A potential skatepark set to be built at Sydney’s idyllic Rushcutters Bay has been pushed ahead by a local councillor who claims the only ones with a problem are “old people with nothing else to do with their time.”
The proposed million dollar skatepark and basketball court area was set to be built on 1200 square metres of Rushcutters Bay Park, but was blocked in late January after local protests. The NSW Government put an interim heritage order on the park to prevent the skatepark’s construction.
An interim heritage order is made on the recommendation of the Heritage Council, giving what’s called a “breathing space” of no more than a year for a full heritage assessment to be completed before building on the site begins.
However, news today is that Woollahra Council has voted to ask the state government’s new Environment Minister to lift the order so it can continue with the planned construction.
According to Councillor Anthony Marano, most locals were actually behind the skatepark – and a petition that had been bandied around as evidence that it shouldn’t be built was gathered on false pretences.
“There was a petition presented against it but the organisers were just going up to random people in the park, and passers-by, and giving them misleading information so they would sign,” Marano told Domain.
“We found most of them don’t live at the park so it doesn’t matter what they think.”
The people organising against it are elderly and retired and have nothing else to do with their time and are an extremely vocal minority. The reality is that most of the people against this will be dead in 10 years. I don’t mean to be rude, but they are all elderly people and if we listened to them, we wouldn’t do anything.
The Woollahra Council ran a six-week consultation of their own last October and found 60% of the local population were in favour of the $1.1 million addition.
The state’s heritage office will meet in August to decide whether the site is deserving of a heritage listing. Here’s hoping that they make the right choice and put a sick-ass halfpipe right there on the water.
