Miranda Devine, and how not to fix Sydney while saying Sydney needs to be fixed ...

(Above: Anthony Horderns, grand old Sydney building, now long gone. More photos here).

And now we pause for a moment to consider a parochial issue of concern only to the citizens of Sydney, thanks to Miranda the Devine in Risk a trip down Filthy Avenue.

It seems the good citizens haven't understood that George Street is in fact Sydney's equivalent of Fifth Avenue or the Champs Elysees - astonishing really when you realise it's gridlocked and jam packed with buses on a daily basis, and therefore fulfils the basic requirements of a major road in a burgeoning megalopolis.

There's just one problem with the picture - Fifth Avenue was widened back in 1908 to accommodate the growing traffic (here), and the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, which has been through many incarnations, is now reckoned to be amongst the worst for street crime (double other areas of Paris), as likely gaulois lads feast on tourist gawkers. What was once at the forefront of Napoleon III's re-making of Paris is replete with vulgar cinemas and retail shopping chains.

Never mind, both streets are grand parades compared to the goat track from Circular Quay that became George Street, and both show the benefit of decisive government action, undertaken with imagination and without regard for the plebeians.

But what's interesting about the Devine's piece about how Sydney fails to match up to Paris and New York is what might be termed its motivational disgust:

disgust with ordinary popular culture;

disgust with Australia and Australians;

disgust with Clover Moore and her hippie tendencies;

and disgust with solutions that might involve actually doing something about Sydney.

First the disgust with popular culture as exemplified by George street:

... what a squalid, garbage-filled, vomit-strewn, crime-ridden, sex shop and spruiker-dotted pigsty it is. It's an embarrassment to Sydney and a stark contrast to main streets in other world-class cities.

The footpath was filthy, quite apart from the vomit. It looked as if it hadn't been properly washed for years and there were empty Coke bottles, food wrappings and other garbage in the gutters.

Two homeless men displayed their misery a couple of blocks from the cinema - one fast asleep on the steps of a church, the other drunk and ranting incoherently at passers-by.

There are sex shops on practically every block of southern George Street, and two in one block. There are all sorts of low-rent ugly street frontages, from money-lending outfits, TABS, fast-food joints and discount disposal stores to a backpacker joint and convenience stores.

By golly, Sodom and Gomorrah aren't a patch on this lot. I've never seen such despicable filth, what with all the money-lending, the fast food joints, and the discount and convenience stores. Clearly letting the marketing decide has its problems. Oh capitalism that you could reduce a once proud goat track to this kind of vile offal:

Under rusty, ragged awnings, signs display the vast array of retail opportunities on offer: ''Amazing Loans'', ''kebabs'', ''massage'', ''cheap internet'', ''Club X'', ''cash shop'', ''TAB''. Spruikers bark into megaphones, trying to sell $10 T-shirts from tables set up outside their shops.

Yep, the filthy capitalists - imagine that, trying to sell ten buck T shirts from tables outside a shop! Next thing you know Chinatown will be taking over the Haymarket end of town, and they'll be selling computer parts and offering strange machines for Japanese girls to play with. Naturally only one Australian business can stand against this appalling tide:

The City of Sydney RSL is about the classiest business on offer, and that's not saying much.

As for the place where they're currently screening that left wing monstrosity Avatar, let's not say anything, unless it's nasty:

The laughably named ''theatre district'' or ''cinema strip'' or (choke) ''new Hollywood'', between Liverpool and Bathurst streets, is still an unwelcoming menace, despite the CCTV cameras and extra lighting installed by the former lord mayor Frank Sartor during his $70 million George Street refurbishment more than a decade ago.

Well they did take down the scientology volcano, sob, and so another grand bit of street sculpture exited our lives. What was left?

Stabbings, muggings and brawls are a regular occurrence in the strip. And it's no longer even any kind of cinema strip, since Hoyts, Village and Greater Union merged years ago into one ugly megaplex now called Event Cinemas, full of games arcades and fast food, and zero street presence. And slung across the middle of it all, between the pubs and Hungry Jacks, is the unloved, unlovely monorail.

Oh dear, now if a left wing culture vulture - say a Paul Keating - did this kind of hatchet job, filled with disgust at ordinary expressions of popular culture, what's the odds that Miranda the Devine would come out swinging about his hatred of Kellyville, and his indecent, perverted, un-Australian love of ancient French clocks, as just one of many examples of how the man is incapable of understanding proletariat joy?

But you see Miranda the Devine is the last person you should approach for a review of inner Sydney, at least if you think contradictions are an indication of confused, fuzzy thinking. Because back in her earlier life, here's what she had to say in Traffic hazard ahead: vegan cyclists about the monorail, and a vision of Sydney which might involve other forms of transport:

Light rail activists such as Sydney's Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, forget Sydney has already experimented with light rail; they pretend the under-utilised, inexplicably unfashionable monorail doesn't exist, and any murmurs to expand it are quickly silenced.

Inexplicably unfashionable? You mean a useless device that takes you in a circle to places you don't want to go, unless you want to visit Laurie Brereton's grand architectural vision at Darling Harbour? And murmurs to expand this unloved, unlovely edifice are quickly silenced?

Yep in much the same way as the Devine silences any attempt to get the cars out of the inner city, to embrace bicycles or light trail, or to do anything to tackle the gridlock which is endemic in the city, and especially on George street on peak hour. The fumes are enough to make a stout-hearted jungle dweller weak, and perhaps offer an explanation for the Devine's next sorty into the next bit of inner city suffering:

Even the trees along George Street look seedy and out of sorts.

No, never. Seedy and out of sorts as the traffic gushes up and down and around them? Dearie me, how ever could that happen.

There are whole blocks without a green leaf in sight. Up near Town Hall, it becomes a bit fancier, but the southern end of George Street is an embarrassment.

Won't someone think of the trees in a street saturated with buses, and so narrow that tree-plantings would add to the difficulties traffic faces? Enough already. What about alternatives? Here's the Devine being helpful in earlier times:

... Moore is relentless in her campaign for a whole new light rail to clog city streets, this month releasing two consultants' reports which aim to close Clarence Street and run trams down it. She claims this would halve city travelling times from Central to Circular Quay to just 14 minutes.

But there is a City Circle train that already goes from Central to Circular Quay in just nine minutes, so what is point, other than removing cars from the city by stealth?

You see? No need to do anything about traffic in the city, everything is hunky dory. Meantime, on we go with the litany of gloom:

Tourists on travel websites warn each other it is a dangerous area at night. And it's not alone in our increasingly shabby city. Oxford Street, for starters, is a grotty shadow of its once vibrant self.

Because of a foolish intervention which saw a lively, grotty, strip of night life turned into an ersatz Champs-Élysées? Where despite all the noise about removing the traffic, the traffic remains supreme, and the two sides of the street are even more remote from each other?

Well there's no doubt Sydney council and the state government have a lot to answer for, but as usual the Devine manages to confuse the issue by dragging in her standard disgust for alternative views of the world:

So what exactly does our Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, do? That is, apart from hijacking New Year's Eve celebrations to deliver trite sermons about ''catastrophic'' climate change, banning ''cruel'' food like Tim Tams from council events, and pushing politically correct Christmas decorations.

She's good at spending money - whether it's jetting off to Copenhagen's climate change summit, hiring lots of staff or lashing out on a New Year's Eve party at the Opera House for her mates. She's been in office six years but seems obsessed with pie-in-the-sky environmental ideas such as banning cars and halving carbon emissions, while ignoring such boring details as George Street's ugly actual environment.

Yep, it's hard for the Devine to have a go at Clover Moore doing anything about inner city gridlock, because the Devine is a fierce supporter of the car-driven gridlock status quo, and a heroic reviler of lyrca clad loutish cyclists and light rail supporters. As for the ugly actual environment, has she ever wondered why the low renters continue to cluster in the traditional low rent areas around the Haymarket? Which was a lot more low rent back in the days when you could sit down with metho drinkers in the Capitol theatre as they sought a break from the cold ...

Could it have anything to do with wanting even more development along the hideous lines managed by the World Square 'transformation' of the old Anthony Hordern's site - oh if you could only come back, you old gingerbread beauty. Chalk another dead body up to that arch philistine Bob Carr. (again here for that story).

In an empty speech to the Property Council two months ago to spruik Sydney's plans for the next 20 years, all she talked about was green issues, with the word ''sustainable'' popping up 16 times. She was big on joining networks of international cities and putting photovoltaic cells on the roof of Town Hall. But there was nothing to encourage the $350 billion property industry to invest in improving the city.

Like giving the visigoths and the vandals a free go is going to fix Rome? And shoving more rats into the city without addressing issues like public transport is going to make things even better, as high rise apartment blocks reign supreme? As if the private property industry has done anything, except tear down old buildings and shove very large bits of shit up in their place?

Perhaps they would have laughed if she'd told them her ideas about tearing down the Cahill Expressway, burying the Western Distributor and Circular Quay railway station, and forcing cars out of the city.

Or perhaps they wouldn't, if they had some idea of an urban vision, along the lines of a Napoleon 111. But I guess the grand old days of autocratic absolutism are gone and seeing as how Miranda the Devine would make a perfect understudy for Napoleon 1, perhaps that's just as well. Because she continues her strange letch for Frank Sartor, whom she gave headline treatment as a kamikaze solution to the state government's woes a year ago (Frankly, the best option is Sartor) and whom she now dresses up as a kind of zero tolerance guru:

For all Sartor's flaws, he was a details man who knew that it is the mundane stuff which makes a city liveable, at least as much as the grand visions.

Sartor used to walk the streets of the CBD every day, since he lived in an apartment in Pitt Street. He could see for himself if the ''cleansing'' department was fibbing about the cleanliness of the streets. He was so obsessed he'd make late-night unannounced visits to the central CCTV control room to make sure the operators were awake.

Well there's a vision of a kind - trying to clean the streets while bobbing in and out of all the illegally parked cars - but no, we're not going to offer up a dollar to the Orwellian swear jar in the name of obsessive compulsive control freak micro-management strategies.

But enough of all this, let's get back down to the solutions, if there be any:

When Moore hired the Danish architect Jan Gehl to figure out how to improve the city, he immediately identified George Street as the number one item to be fixed.

In his 2008 report he described George Street as narrower and longer, at two kilometres, than most main streets around the world. It lacked ''coherence'', with ''a lot of underutilised … pockets'' and the ''quality of frontages varying quite a lot''.

''The old footpaths are characterised by a poor level of maintenance and a variety of materials.''

His solution, embraced by Moore, to transform George Street into a grand promenade by closing it off to private vehicles was impractical, not least because it relies on a dysfunctional state government and a sluggish economy.

But at least he knew where the heart of Sydney's shabbiness lies.

WTF? That's it? Impractical? Spend an entire column whining about how George street isn't a grand promenade, and then when someone suggests it, and even puts in a kind word for pedestrians, he's dismissed as an impractical man, and we can't afford any government action of any kind? Except for a bit of obsessive street sweeping so that princess won't get vomit on shoes?

No grand promenade, no square, no light rail, no delusional Amsterdam dream of bicycles in a tree-lined city? We've got the city circle and that's enough, and at least we know where the heart of Sydney's shabbiness lies, and while it's great to talk about grand solutions and grand designs and grand streets like the Champs-Élysées and Fifth Avenue, we'll just settle for keeping the way things are, and talk down any attempts at a solution, because taking a pot shot at the current mayor over her Tim Tam obsession is easy - as easy as gushing bile about the state of George street, as fine an example of popular Australian culture as anyone's managed since the good old days of Times Square?

Well it should be said that Sydney has got the politicians and the council it deserves, and Clover Moore is just the latest in a long line of inept players who fiddle at the edges because the bigger solutions are too hard. And the state government is the worst of all, with Bob Carr as usual the source of much of the rot, and Paul Keating's current fiddling with Bangaroo yet another example of how too many cooks can ruin a broth ... and stick a luxury hotel in the harbour in best Dubai style.

But it should also be said that Sydney has got the commentariat columnists it deserves, as exemplified by the Devine heading off to Chinatown for a meal and failing to realise that the meandering mendacity and ideologically blinkered scribbling in her columns over the years has helped reduce Sydney to its current condition.

If in doubt, why not head down to Melbourne for a quick refresher course on how it can be done. Perhaps because they've only got the Yarra, in recent years Melbourne has tried harder. Oh the locals will whinge, about ugly bits and street crime and any number of other problems, but there's light rail, there's malls (as opposed to the torn up monstrosity currently infecting Pitt street), there's engaging street art and sculpture, and even the freeways have their own bizarre endearing erections (just love those erections). I fell in love with the place all over again, but now, sob, thanks to the merging of the SMH and the Age online, they also have Miranda the Devine in their faces if they stray on to the intertubes ... that'll teach 'em, them and their deep south fear of northerners ...

Just a quick whisper to the sparrows from the south ... whatever you do, however you feel about Sydney, make sure Miranda the Devine never gets to write about Melbourne's light rail or its willingness to do urban makeovers with some awareness of the virtues of the past ...

Ah well, never mind, it's Sydney festival time. Probably should head in to George Street by car (no, I know they're suggesting using public transport - what public transport), get on the piss, have a bet and pick up a burger, making sure I carefully dispose of the wrapping paper in the street, and rage about taking in the art ... it's the Sydney way, and no effete poncy poseur with an eastern suburbs mindset and a hatred of cyclists is going to change my way of doing things ...

(Below: oh no, another lout with a bicycle, only she's not lycra clad).