Mirana Devine, and Paul Keating for Napoleonic mayor of old Sydney town ...

(Above: Finger wharf. Hiss boo, tear it down, throw Russell Crowe out on the streets, where he and his bunnies belong!)

Here's Paul Keating in one of his sensitive moments of concern for inner city dwellers and his rage at the way a finger wharf became the most grotesque private property heist in New South Wales public history:

Now, I wasn't quick enough off the mark on this one. I had a decision by the Cabinet of New South Wales to take this down. Laurie Brereton, the Minister for Public Works, and Premier Neville Wran had agreed to take it down. The Labor Council of New South Wales put on a stink and said they wouldn't allow Labor to take it down. So I said to Hawke, 'Look, we'll buy it, and we'll get the army to take it down'

And here's a little more on that grand vision:

... I wanted to, of course, in an earlier day, I wanted to put this underground, this road. Take the Cahill Expressway down, put this underground, bring the Botanical Gardens and the Domain back as one, and see this extended back down to its natural shoreline by subsuming that wharf in the green space here and building a boardwalk around here and turfing the navy out of the parking station.

[Laughter]

But once Clover and the rest of them told me, no, no, I was wrong, and that we had to have this with its great cathedral spaces, I decided, well, I'd leave the navy here. And, you know, they're always banging away down there, annoying all these residents.

How about another grand vision? Paul Keating on shifting the Federal parliament to Sydney:

Garden Island lends itself either to being a natural headland, or accommodating a ceremonial building. I have long believed that this should be the site of the Commonwealth Parliament and the Commonwealth parliamentary chambers, with perhaps parliamentary offices built, St Petersburg-like, in a low-level horseshoe around the historic Captain Cook Dock...

...We could formalise this event, or these events, by putting the Parliament at the centre, and on the most panoramic point of the largest and most international Australian city, and that's, of course, Garden Island. The Commonwealth spent $1 billion on the current Parliament building, but that was 20 years ago.

There's plenty more here, in Paul Keating on the design of East Darling Harbour, all entertaining, and designed to get citizens outside Sydney, which is after all, the known centre of the civilised universe of Australia, frothing and foaming at the mouth. As for heritage folk?

But you know what'll happen. Some toolshed in 1890 will have to go down here and you'll get the Heritage mafia fighting you to knock it over. They will. They're nutters.

[Laughter]

They're absolute nutters. They have a complete confusion between ends and means, about what is important. And if we were to build, let's say, we were to build a Commonwealth Parliament here, wouldn't it be worth the price of a couple of machine sheds? You know, however built? In brick, with however the radius was done in steel. Not unnecessarily knocking them out, but if they have to be knocked out, they get knocked out.

Of course while Keating rambles on about his grand vision for the harbour precinct there are a couple of practical matters that require attention, like trains that run on time, ferries that work, and an airport that doesn't lay siege to the city by abandoning the curfew. But that's not as much fun as knocking over a toolshed with a lot of banner-waving nutters inside.

These days of course Keating is very strong on his shock at the way the government has abandoned, or seems to be in the process of abandoning, Badgery's Creek as Sydney's second airport, but of course when in government, Bob Hawke and Keating went missing in action:

However, despite a vast number of favourable words being written on the subject, the Hawke government backtracked in 1994 and instead of building a new airport, a second runway (known as the third) was added to the existing airport. The bad publicity did not seem to bother Hawke, nor did it seem to bother prime minister Paul Keating when he opened it, dubbing it the runway "the nation had to have".

Never mind. We also had to have a recession for fear of becoming a banana republic.

As an eccentric Napoleon with grandiose visions, Keating is great fun - worthy of a musical - and always entertaining, and the idea that Barangaroo is much more than a land grab of office blocks and apartments and hotel rooms is a worthy delusion to maintain, as he keeps rabbiting on about public interests and public needs and public enthusiasms. As if the developers are somehow at arm's length when it comes to making a buck from Barangaroo ...

You know the game's afoot when you get this kind of guff peddled in stern letters to the press:

Some critics of the Lend Lease plan have argued that it is not right to gift 7 hectares of waterfront land to a developer and allow them to evolve the design into something very different to that which has been presented to the public.

This statement is fundamentally untrue. Firstly, the land is not gifted, but leased in stages for each building and only after approval of each part, by the Barangaroo Delivery Authority.

Oh that's alright then, if we don't like it, then we'll just revoke the lease and knock all the buildings down. After all, it's fun knocking things down.

Meanwhile, the resident cafe latte handwringers at the Sydney Morning Herald have been looking slightly askance at Barangaroo - Keating: the new bandmaster leading our mini Manhattan - is a sample of the ambivalence, as distant memories of the splendid Toaster bequeathed to Sydney harbour bubble up in the collective beehive mind.

But the notion that Keating might have jumped the shark now becomes a certainty with Miranda the Devine's It's time for the old grey mayor:

For all his faults, Keating is a brilliant autodidact with verve and the chutzpah which got him from Bankstown to the Lodge without so much as a university degree. He has the balls Sydney lost.

So if we are to have a Greater Sydney council, let us have Keating for mayor.

Dear lord, I have to confess I immediately fell over in a deep swoon, and it was only with lashings of smelling salts that I came round.

With friends like these, Keating needs enemies? And of course the funniest thing is that the Devine strips all the nonsense about public benefit away, to praise the Barangaroo project's collection of high rise buildings, and the dictatorial manner in which it's being arranged, and bugger the public whingers:

Now, rather than a cowering collection of low-rise buildings, Barangaroo will give the city a much-needed new financial district "for a funds management industry of a trillion dollars of superannuation savings [and] the public gets a new botanical gardens''.

It's an exuberant, unashamedly urban plan. Being Sydney, it also has critics, who complain especially about the 40-storey hotel.

Keating dismisses the criticism as penny-ante carping, with no role in the ''greatest waterfront scheme currently in the world".

He knows you need a dictator for a great planned city; how much consultation did Haussmann do when he rebuilt Paris?

Well as for the new botanical gardens, don't hold your breath. This is just a fancy way to dress up a public park with typical public landscaping, and there's no confirmation that the Botanic Gardens Trust will be running the show in a botanical way:

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: But this is not revegetated Aussie bushland, Australian bushland that we'd had here when Captain Phillip was here. This is - I'm right about botanic garden standard landscaping, isn't it?

PAUL KEATING: Yep.

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: But robust for walkways ...

PAUL KEATING: But we've gotta do - this is the other technical problem with this, Quentin: when the basements of these large buildings are excavated, the soil has to go somewhere anyway. It either goes out by barge or by truck down Sussex Street or it goes into fill on the site and the obvious way to fill on the site is to recontour the headland. It's the sensible thing to do, you know? In the end, Phillip Thalis stamped his foot and we said, "Alright, Phillip. Next. Next." You know? (here)

Yep, it's a handy place for land fill, not that there's anything wrong with the artificiality of a Central Park if it's done right. But calling them botanical gardens? It's just window dressing, or landscaping, if you will ...

Meanwhile, the Devine rabbits on about how Sydney is going to double in size, and how Sydney will end up the most congested city in the country, and how already Melbourne - town of the alley way latte - beats wretched Sydney in terms of livability, and how there were dire sickening visions of future harmony when it came to latte chatter about Barangaroo:

... from the Barangaroo Delivery Authority, we had the utopia of 30,000 people strolling, biking and catching public transport, producing zero waste, being "carbon neutral" and "climate positive'', and providing the rest of Sydney with recycled water, whether from their own kidneys, or not, wasn't mentioned.

Nauseating.

Thank the lord Paul Keating's Napoleonic vision of tall towers, and dictatorial fiat shattered that kind of rhetorical nonsense and talk of public discussion in an instant.

But speaking of public transport, it's amusing that at some point recently someone must have looked at the grand vision of Barangaroo, and worked out that once the metro was a dead duck in the water - or a loon on an impractical expensive pond - there needed to be a gesture in the direction of public transport.

Cue light rail, which for years has been on the outer with the state government, and now becomes a central part of the vision, as if Sydney were suddenly aspiring to become Amsterdam:

Barangaroo will be a key destination on a massively expanded $500 million light rail network from Dulwich Hill to Circular Quay.
This light rail network will deliver 10,000 people an hour to the heart of the Barangaroo precinct
It will run through the Western corridor of the CBD, linking the new development with Circular Quay, Haymarket and the Inner West and key tourist destinations. (here)

There's more - ferries, cycle ways, strong pedestrian links, and only 4% car access - and then I look at Darling Harbour - well I don't look that often - and I laugh. Because this vision came about almost overnight, never mind the extensive lead time involving the Barangaroo development.

That's the great thing about Sydney. If you didn't have a sense of humour before you land in the town, pay attention to the parochial parish pump politics for longer than a second, and you'll rapidly develop one.

Paul Keating as Napoleonic mayor of greater Sydney? After the swoon, I laughed and laughed, until they got out the straight jacket and I sobered up a little.

Still thanks to Miranda the Devine it's another great day in the old town, a smile on everyone's faces.

Sure South Australia might be having an election, tainted by scandal, and good old Melbourne might be more liveable, and Tasmania more idyllic, but this is the town of the Rum Corps, and the Rum rebellion, and never you forget it ...

The waves beside them danced, but they

Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed, and gazed, but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Barangaroo daffodils. (complete here)

(Below: the grand vision - more images here. You'll be able to see the little patch of green off to the left more clearly. It's a botanical gardens in true Victorian style, don't ya know. Just say it's not about beds and office space, click your heels three times, and you could be in Kansas).