Pro-business governments reversing Eureka Stockade achievement

Today is the 158th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade rebellion, in which around 500 miners rose against British colonial authority on the goldfields at Ballarat. It is often described as the birth of Australian democracy and the 'fair go'.

Peter Fitzsimons, who revisits the event in his new book The Unfinished Revolution, explains the cause as resentment towards the government, which was granting wealthy squatters use of large tracts of land for a pittance — 3000 acres for £10 — while the often dirt poor miners were having to pay 30 shillings to lease their 64 square feet mining plots. 

The squatters controlled the government and the miners had no influence. The former built large pastoral empires and became very wealthy. In 1839, a group got together to establish the Melbourne Club, which still exists as a meeting place for Australia's richest and most powerful men. Like James Packer. 

Packer has successfully lobbied the NSW Government to back his proposal for a $1 billion casino and hotel complex at Barangaroo, on the edge of Sydney Harbour, with no competitive tender. It fits the Government's Unsolicited Proposals policy, and has bipartisan support. 

Packer responded: 'I'm incredibly grateful to the Labor Party for not playing party politics and I'm incredibly grateful to Premier O'Farrell and the Liberal Party for doing what it has done.' He also has wide supportfrom other influential politicians and business people who possibly believe they can benefit from his investment's boost to the tourism sector.

But other voices including commentator Mike Carlton and former premier Kristina Keneally are concerned that ordinary people have been cut out. Carlton said: 'Barangaroo is public space, owned by the people of this state, who are entitled to the final say in what happens there. Yet before a sod has been turned, the normal checks and balances have been tossed overboard.'

The NSW Government website says the Unsolicited Proposals policy's 'key objective is to provide consistency and certainty to private sector participants'. Private sector investment is an easy option for governments around the country that face the challenge of having to catch up on decades of underinvestment in public infrastructure. 

Packer is funding much of the transformation of the industrial wasteland into a thriving modern urban hub. But in the end, it will belong to him and not the people, and its management will be geared towards increasing his personal wealth and influence, and not the common good. It amounts to a reversal of the enfranchisement of the people which was the achievement of the Eureka Stockade. 

Former Victorian premier Steve Bracks called Eureka 'a catalyst for the rapid evolution of democratic government in this country' and 'a national symbol of the right of the people to have a say in how they are governed'.