Liberal colleagues for votes in a multi-member seat as against Labor, these votes are important.
Angry residents are petitioning MLAs, and it will help him no end to be seen as “”that nice Mr Cornwell who listened to us.” This, of course, will perplex the white-shoe developers who thought the Liberals were always on their side.
Independent Michael Moore has seized the moment, too, calling for a moratorium on in-fill.
His position shows just how fluid the in-fill question is, both as a conservation and political issue. Wayne Berry astutely pointed out that Moore is supposed to be a conservationist and conservationists are supposed to like in-fill because it stops suburban sprawl and uses resources efficiently.
However, preserving heritage is also a conservation issue, which has led the conservation movement (as well as the politicians) being ambivalent about in-fill.
The mindless ideological conservationists chant “”in-fill good; greenfields bad” with the same ideological vigour that they pushed the blue-rinse set out of the conservation movement in the 1960s. However, the more discerning conservationists are saying “”good in-fill good; bad in-fill bad”. They are saying slum creation driven by greed and property values is not good conservation, but carefully done in-fill balancing the rights of existing residents with the need to use resources more efficeintly is fine.
Even the developers are split, at least privately, with some saying we do good-quality in-fill not like the rubbish in Kingston.
Perhaps, the main reason for the political confusion at a local level, is that the easiest political outlet for anger over in-fill in Canberra has been closed: the creation of separate residents’ movement. After the Residents’ Rally fiasco in the 1989-92 Assembly that avenue not regain respectability for a long time, even though it is perhaps more needed now.
So at least until February, as the Griffith woman’s plight shows, in-fill will continue to generate a great deal of heat and no light.