It was suggested last week that Canberra be nominated for world-heritage listing. The suggestion is ill-founded in both logic and common-sense.
Let us draw and analogy. The English common law has as one of its many elements some principles of property law. It recognises several estates in land, two of which are estates in fee simple and entail.
Estates in fee enable the owner to do what he likes. Estates entail enable the owner to enjoy the profits of the estate and to live on it, but require its maintenance and its passing to the eldest son indefinitely down the family line. The estate entail was aimed at preserving the family lands for the family, down the male line, indefinitely.
Of course, the estate entail has little or no application in Australian law these days. However, the principles offer much to international law. Until the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation started to call attention to sites of world significance, sovereign nations behaved as if their lands were held in fee simple, that is, they thought they could do what they liked with them. Since the 1960s, UNESCO has drawn to the attention of national governments their moral duty to preserve for the people of the world, now and in future generations, places of great cultural, scientific or national significance. Like the estates entail, national governments should preserve the estate for the world family. These would be placed on the world heritage register. Once placed there, national governments accepted that they were morally bound to preserve them.
Some federal states, most notably Australia, used this as a method for wresting control over significant sites from provincial governments who might destroy the heritage value of the sites, leaving nothing to pass on to future generations. Given the desire to preserve sites which might otherwise be destroyed, this was an understandable step. The heritage-listing system is a voluntary surrendering of the right to deal with sites on the whim of national governments.
The listing of Canberra makes no sense. It is under no threat. The people of Australia and the world will inherit it anyway. Its value as a planned city is already well-recognised. Its cultural significance is hardly well established on the world scale. It is not the Pyramids, of the Mayan city of Tikal. It is not the Acropolis or the Forum. There is no necessity to use international concern to prod a state government to recognise its international duty; the Federal Government has full power in Canberra whenever it choses to exercise it.
Any push to list Canberra will downgrade the currency of world heritage. Heritage, of its nature, is something to be inherited. The world heritage list should be a list of sites of irreplacable value that future generations have a stake in inheriting. Much as Canberra is a beautiful city, pleasant to live in and a fine example of 20th century planning, it is not irreplacable and it is not under threat. Listing might give the present population a good feeling, but that’s all. The idea should be put of the back burner for, say, 100 years.