Get real, Bruce: City of Adelaide fable is ‘pure hubris’
The Lord Mayor of Adelaide Dr Jane Lomax-Smith responds to last week’s op-ed from Bruce Djite with her own column, and says the role of Council in city development has never been more important.
As Joseph Campbell once said, mythology helps us make sense of the world – but that doesn’t make every myth true.
Take Bruce Djite’s op-ed last week: it reads like a fable, complete with a villain (the City of Adelaide), a hero (himself), and a neat, self-serving moral.
But the story? It’s pure hubris.
In case you missed it, here’s the gist – though you’ve likely heard this tale before.
The City of Adelaide, painted as a 185-year-old roadblock to progress, should be blown apart and replaced by a grab-bag of commissions and trusts, suggests Bruce.
Our plucky young ‘hero’ claims the Council kills development, underfunds Park Lands, and lacks any real vision.
It’s a familiar yarn. One where the Council is, paradoxically, both too progressive and not progressive enough, penny-pinching and over-spending, narrow-minded and naive.
This familiar rhetoric has returned on the back of the State Government last week pushing through legislation to take control of the North Adelaide Golf Course and associated Park Lands from the Council, a guardian of these parks for nearly two centuries and overseer of the golf course for almost a century.
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In February, I stood shoulder to shoulder with the Premier when he made the announcement that LIV Golf would relocate from Grange to North Adelaide from 2028.
The Council bent over backwards to provide details and information on every inch of the course and surrounding green space and met every ambitious deadline set for us.
Motivated by factors beyond our responsibility, the State Government ended the relationship before we even reached the second date.
Were we disappointed? Yes, but we had that right, because the legislation has now in fact created uncertainty.
Is this now our planning future? When planning rules, systems, and requirements for public consultation can simply be brushed aside as circumstances or needs arise?
That is in fact chaos, and the antithesis of what the Property Council, till now, has consistently called for – certainty.
Purporting to be focused on the future Bruce instead is sifting through the entrails of our apparent inaction or obstruction on projects dating back to the 1980s. The Le Cornu site is always mentioned in this context.
Just for the record, the Council rubber-stamped every development application made to build on the O’Connell Street land. Eighty-Eight O’Connell Street was only developed once the Council bought the site and negotiated a mixed-use development that’s tipped to open next year.
Realising the dire need for more housing, we’ve been busy supporting housing projects, such as on the old Franklin Street bus station and on our own land at the Central Market, and the Flinders Street boat shed site.
By the time our bicentenary rolls around in 2036, the city will be home to almost 50,000 people – a challenge considering we have fewer people living in individual dwellings.
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Likewise with the proposal to park the Adelaide Crows headquarters in the Park Lands, the AFL club withdrew plans at a time of majority support from elected members.
I’d be the first to say they didn’t get an easy run in the public arena and nor should they have.
They wanted to build on public land. They were in fact scuttled by public debate and public pressure (entitlement, it seems, does not like attention).
Yet despite this clear commitment to growth and renewal, the Council is still cast as anti-progress, nowhere more so than in the debate over the Park Lands.
Paradoxically, those arguing for more open space and a state-run trust to oversee our “state and national treasure” also support it being swallowed up by office blocks.
In the 2025/26 Business Plan & Budget adopted last week, we’ve set aside money to rehabilitate the old Aquatic Centre into a soccer pitch. It’s part of the more than $25 million we are set to spend on our Park Lands.
Perhaps the Council isn’t given enough credit for protecting and nurturing our 7.6 million square metres of Park Lands from the next good idea to come along, the various hair-brained plans, from stadiums to trailer parks.
For centuries Local Governments have been tasked with delivering on ever-changing community expectations and interests, responding to competing needs of our varied and diverse communities. That is the stuff of the democratic system.
I have heard it said that the least relevant council in South Australia is in fact the Property Council.
At its core, the Property Council represents a membership with a single common interest.
We’ve long worked constructively with our friends at RAA Place, and we’re even paid-up members of the Property Council (a not insignificant fee).
But if, under Bruce’s leadership, they no longer see value in what we offer, and no longer represent us, that’s a membership fee we might save and spend on the Park Lands.
Campbell said myths help us understand the world, but they don’t build one.
We’re doing that thankless work already. Having badly thought through criticisms which propose circumventing democratic governance is a shallow distraction. If Bruce is ready to get real, we invite him to join us.
Dr Jane Lomax-Smith AM is the current Lord Mayor of Adelaide.
