TRAUMA TOWN, Part 11: A lot of family trauma is about something lost, an inheritance or a place, says Philip Bull in this final of the Trauma Town series. To work through those myths, some of us need to reclaim space in a literal sense. The economists would call it capital formation, he says.
Let’s be up front. If you move in this city, you see some form of corruption, something that offends. The Twin was in Canberra working in parliament. He said the corruption there was a bit hard to find, but he took me on a tour of the new Parliament House and showed me this weird room they called the prayer and meditation room. The Twin thought it was funny because he said that was where all the politicians take their young staffers for special meetings. You could smell the corruption coming off the carpet in that room. When the Twin got back, Old Sydney Town was waiting for him.
The latest scandal at Parramatta, for instance. You could say it’s so entrenched and internal it’s pink! (what is pink internal and entrenched?)
What this one was about, apparently, was giving jobs to your mates and setting up a club at the council. I was wondering to myself how this is so different to the hiring practices of most councils, but the club stuff is evil. They threw Dad out of the Psychoanalytic Club in the early 1990s, and Granddad got the boot from Royal Sydney in the 1930s for leaving a Bertrand Russell book in the foyer. I do not like clubs. Monkeys prefer more performative groupings; we call our loose collection of friends and family a troop. You buy in and if the vibe fits you stay. Pass a banana over, Ferdinand.
I take various things away from these scandals.
When I know the people being dragged through these hearings, I feel empathy for them. People accused of corruption have feelings too.
I think to myself that the B-grade route I have mapped out for my planning career is not going too badly. I give myself a little schadenfreude pat on the back to balance out that empty feeling of empathy and missing out on a slice, or, given recent cost issues in the development industry, a lick.
Then finally I look to what all these scandals have done to where I get my income. My observation is that the ICAC (the Independent Commission Against Corruption) might as well be called the Abundance Investigation Agency.
It’s all about process and no outcome required. A bit like urban planning. The ICAC says you’re corrupt, but a court thinks there is not enough in it to take it any further. That’s a common ICAC result for planners. I suppose a corruption agency does need to focus on process, but giving planners more process seems to create corruption risk.
I never wanted an HR job at Parramatta Council; however, I see the practices of the Pink Ladies all over planning. The officious gatekeeping. The weird reification of numerical controls and legislation, so you can make other people prepare strange specialist reports for you and set up barriers and gates for them that need to be opened by someone – oh, that’s me! This corrupts activity, reduces it to process and puts a cost on everything.
This series of articles is an homage to small projects, the quirk in our city, building based on a psycho analytical framework, how personality and trauma express spatially. Is that too many things? The sin of the Pink Ladies, and often management of our cities, is to create and promote a web that is meant to get everything right but instead makes for such a complex system that a lot of stuff either cannot get through or even into that system.
It’s “can’t see the forest for the trees” stuff. This system irons out quirk and personality. The Pink Ladies went down in a hail of text messages because these days getting your mates into high paying council jobs is complex. Thirty years ago, at Waverley Council, if you showed up to the interview in your Randwick Rugby training gear, you got the job.
The outcome of complexity is more cost and exclusion of participants. And more trauma that can’t be expressed spatially. Because a lot of family trauma is about something lost, an inheritance or a place. To work through those myths, some of us need to reclaim space in a literal sense. The economists would call it capital formation.
Planning and building are where most people build their trauma fortunes; your labour is free and therapeutic. The last psychologist I went to – I have moved on to behaviourists BTW and believe these two tips wisely summarised our last session (after running it through AI): be prospective and focus on your business goals.
That’s hard work when you live in a system obsessed with the status quo.
Councils prefer dealing with larger developers. They have the time to do the meetings, tip the hat, produce all those comforting reports. If you are doing small projects in trauma town, you are on the eastern front of the cost crisis; it seems to be getting worse. Unrealised dreams and bottled-up trauma.
A lot of family trauma is about something lost, an inheritance or a place. To work through those myths, some of us need to reclaim space in a literal sense. The economists would call it capital formation.
Apparently, productivity is an issue in Australia. The reason we seek out corruption is that it is not very productive.
Well, I am more worried about people not being able to work through intergenerational trauma spatially. What if your emotional arc could only be completed by constructing some sort of structure from your past, or even better, your subconscious.
Cities need small projects for its participants. I think a city of small players is a good thing; it’s democratic and allows for strivers.
There are better solutions to corruption and its costs than more panels, planners, process and Pink Ladies. Most of the solutions to corruption look a lot like more opportunities to be corrupt.
A more elegant solution to corruption and all the unproductive things it gathers would be to deregulate some aspects of our city management. Let the market and the preferences of households sort some issues out. Like cities did.
From a spatial trauma perspective, the issues we should deregulate are all those qualitative things like heritage, traffic, most of planning and what kind of roof you can have and its colour. Keep a focus on all the STEM stuff like surveying, architecture and building code compliance. Because it’s in those places that climate change adaptation will happen. The council should not be able to pick your roof, but they should make sure your building is safe and energy efficient. We must align our trauma policies with all that climate change stuff too. [Dark roofs lead to urban heat island; but clogged traffic will force people to abandon cars – Ed]
I have also realised that the psycho analytical framework that Dad worked on was long-winded and the rebate a massive rort. Our family moved on to other rorts; I got into planning, for example.
Times move on, regulatory frameworks become more complex and encompassing. Not all the bits of it are as necessary when other more important issues emerge, and other bits of the system grow.
But trauma is forever, as long as monkeys fall out of trees.
