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Listing the worst things about Sydney makes it easier to leave

Tim Dick

It's easy to hate Sydney this time of year, all sweaty humidity and traffic. A city that only flows freely when schools are on holidays now over, a city in which authorities think most thoroughfare clearways are only appropriate for weekdays. Pity those of us who must drive on the weekend.

I've been assessing the worst thing about Sydney given how difficult it is to move away,  which I'm doing this week. Thinking of its insufferable attributes makes it easier to justify a decision to live elsewhere for a while. The antidote to departure angst is creating a leaderboard of Sydney awfulness, whittling the candidates down to the city's single worst thing.

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Sydney's hottest nights on record

Sleepless in Sydney with two nights recording a minimum of 26 degrees Celsius.

Sydney's worst thing is not the heat, even though on Saturday at 7.30am the apparent temperature was already 28 degrees and the humidity 87 per cent. That's after the city recorded its hottest January. Tourists might like the weather this time of year, but I am not alone in finding it unbearable.

It is not the traffic, as infuriating as it is, and as it will stay, despite the new trams and metro lines, even if each is started and finished. In this state, don't bank on anything until it is open and running, and not even then (hat-tip, the monorail).

It is not the fact that Sydney ripped out its trams in the 1950s, only to be put some back in three score years later. Or that rail trackwork happens during Saturdays and Sundays, just as clearways refuse to operate, rather than at night. Or that the airport is a disaster for picking up, dropping off, and driving by, especially on Monday mornings, Friday nights, and any morning within coo-ee of the international terminal as a gazillion flights to Asia leave at the same time.

Or that it taxes the good driving behaviour of taking the tunnel to avoid the city centre, rather than tolling those who insist on driving into it. Or that it puts in bike lanes, only for the state government to rip them out again. Or that it ridiculously bans dogs from almost all of its many beaches.

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It is not that Sydney is so shallow, so obsessed with money, and so comfortable with self-obsession that someone like Roxy Jacenko can prosper, "a PR queen" who deploys her small children as social media marketers. Not even her insider-trading husband's disgrace could stop her. If there is an antihero for Sydney now, it is the rise of an avid self-promoter infatuating an embarrassing portion of the city media.

It is not that great chunks of Sydney children are forced into private schools given the effect on public ones of the federal government's incentives for privatised education, and the state government syphoning academic talent off to selective schools.

It is not that much of what passes for public discussion assumes Sydney ends somewhere west of Annandale. Take Keep Sydney Open, the lobby group opposed to the lockout laws, which don't apply in most of Sydney, from Newtown to Parramatta, Penrith to North Sydney. Its ambition is preserving early morning alcohol sales in three postcodes near the city centre. The received progressive wisdom is that Sydney is dead, but calling it Keep A Small But Important Part Of Sydney Open would be more accurate, if not as catchy.

It is not the astonishing rudeness exhibited in public by adults who should know better. Like remonstrating with waitstaff, or riding a pointlessly loud motorbike, or trying to overtake a queue of straight-on traffic by driving down the left-turning lane only to push in at the intersection.

It is not that your own special patch of Australia, a small two-bedroom, one bathroom inner-city flat, can now cost you over $1 million. One million dollars. It is not that the federal government prefers to subsidise people's second, third, and fourth, houses, rather than sensibly reforming tax rorts to help those who aren't aboard the property enrichment bus.

It is not that we take seriously John Symond, who lives in a shopping centre-sized harbourside house, when he shamelessly forecasts the imminent date on which some ostentatious lunatic pays $100,000,000 for a single dwelling.

It is not that the two News Corp titles obsessed with pillorying anyone living within 10 kilometres of the CBD as inner city hipsters, The Australian and The Daily Telegraph, are both headquartered in the hippest of inner-city suburbs, Surry Hills.

No, the worst thing about Sydney is February. It's the month in which all these awful things are at their worst, combining to overpower the many reasons to stay, and dissolving shadow-of-departure wistfulness into resolute determination to leave.

Tim Dick is a Sydney lawyer. Twitter: dick_tim

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