Who is going to pay for Callan Park in the future?

You will have read or heard about the wrangle over who is going to pay for Callan Park in the future.

After a generation of neglect, it’s a bit rich to expect Leichhardt Council to pick up the bill for devastated heritage buildings, collapsing infrastructure and the whole cost of the master planning for the entire site. Not to mention the clean-up of any serious contamination on the site.  As the Mayor, Councillor Jamie Parker, has pointed out, the state government cannot expect to dump these costs on the residents of Leichhardt Municipality.

Ideally, Callan Park would have a Trust to manage it just like very other major park in Sydney. Failing that, the state government must pay for the site to be handed over in good order and help with its upkeep.

But there are other dangerous pitfalls in the deal which has been offered to Leichhardt Council. There are two serious dangers in the Agreement.

The first is the shrinking of the area originally offered to Council.

Last October the NSW planning minister Kristina Keneally promised Council 40 of the 61 hectares at Callan Park.  Since then, the ambulance service has put in a bid for the most modern mental health buildings on the site and more than 10 acres (or 5 hectares) of additional open space adjacent to these buildings. Apparently they want this area for administration and car parking.

The Heads of Agreement apparently asks Council to accept this shrinkage. The ambulance service may have a plausible argument for this takeover, but we haven’t heard it. And it’s hardly likely that their case is better than that of people with a mental illness. The targeted buildings are state-of-the-art cottages and wards built in the 1990s for people who were recovering from the worst of their mental illness and before they went back out into the community.

Everyone, except apparently the NSW government and its bureaucrats, knows that these beds are needed and needed now. Emergency departments are overcrowded with mentally ill patients and there are just not enough beds at Concord, the smaller psychiatric hospital which was supposed to replace Rozelle hospital at Callan Park. The consequences of this shortage are homelessness, imprisonment and premature deaths for hundreds of our fellow citizens.

You have to ask: Is the ambulance administration takeover meant to be the fnal nail in the cofn of a humane approach to mental health at Callan Park?

The second trap in the proposed Agreement is just as bad. Council has to prepare a plan of subdivision of the site as a precondition of the 99-year lease.

The Agreement claims this subdivision is necessary to secure the leases of the other tenants. That’s just not true. The University of Sydney and the Writers’ Centre have leased parts of the site for 15 years without subdivisions.

Carving up the site would open the door to disposing or selling of chunks of the site something which state governments have wanted to do for the past two decades. Yes, the Callan Park (Special Provisions) Act 2002 now prohibits any sale of Callan Park land, but dividing it up into disposable parcels would simplify any later change to the Act and future sale.

The community and Council have opposed subdivision in the past. The last example was three years ago when NSW Health and the University of Sydney proposed subdividing Kirkbride, the sandstone complex in the heart of the site, into six separate lots. The reasons for that subdivision were never explained.

It is conceivable just that these clauses in the Agreement are the work of some over-ambitious bureaucrats in the ambulance service or Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority. but they do chime in with the state government’s long-term aims:

• Selling or disposing of parts of Callan Park and

• Barring forever the return of a public mental heal hospital or a wellness centre to Callan Park.

Friends Delegation sees Verity Firth

Clearly SHFA, on behalf of the NSW government, is ofering too little and asking too much. It’s a dangerous deal and exhibits the lack of goodwill that is too often the trademark of this government when it comes to Callan Park.

Because of this, a delegation from the Friends saw our local Member of Parliament, Verity Firth, on October 8 and brought these matters to her attention. We have yet to hear back from her by letter, although at the meeting she

1. opposed any unilateral ambulance takeover of additional land and buildings and
2. accepted that the NSW government bear the cost of cleaning up any contamination.

She also took on board a number of other points raised by the Friends.

We remain hopeful. Negotiations are continuing and the local MP and Mayor can bring us up to date on November 7.

I hope you can make this important meeting on Saturday,

Yours for Callan Park,

Hall Greenland for Friends of Callan Park