Eamon Waterford

Caitlin Morrissey

Eamon, is what is the DNA of Sydney to you?

Eamon Waterford

So, I’m going to start with what the DNA of Sydney is not. It’s not actually the harbour, the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, the gorgeous pristine sapphire water that is so famous globally for that vista. And, you know, I think that a lot of the world thinks that that is the DNA of Sydney, but actually the true DNA of Sydney is the people of this city. It’s one of the most multicultural cities in the world. There are over 200 different nationalities who have called Sydney home. There’s over 300 languages spoken in Sydney. It’s home to First Nations communities who are the longest surviving civilisation in the entire world, tracing their ancestry back in this place for over 60,000 years. And so, what makes it special in some ways is that incredible diversity of people and what they’ve managed to achieve by all coming together in a peculiar way.

You know, we’re a new city. We’ve only been around for about 240 years as a modern city. And in that time, we’ve had progressive waves of migration that have shaped the city. And you can almost kind of look at these bands like the rings in a tree of where kind of different eras of the city have grown themselves out from that beautiful harbour that obviously was the start of the city, the kind of the seed that catalysed the growth out from there. And so you find this incredible diversity. And it’s interesting, Sydney’s multicultural but most suburbs within Sydney are not that multicultural. What we have is this interesting kind of village feel to the city where you can go to Harris Park and feel like you are in Mumbai. You can go to Chatswood and feel like you were in Shanghai. You can go to parts of the eastern suburbs and feel like you’re in Tel Aviv. You know, we have these diaspores dotted around our city that have created gorgeous, spectacular, welcoming, safe communities that feel like home. And so that I think is probably the DNA of Sydney.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much. What an incredible place to start. I have one follow-up to something that you’ve just said, which is maybe to ask you to say a little bit more about the spatial patterning of those eras and those concentric rings. So what is the character of those rings?

Eamon Waterford

Yes, so probably the biggest divide in Sydney is between the parts of the city that were built before the invention of the automobile and the parts that were built after. You know, a lot of European cities have a pre-automobile grid and about half the city in Sydney is pre-automobile and the other half is post. And so you see quite a different kind of spatial pattern to the city as a result of that change. The city is very sprawling in its western parts, in its northwest and its southwest, because at the time we thought that long distances were fine. You had the car and you could drive like that. But at the same time, we see these sort of middle ring in the in between, between the kind of 1800s and early 1900s era part of the city and the sort of post 1950s era. Which these middle ring suburbs have quite interesting interwar architecture, but also post-World War II migration. Huge kind of diasporas of Greek and Italian communities that have moved to Sydney that have created these suburbs that are something in between those two extremes, I suppose.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thanks, Eamon. So from your point of view, what is it that makes Sydney, Sydney? And I’m going to add the follow up there, which is, is there one Sydney? Is there more than one Sydney? And what is the tapestry that holds them together when we think about what it is that makes Sydney, Sydney?

Eamon Waterford

There’s clearly a lot of different Sydney’s and we see that really come through with people who don’t necessarily relate to Sydney as a concept. They will, when you ask them where they’re from, will describe the suburb they’re from. ‘I’m from Punchbowl.’ ‘I’m from Parramatta.’ ‘I’m from Marrickville.’ Or the area, ‘I’m from the Inner West.’ ‘I’m from the Eastern suburbs.’ ‘I’m from the North shore.’ This tribalism almost that has popped up in Sydney, not a negative tribalism, not the sort of tribalism where people are going to war with each other, but tribalism where people are proud of the region, of the suburb that they’re from, has resulted in this village-like feel. And that’s almost understandable when you’ve got such strong diasporas of different communities from around the world coming to call this place home. I don’t think we’re as good as we could be at articulating how those are all the tapestry, the puzzle pieces that make up Sydney to translate that local pride, that regional pride into city pride. And one of the challenges that Sydney often grapples with is it’s a bit of a tall poppy, you know, it gets cut down by a lot of people, talked down because of its success.

What makes that disparate group of places successful and holds it together is a couple of things. The first is a killer combination of economic vibrancy and lifestyle. Sydney is a gorgeous city to live in. I mean, spectacularly beautiful to look at, but also pleasant climate, lovely weather, great clean air, incredibly green and leafy and beautiful to have a walk around and run around in. And then it’s economically vibrant. You know, it’s the financial services hub of Australia. It’s the professional services hub of Australia. Although sometimes we compete with Melbourne for that position. But it’s certainly a significant sort of knowledge economy hub. We have significant medical technologies, medical devices, a very large healthcare sector, very large education sector, six universities in the top 200 globally, I think two in the top 50 at the most recent recording. It’s a very successful city in terms of its economic vibrancy. And to give you sort of data to back that up, if you look at the recorded economic history of Sydney from 1850 to 2020, Sydney experienced 170 years of uninterrupted economic growth. 2020 during COVID was the first year in recorded history that Sydney had ever experienced an economic downturn. And that’s a combination of, yes, quite high immigration and economic growth, right? It’s a city that was growing at pace and continues to grow at pace because it welcomes a lot of people from around the world. But also those people come here and do interesting, innovative, edgy, exciting things that they can’t always do in their home cities or home countries.

Greg Clark

Actually, Eamon, you’ve said three things that I just want to invite you to really draw out. Let’s just go to the thing that you just said. 170 years of uninterrupted economic growth is a kind of without precedent. I mean, even if you think of the fast-growing cities of Singapore, of Shenzhen, of Dubai, none of them have had 170 years. So why don’t you just say that for us again, but also then say what are the consequences of a city that has 170 years of uninterrupted growth in terms of people’s outlook and perspective and mindset? Just say something about that.

Eamon Waterford

So Sydney has experienced from 1850 to 2020, 170 years of uninterrupted economic growth. That is almost certainly without precedent, certainly in the modern economic history. And you’d be going back to sort of Rome during the height of the Roman Empire to find parallels of 170 years of continued success. It is quite remarkable. And of course, it’s partly a result of growth from immigration, and it’s partly a result of innovation and development of new ideas. It’s also led to a big cultural consideration. People here are optimistic about the future of their lives because they’ve never experienced anything other than success. You know, there are ebbs and flows and downturns and challenges and undoubtedly people have it tough in this city but when you have a city that just keeps winning, it’s infectious. It becomes an incredibly exciting place to be because of that because people, you know, are used to things working out and so they are willing to try things.

Greg Clark

Brilliant, Eamon. And then a second thing you said is that Sydney is an economic hub and an economic leader in a number of very important sectors, from universities to IT to medical to financial services to corporate headquarters. And so you’re beginning to talk about Sydney’s role in the Australian system of cities. Why don’t you just say a little bit more if you don’t mind about that?

So if you’re born anywhere in Australia, how does Sydney feature in the mindset of your journey to a successful life? If you’re an actor, if you’re a filmmaker, if you’re a journalist? Does everybody who wants to be successful in Australia have to have Sydney somehow in their career on their CV? Could you talk a bit about that?

Eamon Waterford

Yes, Sydney has the gravitational pull for people in Australia. It’s the largest city. It’s the most successful city. But it’s also the gateway city to the rest of the world. If you want to be globally successful anywhere in Australia, you know that your first stop is Sydney because you know from Sydney, you connect to the rest of the world. It’s of course, also a big hub when it comes to professional, legal, financial services, very large financial services sector. We have a lot of technology and IT startup innovation happening in Sydney. It is under-appreciated, but the value of tech unicorns in Sydney is larger than the value of tech unicorns in Tel Aviv. Something that Sydney does not really talk about. We often talk about our beautiful harbour and then stop there instead of actually talking about this amazing innovation story we have to tell, which is cities that the world looks to as startup meccas are parallels and equals to Sydney. And yet we don’t talk about that. So there is undoubtedly something about Sydney’s role as a gateway for people who want to come to Australia and for Australians who want to connect with the world.

Greg Clark

Fantastic Eamon. Then the last one was you talked about the different Sydney’s at a local level and how people talk about their suburb or their district or their town as it were. How far does the concept of Sydney stretch geographically? And of course, I’m very aware that you’ve personally taken a really leadership position on things like, you know, the metropolitan region of three cities and the sandstone region. How has the idea, the geographical idea of Sydney changed and evolved? And which parts of those things do you think are crystallised and which parts are still fluid?

Eamon Waterford

Sydney is in some ways very clearly bounded. Because it’s got these incredible national parks and an ocean, there is a basic limit to how far Sydney goes before you just hit bush and you don’t hit much else for another 50 to 100 kilometres. But in a more truthful way, Sydney is also a fuzzy concept that depends on how you’re looking at it. And it’s undoubtedly true that Sydney as an economic region stretches far beyond those national park boundaries. Areas around Sydney, cities that would be relatively significant in their own right, like Gosford and Wollongong, have been drawn into the economic agglomeration that is Sydney. And indeed, as we look beyond that, we’re really excited about the potential for a mega region developing up around Sydney, stretching up to Newcastle and the Hunter, which is an education but also mining and engineering hub in its own right with a deep-water port and a lot of interesting things going on. We’re excited by the opportunity to connect that into that single economic agglomeration. At the moment, the trip is a bit far, but we’re really excited about the potential of high-speed rail, which is something the government’s currently looking quite deeply at.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much, Eamon. So now I think everything that you’ve just said really tees up the next question that we have about who lives in Sydney and why? But more importantly, what is the promise of Sydney? And I think you’ve mentioned three words there that perhaps sum some of this up, but I’d love to hear more. About this city of opportunity, excitement, and this infectious spirit of the upswing city. What else would you like to say about the promise of Sydney that you haven’t already, and what draws people to it, I suppose?

Eamon Waterford

Yeah. I mean, it is true that Sydney is one of the most expensive housing markets in the entire world. So there’s a good reason that people want to live here otherwise, they wouldn’t put up with that. You know, the fact that housing is so expensive is to some extent a side effect of the demand for people who want to be here. There are more people that want to be in Sydney than can be and that’s resulted in very high house prices.

Part of the attraction for Sydney is just that combination of a good lifestyle and a good career. Or you can be looking after the long-term whilst also having a good time. It was once-- a very smart man once said to me that Sydney is sometimes perceived as the city of the one-night stand, not the long-term relationship. But ultimately, what Sydney is, is a place that you could have a good time tonight, but also know that tomorrow you’ll be getting on with the job. That combination is rarer than we’d like to think it is. There are of course, other lifestyle cities that mesh that combination together, the likes of Barcelona, Stockholm, San Francisco to some extent, Toronto, of course. But these are cities that are often very far away from Sydney. Sydney is somewhat unique in its-- the combination it offers in this particularly South Eastern Asia, but even the Asia Pacific region more broadly, it is something that Sydney offers that not many other places have.

Greg Clark

It would be good if you spoke just a little bit about Sydney as an Asia Pacific city. Just take a couple of paragraphs on that if you can. Because I think that’s going to be a very important story. So maybe the way I’ll frame the question is this, that I think it was an Australian Prime Minister about 25 years ago who said that Australia needs to pivot to Asia Pacific and to stop simply thinking about itself as a kind of satellite country of Western European sort of national origins. In what ways and how far has Sydney become an Asia Pacific city economically, socially, culturally, et cetera? It was Paul Keating, wasn’t it, who said all of that.

Eamon Waterford

It was Keating who said we need to pivot to Asia and we’ve been doing it ever since. Sydney has gone through eras of relationships with other countries. So for a long time we saw ourselves purely as a British colony. And then for a long time, our major partner with a major power was with America. But increasingly it’s with China. And we find ourselves as a country and as a city in this funny balancing act between our Anglosphere relationships and our Asian relationships. We are of course in the Asian quadrant of the world or trident of the world. We are well connected into Asia and that is evident in the population and the demographics of Sydney. It is increasingly a Pan-Asian city. We have a very high Chinese population. A very high Indian population. Indonesian, of course, just being quite close. Vietnamese, Cambodian, successive waves of migration from basically all of the Asian countries have seen a really rich mixing of Sydney that is combined with a lot of British expats and indeed people like me who are Irish immigrants many generations ago. So I wouldn’t say that Sydney is purely an Asian city. I would say it’s an interesting hybrid city. It is of Asia in Asia, but also holding that tension, that balance between, I guess, you know, an increasingly fractured world right now.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thanks, Eamon. Before we move on to geography and geology, I just wanted to pick up on something that you said, which was that Sydney-- there’s the tall poppy syndrome mindset in Sydney. I’ve just finished my PhD, which I did in Melbourne partly, and I heard this term come up there as well. What is the tall poppy syndrome in Sydney? And where do you think it’s come from? And how does it sort of shape the character of the city?

Eamon Waterford

Yeah, so I recently discovered that the concept of the tall poppy syndrome is an Australian invention. I had thought it was a globally understood concept. But to give context, the idea is that the tallest poppy, i.e. the most successful poppy that grows the strongest, is the one that’s cut down by the farmer, by the florist. And it is essentially a very common Australian cultural norm to not want to be too successful or to be too up yourself. You know, arrogance is very much looked down upon by Australians. And so, Sydney in many respects, is the most successful city in Australia and therefore it is the tall poppy that people like to cut down.

Whereas there is a lot of pride for Melbourne for its cultural output. People in Sydney do not respect Sydney’s cultural output to the same extent. Despite the fact that on almost all metrics you would look at, there is greater cultural production and greater cultural performance in Sydney than in Melbourne. And so there’s something to this idea that Australian culture loves an underdog, resents a winner that keeps winning and that is a challenge for Sydney because we are certainly not an underdog in the Australian climate and we just keep winning.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you. It’s such a fascinating concept and it came up so much in the work I did in Melbourne. So I was really curious to hear how that plays out in Sydney too. And it makes so much sense when you talk about the city that’s been on an upswing for, you know, over 150 years to be the tallest poppy and for that to have such a part in the mindset of the city, I suppose.

Eamon Waterford

You know, I’m obviously trying to give a relatively positive frame to Sydney, but I think there’s something we’re working on that we think is really important right now. Is part of the reason why we suspect Sydneysiders are down on their own city, why they bring the tall poppy syndrome to bear on their own city, is because when they see their city depicted in marketing, in film, in television, it’s not a city they recognise. It’s a city of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, which is actually a very, very small proportion of the overall city. When they do see themselves genuinely reflected in culture, in media, they are really proud. They’re really proud of that diversity of people. They’re really proud of how the city works well, despite and in fact, because of that multiculturalism. But because often the brand of Sydney on the global stage has been lagging behind and focused on those beautiful assets rather than the people of the city, people don’t respect it because it doesn’t reflect their lived reality. For the Committee for Sydney, we’re really passionate about changing the brand narrative of Sydney on the global stage to better reflect the people of Sydney because not only do we think that will drive greater prosperity and attraction for the city, but we suspect it’ll also mean that Sydneysiders are far more likely to fall in love with and have a lot of pride in their city.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much, I think that was a really key insight, actually. So now moving back to the original list again. I want to ask you a little bit more about the sort geography and the geology. Obviously, you have mentioned the harbour, but we know that this is also a riverine city. And so what is the role of geography and topology and environment in shaping the city?

Eamon Waterford

Yeah, the geology of Sydney and the topography is really critical to how the city is shaped. Water looms large in our city. Obviously, the traditional eastern parts of the city, that’s the beach and that’s the harbour. But there’s very, very few people who live anywhere in Sydney who aren’t within a couple of kilometres of a body of water, whether that’s a lake or a river and indeed the harbour or the beaches for many. And water plays a really important role because it’s hot here. The climate’s beautiful, but it does get hot during summer. And so being able to find refuge in water is a really important part of Sydney culture. It’s a really important part of Australian culture. We’re a coastal country, right? And we’re a very urban country. So this idea of living in cities close to water is actually deeply imbued in Australians and frankly is the lived reality for the majority of Australians. So that’s really important.

The other thing to bear in mind is that we’re built on this base of sandstone, and sandstone is very soft and it gets washed away very easily. So we’ve ended up with these very intense sort of filigree network of land spitting out into harbour. Where you have ridgelines running down to water that can serve as main streets for local communities, main arterial roads, and then the filigree streets running off that down to the water or the residential houses. It’s a very common kind of topographical makeup of Sydney suburbs is that ridgeline high street followed with houses running down the side. And that means that you have kind of these, we call them insular peninsulas, but you have these small spits of land out into water all over the city that have developed their own kind of cultures and really intensified that around their high street, that that high street becomes the heart of those local communities.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you because what you’ve done there is really draw together what we describe as the endowed traits, the sort of traits that the planet gives to a city, so it’s sandstone. And then the inherited traits which is all to do with vernacular and architecture and planning and layout. So thank you for doing that.

Eamon Waterford

Can I make just one other point to note? I mentioned the Aboriginal communities of Sydney and the fact that there’s been people here for 60,000 years. It is also worth noting that those ridgelines serving as the arterial roads also served as walking paths and connection paths for Aboriginal communities. These are not actually roads that were laid down in the last couple of decades or even the last couple of hundred years. They are built on people walking those routes for tens of thousands of years. And actually, we are, our city—our modern city has been built on that network that has been laid out for so long.

Caitlin Morrissey

Just to continue on this sort of line of questioning about the physical infrastructure or architectural features in the city. From the built environment, where do we read the DNA of Sydney in its built form and in its vernacular?

Eamon Waterford

Yeah, well, that sandstone that’s under the ground across the whole city got dug up and turned into spectacular buildings all over the city. So we have really, really beautiful historic buildings made out of sandstone and that was kind of the first wave of architectural genius in Sydney.

We perfected the terrace, the terrace home in Sydney as well. We have spectacular, what were essentially workers’ homes initially, but have become beloved as a kind of architectural icon. And then bizarrely, after perfecting them up to the 1940s, we decided, right, that’s it. We don’t want to build any more of them. And we didn’t build another one for 80 years. And it’s only been in the last 10 years that we’ve started building them again. And people love them. They are a wonderful way of creating sensitive density. Suburbs made of terraces where each home opens directly onto the street and is about five metres wide but shares walls with the buildings next to them. These are two-story suburbs, but they are as dense as many other suburbs that would be six to eight stories because of the intensification of the built form. So there’s something to that sensitive low rise density that Sydney has in a lot of its areas. It’s really wonderful. And then, of course, you start to get into the red brick walk-up architectural design. So your two to three-story buildings that really speak to that migrant story. You know, this middle ring of suburbs of Greek and Italian migrants living in walk-up apartments. It’s just another wonderful part of the architectural story of this city.

Caitlin Morrissey

Can I ask you what the turning point was more recently that led people to rediscover the terraced home as a great typology for building homes in Sydney?

Eamon Waterford

It took us longer than most to come around to the idea that building large houses 80 kilometres away from your CBD in sort of pre-planned communities was perhaps not the best way to deal with climate change, affordability, accessibility and connectivity. So we only really realised that quite recently. And we are still sort of rebuilding the infrastructure into some of those communities that have been built a long way away. But that idea of turning our mind back to density and turning our mind back to that medium density, that sensitive density, is really only a recent kind of adjustment for Australians. It’s fair to say we built a lot of density in the years prior to that, but it was more of an Asian style density. It was quite high density. We were talking 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50-story towers and that served us very well in terms of getting a lot of people close to the things they needed to be close to, but we’ve basically realised we missed a in the middle and we need to go back and do that again.

Caitlin Morrissey

And so partly over this conversation we’ve been sort of referring to, and Greg asked you specifically about Sydney’s role in the Asia Pacific and what that relationship is like. And we’ve spoken a little bit about Sydney in relation to Melbourne. But what do you see as Sydney’s role in Australia? And what is distinctive about Sydney compared to the other capital cities?

Eamon Waterford

Yeah, it’s worth noting that Australia, about 70% of the population of Australia lives in cities. We’re one of the most urbanised societies, certainly in the Anglosphere, I suspect. But we tend to have a small number of very large cities and not much else in Australia in terms of where our population lives. And Sydney is the largest city. So the role it plays is basically the deepest labour market, the richest cultural vibrancy and the largest inflows and outflows of capital, of talent, of ideas to the rest of the world. So Sydney’s role is to do the niche and the obscure that other cities do not have the scale to do, and to connect Australia to the rest of the world.

Sydney is Australia’s largest city, but it is almost neck and neck with Melbourne. Melbourne is a very large city as well. And there is an interesting sister relationship between Sydney and Melbourne. Like sisters, they don’t always get on, but actually, they have a lot that they need to rely on each other. And we talk about the need for Melbourne and Sydney to collaborate to compete on the global stage. The reality is that they are incredibly economically intertwined.

The flight route between Sydney and Melbourne is the second busiest domestic flight route in the entire world. And that connectivity between those two cities a long way from their major trading destinations around the rest of the world is that they rely on each other a lot for scale, for labour market depth, for ideas generation and cross-pollination. And so in some respects, you can look at this interesting quasi mega region that is made up of about 11 million people sitting across Sydney and Melbourne. That is quite an interesting interrelationship that’s happening despite the fact that these cities are almost 800 kilometres away from each other.

Greg Clark

I’ve got two questions Eamon, can you say a little bit more about where is the Aboriginal identity in Sydney? And the second one is obviously you’re going to pick up the question about leadership. And I think it will be wonderful to hear your reflections, not just on the key individual leaders that he wants to cite, but also your assessment of to what extent collaborative leadership is now really emerging. Because the Committee for Sydney, in my view, is a really important platform in the collaborative leadership of Sydney.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Just while you’re talking about the flight route between Melbourne and Sydney, I know that from Melbourne’s perspective at least, that flight is so frequent it runs more smoothly and more efficiently than some buses in Melbourne. It was incredible to see the number of planes taking that journey down to Melbourne Airport coming from Sydney.

Eamon Waterford

It almost takes less time to fly from Sydney to Melbourne than it takes to get on the SkyBus from Melbourne to the, you know, from the airport to the CBD.

Caitlin Morrissey

It’s mad. It’s like that is an incredible... I really had to get my head around that, especially because I think coming from the UK, when you get on a flight, it’s like it’s not something that you do just to go to your nearest city. But I know that’s like an everyday reality for the people, you know, jumping in business meetings and stuff like that.

Eamon Waterford

I mean, there are a non-insignificant number of people that would be commuting multiple times a week from Melbourne to Sydney or vice versa. Like that would be a pretty common thing for people to say, I’ve got to pop up to the Sydney office every Monday and every Wednesday.

Caitlin Morrissey

Yeah, or even just to go for a day. It’s so doable. Thank you so much for everything that you’ve said so far. While those questions are very fresh in our minds, perhaps we could just go into the two questions that Greg just asked. The first was picking up on something that you mentioned earlier on as well, which is about the Aboriginal identity in contemporary Sydney. So where we see that continuation and those enduring-- whether it’s social, whether it’s cultural, whether it’s ways of relating to the environment, whether it’s like you said, the way that people move around the city, the continuation of Aboriginal identity or ways of being in place. And then the second was on leadership, which we do have a question on, so perhaps I’ll include that in that question. But is there anything else that you’d like to say about Aboriginal identity in contemporary Sydney?

Eamon Waterford

Yeah, I think there’s a concept that I’m not the best placed person to articulate and an Aboriginal person would do a better job of this, but they talk about Country and caring for Country. And this concept of custodianship where people are not at the top of a food chain systems that are there to service people, but we are all part of the same system, and we have a responsibility to manage the balance between those systems. So when they talk about Country, they’re not really just talking about the land, they’re talking about the ecosystem, the plants and the animals that go along with that. So this concept of caring for Country I think is a really profound one that’s starting to really affect the way we think about urban design. about how we think about economic development, about how we think about responding to climate change. And learning lessons from people who’ve been actually operating in this environment, which can be stark and harsh and hot and wet and difficult at times, but have managed to withstand that for 60,000 years and know a thing or two that we can learn from is a really profound change in the way that we think of our role, of our place as a city. You know, it’s not our responsibility to dominate the environment and turn it to our will. And actually, that our ability to do that is incredibly limited because the environment is harsher and bigger and stronger and more capable than we are. And so learning to operate within it is such an interesting concept. This idea of custodianship over Country rather than sort of domination over Country. And I think that’s a really critical role that Aboriginal people play in modern dialogue.

The other thing I would just note is that there is an incredible, rich cultural output coming from Aboriginal communities at the moment. You know, First Nation artists are winning awards at the Venice Biennale. They are, you know, topping the US music hits. They’re topping-- they’re winning Grammys. I’ll say that. You know, Aboriginal artists are winning Grammys. Like there is something very universal about the reflections and the perspectives they have that is obviously resonating with global audiences as well.

Caitlin Morrissey

So we wanted to ask you about who you see as being Sydney’s most influential leaders and what their leadership has been. There was also an addition to that question, which is who are Sydney’s quiet leaders, perhaps the people who don’t get recognition, but whose work in the city really embodies the DNA of that city? And then the third part of that is Greg’s addition, which is where we’re seeing collaborative leadership in Sydney, particularly from your perspective as the CEO of the Committee for Sydney?

Eamon Waterford

Yeah, well, why don’t I list some people and then I’ll talk about the collaborative leadership element. Look, any conversation about Sydney, Sydney’s leaders probably can’t go past Clover Moore. She’s the Lord Mayor of Sydney, but don’t get confused that she runs the whole city. Much like I think it’s the Borough of London, she only represents a very small proportion of the city. About 7% of the city’s population live within the local government area called the City of Sydney. There are 33 local councils in Sydney and she represents one. But it is the one that holds our major CBD. It is the Local Government Area that has the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and some of the most significant and prominent parts of the city. And she’s been in charge for about 20 years. She has absolutely shaped her council area and, as a result, the whole city in ways that she feels very strongly about. She has led the way on climate change response. She has led the way on public art and the importance of art and culture in our city. She has led the way on championing and advocating for things she cares about and campaigning against things. And inevitably, politicians, even at much higher levels of government, will regularly say, well, we can’t have that fight because I don’t want to get in a fight with Clover. She is on-- you know she’s a leader cause people only need to use one of her names. So that is one person I’d mention.

I think there’s another leader worth mentioning. He’s a guy called Harry Triguboff. He’s probably about 90 now. And he runs a developer called Meriton. And, you know, I don’t think-- basically he’s built just an inordinate number of houses in Sydney. I don’t even think they’re necessarily my favourite houses in Sydney, but you absolutely have to appreciate the fact that he has had a vision for making places for people to live in and just delivering them at scale at large for 70 or 80 years in this city. Undoubtedly shaping this city in his image.

Another leader I’d mention is Pat Cummins. He’s the captain of the Australian cricket team. He lives in Sydney. He’s a proud Sydneysider. And he embodies so much that is classic about Sydney. He’s very good-looking, which is a classic Sydney vanity, cares about the climate, and is worried about the environment that he’s leaving for his children. He is very good at sport. These are all kind of classic Australian traits. And also, you know, there is some-- cricket in Australia is everybody’s second favourite sport. Everybody has a sport that they follow obsessively, and then they also follow cricket. And as a result, the captain of the Australian cricket team is, you know, on the same par as the Prime Minister in terms of cultural importance in this country. And so for this to be a man who’s very pleasant, very cheerful, very lovely and very thoughtful is quite nice to have a leader like that.

And then you mentioned quiet leaders. In terms of quiet leaders in Sydney, the real quiet leaders are, I think, the CEOs of the councils. We have these 33 local governments. They have mayors. Those mayors are the publicly elected politicians that lead those councils. But sitting underneath of them are the CEOs that are the public servants running those entities. And these are complex beasts. Deeply underfunded for the expectation and the modern world that they’re grappling with. And these CEOs are by and large incredible people doing amazing work, quietly working away.

You mentioned this idea of collaborative leadership. I will talk a little bit about the Committee to Sydney, but there’s a really good example of a project called Resilient Sydney, which is a coalition of all 33 local governments across Sydney working together to build the resilience in the face of climate change of the city. And those CEOs who work at those councils are the ones championing this work with their councils. The idea of getting any 33 organisations to collaborate on something, let alone competitors, organisations who are competing for talent, for their staff, for residents, for grants from higher levels of government, the idea that they have all come together to work on something as existential as climate change is really impressive and really admirable.

But one of the genuine challenges Sydney has is so many governments, right? Like we don’t have a metropolitan level of governance like a GLA or a major council area. And what we have is we have a state government that represents all of Sydney, but it also represents an area much, much larger than that, about the size of Texas, let’s say. And so, as a result, there’s no one really in charge of the city. There’s just government. There’s lots and lots of government, but all at the wrong scale to think about a metropolitan area. And as a result, we cobble it together and realise that this is actually a much better model of collaborative leadership. Rather than it being one person’s responsibility to shape the city, it becomes all of our responsibility.

And I mentioned at the start that the city is blessed with a lot of really thoughtful advocates on behalf of industry, on behalf of civil society, on behalf of the university sector. And these groups have sort of come together as a coalition to identify the key challenges of the city and work on them. And they don’t always agree about the answer to those problems, but there is a broad consensus about what those problems are. So grappling with climate change, dealing with housing unaffordability, ensuring that we maintain a vibrant and culturally rich city, particularly in the face of affordability issues. These are issues that there is no debate about whether we need to deal with. There’s lots of debate about how we solve them and that’s really healthy, but actually the fact that we are having these rich debates I think is a sign of really excellent collaborative leadership.

Caitlin Morrissey

Yeah, I completely agree. Thank you. We have a similar question, but it’s about Sydney’s most world-changing inventions, innovations or discoveries. But you’ve also mentioned that city is the place that sort of provides a platform for musicians, talent, to find their global stage, which I think is sort of partly to do with this question too. What are Sydney’s inventions and innovations and discoveries, and how does it support and provide a platform for those kinds of things?

Eamon Waterford

Well, look, there are lots of modern ones. I mean, you know, Sydney is the home of Afterpay or if you use Jira, you know, that got invented in Sydney. But there are two that I want to call out. One is Google Maps was invented in Sydney. The idea of having a map on your phone is a Sydney invention. In part because it is quite complicated to get around this city, and I suspect we just had a bigger necessity than anyone else to make that invention happen.

But the other one that I think is more of an innovation than an invention is Sydney is one of the best cities when it comes to waterfront development. Because we are so sort of intrinsically tied into water, we’re really, really good at interfacing with it. We are really, really good at creating places people want to spend a lot of time to work, to play, to live next to water. And we are starting to see a real tendency of the rest of Asia to come to Sydney to learn how to do waterfront development. We’ve been having really fantastic conversations with the likes of Ho Chi Minh City and Singapore and Hong Kong and Phnom Penh and Jakarta where they’re slightly different sort of waterfront challenges, you know, about the ways that you do waterfront development and do it well. And that is, think, a really sort of excellent thing that Sydney has to offer. You know, there is a place you can come to, you can catch the train in Sydney and you end up at Circular Quay, which is one of the main train stations, relatively small train station, but it’s in the CBD. And you get off the platform, it’s raised off the ground, and you look out and in front of you is the Opera House on one edge of the frame and the Harbour Bridge on the other edge of the frame. And in between are these historic ferries coming in and out that you can walk downstairs and jump on. There is a Museum of Contemporary Art to your left. There’s people, tourists, locals, visitors everywhere. It’s kind of remarkable how gorgeous, spectacular, exciting, energising that vista is. And you get it by standing on a train platform. This is the way that we’ve integrated the mundane and the profound into this beautiful city.

Caitlin Morrissey

If ever there was an example of how water interfaces with the sort of everyday in Sydney that’s a really good one. I went to Sydney for the first time last year and I was completely struck just by how gorgeous it is, how stunning the city is. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere more beautiful. And I mean that even just sort of walking around the streets, not just the Harbour, but the streets as well, the incredible tree coverage, which I’m sure is part of producing shade from the heat. But it’s just such a gorgeous city.

Eamon Waterford

There’s this amazing thing that happens for two weeks in November. We had a whole bunch of jacaranda trees imported from South Africa to Sydney. It’s not actually a Sydney, but it’s a classic Sydney story, right? We’ve taken an immigrant idea, i.e., we’ve migrated jacaranda trees to Sydney, and then they started handing them out to people when a baby was born in hospitals. You would get your baby and you would get a jacaranda sapling and you would go and you would plant it at your house. And that means that for two weeks in November, every year in Sydney, the entire city turns purple because of these gorgeous jacaranda flowers that explode. They last for two weeks and then they all fall off. But that’s what makes it so great is you’re like, this is gorgeous. I only get it for a brief moment. I get to enjoy it kind of everywhere, regardless of where I am in the city. And it reminds me of that joyous time when my children were born. And then the beautiful kind of cycle, you know, and the fact that these trees are huge now and were planted when someone’s baby was just a day old is this lovely little kind of idea of greenery in the city.

Caitlin Morrissey

And you’ve also just made me realise that I definitely visited during those two weeks, so beauty was on a high. I was thinking this is just stunning, but that’s obviously why. That doesn’t take away from everything else, of this just being an incredibly gorgeous city.

So we have a question here about the key myths of Sydney. The stories that are told essentially about the city or the ways that the city is characterised by people living in the city or from there. And what is the essence of some of these stories? What is it about Sydney that is captured in the stories that are told about it, kind of quite commonly or colloquially?

Eamon Waterford

So Sydney as a modern city was founded by convicts. Was founded by prisoners who were shipped off from England because the English didn’t want them anymore and sent to Australia. And that is an enduring myth for Australians that we are a little bit sceptical of authority, deeply egalitarian in our approach to culture, you know, deeply anti-classist, and sort of appreciative of an underdog and giving people second chances. You may have been thrown on a ship for breaking the law, but you can get a second chance in Sydney. And I think that’s a really important myth because, you know, in so many respects, it’s not entirely true anymore in Sydney. You know, Sydney is undoubtedly, you know, reducing its class, the classist nature of society in comparison to say the European cities that many of those original migrants came from. But it is a deeply unaffordable city. And that necessarily means that it’s a city of inequality where the postcode that you live in, the area of the city you live in makes a difference to whether you can access the things you need for a good life. It has profound challenges of inequality, even to the extent to which climate change will affect people. You know, if you live in high-income neighbourhoods, you’re probably less likely to be affected by the heat because you’re closer to water. You’re probably less likely to be affected by floods because you’re further away from the rivers. And so there’s this inequality that you can see sort of compounded by the key challenges that Sydney is facing. That the challenges are not equally felt across the city. But the critical importance of that myth of that egalitarianism of that, you know, second chance nature of our city means that within that there is an absolute desire to fix that problem. That inequality is unacceptable for Sydneysiders, that they see that and say we acknowledge that it’s worthwhile for us to spend money to stop that. You know the social safety net, the social democratic ideals of from those who can to those who need, you know, loom quite large in Sydney. And that is critically important because it comes from that myth because, you know, hey, if we all came from prisoners, if we all came from criminals, you know, you’re no different from me other than just pure dumb luck mate so let’s, you know, let’s get on and help each other out.

Caitlin Morrissey

So interesting to see the way that elements of that myth, even though, like you said, might not all of it will be true anymore, are still sort of conspiring to-- in a different way, in a different context, sort of shape the response, which is super interesting.

Eamon Waterford

There’s a fantastic song that I think is one of the more indicative songs of modern Sydney. It’s called My City. It’s by an artist or two artists, one called The Kid Laroi and the other being a rap group called ONEFOUR. Kid Laroi is a globally international superstar rapper who comes from Redfern. He’s an Aboriginal guy. Laroi comes from Kamilaroi, which is the Aboriginal clan that he comes from. He grew up in a public housing estate in Redfern and he partnered with this group, ONEFOUR, who are from the western suburbs, the other side of Sydney. They’re Pacific Islanders. They are drill rappers out of the Pacific Islands, or their families are from the Pacific Islands, and they are doing incredibly exciting music. The music is good, but it’s also this sort of great story of, you know, someone whose links to Sydney are 60,000 years old, to people who are kind of second-generation migrants and how they have come together to create this music together. It’s not to everybody’s taste. It is rap after all but like I bloody love it.

Caitlin Morrissey

I’m going to listen to it after this and we’ll probably be able to include a link in our show notes for anybody else. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people who want to listen to that. There’s also a question here about the misconceptions of Sydney. And you’ve spoken about how things like the Harbour and the Bridge get sort of-- everything else about Sydney gets sort of tucked behind these huge iconic infrastructures that everybody is aware of, that they have sort of travelled the world globally and really shaped the way that people imagine Sydney, but there’s so much more to it. So what else is there to say about the misconceptions of Sydney?

Eamon Waterford

I mean, I feel like that is the kind of core one. I’m happy to kind of re-articulate it for you if you want one for that part of it. But that for me, is the real kind of core misconception is the beautiful packaging hides a much more interesting product.

Caitlin Morrissey

And why has that been so damaging as you see it? And why-- sort of, what is-- I know that the Committee for Sydney is doing lots of work to really unpack this and really show that the people of Sydney are really what makes the city. How unhelpful is it that this sort of global framing of these iconic infrastructures has been so pervasive?

Eamon Waterford

So it’s undoubtedly been really successful for Sydney to market itself as a great place to visit, as a great place to come for a trip. And, you know, the beauty of our assets have certainly helped with that. It has been a successful, incredibly successful approach. Tourism remains one of the major industries employing people and providing prosperity to Sydneysiders. But it brings with it a whole bunch of, I guess, traits or brand indicators for what Sydney is that are not true of Sydney. It suggests we don’t work very hard because we’re spending our time sitting on the beach. It suggests we’re a place of beauty, not of brains. And yet, you know, people work incredibly hard, long hours, creating great things in Sydney. And, you know, more than half of the population in Sydney has post school qualifications. It’s a very well-educated city with very great universities. And a lot of them, six universities within the sort of the core area and our major universities that sit in the top 200 universities in the world. We’re the third most significant city for number of international students that are studying here, for example, after London and New York. These are, I guess, intellectual brand indicators that get hidden because we talk about beauty and enjoyment as a place to visit rather than a place to advance your career, to invest in a business to build your business. And it also, you know, that asset story also has nothing to say whatsoever about the diversity of people in this city. It is a kind of a person agnostic concept. You know that beach would be the same regardless of who lived in Sydney. And it is remarkable that 200 different nationalities live in this city, and we are also, you know, a city that is cohesive and safe and respectful and thriving and functioning in a way that many other cities that are grappling or that are becoming more multicultural can’t say the same about. You know, at a time increasingly where globally, you know, we are seeing social disharmony, social fracturing happening increasingly at various different countries around the world, the fact that Sydney is a place that is safe and cohesive, whilst also having 200 different nationalities call it home, is something quite remarkable, and it gets lost in that brand of assets of Harbour.

Caitlin Morrissey

And so on to our final two questions. I think something that you mentioned earlier was really interesting about the city of the upswing city and this isn’t in the context of questions about notable shocks and traumas, but the notion of the shock swing city that was like everywhere but profoundly affected by COVID-19 and this being a pause on that. So I’d like to ask you a little bit more about the impact of COVID-19 on Sydney and, particularly, its mindset. And then how the city has responded to maybe any other shocks and traumas that you may wish to mention.

Eamon Waterford

COVID’s a funny thing to talk about because it was everything. It was the only thing we talked about. And now I can go weeks without mentioning it. And then when it comes up, it re-traumatises me. ‘Oh, my God, that’s right. COVID! I forgot that that time happened’ you know? Our concept of time has totally been blown out because of this weird interregnum between two different areas, pre-COVID and post-COVID. But undoubtedly, Australian cities had quite intensive responses to COVID. You know, we locked the cities down. We realised that as an island nation we could effectively keep COVID out for quite some time, and we essentially did until the vaccines arrived. It took longer than it did for many other parts of the world, but we had very, very few deaths and a very, very strong public health response. It was also helped for Sydney because Sydney had done the hard work to create really great digital infrastructure as a city. So everybody already had their driver’s licence on an app on their phone, which made contact tracing and the tracking of people, which was a really important thing when you only had three cases a day in the sort of the highs of COVID, you were genuinely tracking every single case that was happening, every single location those people had gone to. And it was a relatively straightforward process because you were able to basically say every time you enter a building check in with your driver’s licence and that way we can track it almost immediately. So that contact tracing combined with the fact that we’re an island and it’s easy to stop people coming here is essentially they can either get off a boat or they can get off a plane, those are the only options, meant that we had a number of periods of quite intensive lockdowns followed by essentially long periods of not noticing COVID that much. Obviously, there was no international travel, but beyond that life kind of continued. We socially distanced, but we basically walked around with nobody having COVID. So it was a pretty intensive period. As I said, it was also the year, 2020 was the year that broke our 170-year-long economic growth streak, which is tragic, genuinely tragic to me, but kind of a good excuse, I suspect.

Other shocks and challenges, you know, a big one for Sydney was the Olympics. Like the Olympics was a really wonderful thing. We had the 2000 Olympics. It was the turn of the millennia. But it was a bit of a shock to Sydney’s system to really use that as a leaping off point to go from a kind of a parochial kind of backwards town to being a global city. You know, it was the necessary shock to knock people-- knock a little bit of the dust off people and get people really thinking about what they envisage for Sydney in the 21st century. And it worked. It absolutely rocketed the city into a different paradigm in terms of thinking about what it could be. Putting it on the global stage, but also putting the globe on people’s mind when they were thinking about what they wanted for the future of their city.

Caitlin Morrissey

So the final question is what does the future hold for Sydney, and how will its DNA and everything that we’ve mentioned so far shape that future as you see it?

Eamon Waterford

Yeah, I mean, I’m really excited for the future of Sydney. It’s a city with huge potential. There are things we know for sure. So we know that Sydney is going to be an incredibly successful knowledge economy city going forward. It has great strengths, as I said, in professional and financial services and its financial technologies, its fintech sector is really exciting. Digital technologies will continue to be an important part of the economy. Our response to climate change and our climate tech sector is going to be a really important part of the economy going forward.

The parts that we don’t know, but we hope on the economy are that it will also be an advanced manufacturing hub, that it will be a medical technologies and medical devices hub. That will be a city that figures out how to balance the competing tensions of-- actually, I might just say that one again.

The things we don’t know, but we hope for Sydney is that it’s going to be a medical technologies and devices hub. It’s going to be a hub for things like aeronautical, aerospace, satellites technologies. And then it’ll be a city that it manages to combine the quite sort of old-fashioned concepts of manufacturing with kind of digital technologies to do advanced manufacturing of bespoke high technology componentry, whether that’s for medical devices or whether it’s for satellites. These are the things that we’re hopeful for Sydney. I think it will be undoubtedly some of these things. Probably not all of them, but it will certainly be some.

The other thing I genuinely think the future of Sydney holds is it will be increasingly looked at as a case study for how to do a-- to do multiculturalism and diversity right. To balance social cohesion with difference. To have really difficult but grown-up conversations about race, about culture, about tensions, and come out of it stronger as a cohesive society. Are we perfect? Absolutely not. But I actually think we’re working-- we’re moving in the right direction in a way that many other societies are not. And we’re obviously in an era right now where global cohesiveness is basically about to fall over. Where the idea of globalisation bringing us all together is starting to feel further away than it has in a very long time. And the idea that, you know, even just modern democratic societies will always look that way may not be entirely true. So within those concepts, I’m really confident and excited about the future of Sydney for its resilience in the face of some of those challenges despite the fact that it is also all of the preconditions that many of those other places had, increased inequality, a very, very diverse population with very diverse needs and wants. It’s doing pretty well in the face of those things.

Caitlin Morrissey

Well, thank you so much Eamon.