THAT THE AUSTRALIAN SYSTEMS for heritage and environmental protection are racist is just a statement of the obvious; the Pope is Catholic for the same reasons, and with the same irrevocable finality. They are designed not to protect, but to establish a framework of forms to permit, and there’s really nothing that can’t legally be done if someone is willing to put enough time into drawing up a fancy enough report.

Anything can be demolished, anything at all, especially if someone is willing to go to the full extent of Process, and do things like interpret the former place with its cultural landscape, or contribute to an oral history, or re-use debris in some kind of artwork. It can be a good, and worthwhile exercise, because not everything is as significant as people say. It’s when proponents slackly go through the motions about a place that really is significant, that you see the system for what it is, and you get the hilarious non-lies, the lies that aren’t actually false statements (because they describe factually and accurately what’s happened), but describe things that aren’t even meant to be believed.

A WaterNSW spokesman said the government-owned organisation stood by all aspects of the cultural heritage assessment process for the proposal to raise Warragamba Dam. “WaterNSW is undertaking Aboriginal cultural heritage consultation and assessment for the proposal in line with all relevant policies, guidelines and requirements,” the spokesman said.

IN THE COLD WAR bestseller Gorky Park, the villain, at an upscale New York restaurant with the hero-detective, makes a short speech about the true tragedy of the Soviet Union’s 20th century: the destruction, by Communism, of Russian cuisine. Since it follows another villainous anecdote about the Siege of Leningrad, Martin Cruz-Smith is really leaning into sardonicism at that point. Aaron Timms’ Salt Fat Acid Defeat in N+1 is excellent and you should read it, and makes the same point more seriously (and angrily): that restaurant culture is shitty to exactly the extent our broader culture is, kitchens and food cultures change faster than we think, and that we can do better.

One of the few promises to myself that I’ve managed to keep, after my teenage job at a multinational hamburger chain, is never ever to work in the hospitality industry, ever again. Burger-flipping is so far the hardest physical labour I’ve ever done, but it wasn’t the hard work that made it so unpleasant—-it was the constant acceleration, the pressure to cover for the franchisees’ understaffing, the pushing-down of design and safety failures onto the teenage workers (it’s not the machine that’s broken, it’s you’) the managers’ shameless stealing of time at each end of a shift (‘clock on and then go and unpack the truck’). Since then I’ve worked jobs where I’ve been paid less, and humiliated more, and felt worse, but never with quite the same culture of aggressive shittiness. Everyone knows it. Never again.

Yet our television and internet overflow with content about food and hospitality skills, and shows that make genuinely good viewing, because cooking at any scale is challenging and fun. The Great British Bake-Off and its derivatives, for example, are compelling, supportive, endearing, and show people using their skills. Television shows with chefs as their stars have little but their subjects’ genuine expertise in common, and that’s enough. The manual skills of cooking, and the collective enterprise of working a job at a site together, are enduring and somehow, even though I know better, appealing. There’s no end of people interested in hospitality skills, nor will there be until humans stop being interested in eating: it’s only the industry that’s got problems. But confusing the material conditions of a job for the human satisfaction of a task is the error of modernity, isn’t it; Matthew Crawford’s deceptively appealing Shop Class as Soul Craft made that mistake, imagining that there’s a particular virtue attaching to working with one’s hands, or an essential artisanship existing outside the labour relationship.

What if having a ‘good job’ was as simple as bosses who didn’t spend the entire shift shouting ‘productivity’, meaning ‘work faster’? But here is Timms, again:

During these long, strange months of the city’s somnambulism, one of the few joys, for me at least, has come from helping out as an occasional line cook at various popups run out of semi-resuscitated bars and restaurants around Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. What these exercises in culinary improvisation have taught me is that food still has the power to knit communities together, but only if the institutions delivering it have a stake in the local outcome—if the aid between restaurants and the people they host really is mutual, anchored in a hospitality whose highest calling is always the duty of reciprocity…

MY OFFICE IS IN Newtown in Sydney, so I get to see the ingenuity and suffering of delivery riders on every variety of two-wheeled vehicle. It goes without saying that the work is among the worst paid, most dangerous, and most unpleasant, ways to make a living. What I’ve become interested in lately though is the sheer badness of the actual electric bikes, scooters, and motorbikes the riders use, because they’re bad in specific ways. Look closely and you’ll see cable ties holding them together, bald tyres, evidence of collisions, dropped bikes, wires exposed, just every variation of jerry-rigged cheap fix. They’re cheap bikes, flogged all day, and given exactly, and only, the amount of repair and maintenance needed to keep them running.

One example gives the flavour of the whole. Cheap electric bikes cope badly with rain, which gets into the battery contacts, so riders wrap up the frame-mounted battery with food plastic (glad wrap or similar). It’s a cheap, bad, crappy solution, that works.

This isn’t to judge the riders—when you look at their tools they have to do the job with, you respect the riders more, not less. It goes without saying that the riders come to the job lacking capital, so aren’t going to BYO an actually good bike, or risk damaging it if they had one. Largely, I understand, riders hire a bike for a weekly fee, from companies set up to cater specifically to the industry, in a modern twist on traditional ‘truck’ arrangements; just like 19thC miners paying the company a hire fee for their helmets, lamps, and oil. Not only do they have do very carefully negotiate their budget, what they get is a tool not designed for the job.

Delivery companies issue their riders with insulated backpacks to carry food to customers. As any rider knows, one’s back is the worst place to carry weight; it’s less work, and safer, to attach cargo to the bike itself in a tray or on panniers, where it lowers the centre of gravity, and frees the rider’s body for pedalling. By and large, e-bikes and scooters lack trays or dedicated panniers, though, so either the rider carries the weight behind their shoulders, or improvises a tray—I have seen ones made from milk crates, even from pieces of fencing. This is the future, but it lacks the cleverness of a science-fiction aesthetic, or the deliberate nastiness of dystopia. It’s just crappy, and works in spite of the design.

It’s the vain claim of the tech industry to be guided by improvisers’ virtues; software developers and startup merchants quickly making solutions, constantly reviewing, bringing relentless novelty into the world. Food delivery is very, very old, though—nothing about it has been invented. The design work that has gone into internet-based food delivery isn’t in the actual work, it’s in financialising the arrangements, clipping tickets between producer and consumer, extracting profit from the process. The ‘tech’ is political, a trick redirecting profit to the middleman.

Look closely at the actual technology, the e-bikes, scooters, and cheap motorbikes, and you’ll see that the real élite hackers in this arrangement are the riders.

THE INNER WEST COUNCIL has declined to list a church as locally significant on its ‘Schedule 5’ register of items of local heritage, a statutory instrument. It’s interesting for what it reveals about the objects and practices of Australian built heritage.

The Council had commissioned an independent heritage architect to make an assessment of the Churches of Christ building on Marrickville Road (PDF), which is unambiguous: the church is a significant item and meets the thresholds for listing. I agree.

It’s the right outcome in this instance. What is being proposed is a specific community housing proposal, led by the Churches of Christ itself. The Churches of Christ are the objects of the listing, the group most likely to find meaning in the significance of the place: it would have been a layered irony if that group, an evangelical Protestant denomination whose history explicitly rejects established Churches, had a building protected in spite of their wishes.

The Councillors seem to have split beyond lines of Party, with a ‘socialist’ Green, the Labor mayor, and a right-wing Liberal on the pro side, and other Labor and Green councillors on the anti. That reflects the unusual decision, but also the fact that the Councillors were being put in an impossible position, to decide on a listing—whether a place is significant or not—as a proxy for making a decision about whether a specific proposal should go ahead. That’s an event the Heritage Act and its framework are deliberately supposed to prevent occurring.

It is never supposed to happen that anyone has to make a decision about heritage on the basis of any one proposal. Conservation Management Plans, for instance, are forbidden from making specific recommendations for future use, something you’d think a Plan would cover. There is sense though: it’s to stop arguments about virtue or worth of a future project (or worse, its profit margin) from affecting the objective assessment of significance. ‘Write me a Conservation Plan to support my demolition’, every developer would otherwise say, and get. In heritage, a bright professional line is supposed to divide what is significant from what is not.

What does not exist in NSW (or the rest of Australia) is a means to override a heritage listing on social grounds, that is to say about a proposal, yes, it will affect heritage, but it’s worth it. That would be a dangerous power, but in practice the lack of that power has formed our urban places, and for the worse. For twenty or thirty years, as the real estate value of inner urban places have sky-rocketed, its owners have used the heritage system as leverage to prevent development that would be otherwise legal in the planning system, and increased the value of their own stake, at the expense of the future. The Heritage Conservation Area is the typical tool for this, a big broad brush to paint Heritageness, in deep green, cream, and Indian red, over one’s neighbours.

Anyone with eyes can see the effects. There’s a reason people see racism baked into a heritage system that protects suburban built architectural heritage even when its owners don’t want it, but fails to protect the natural and cultural heritage of traditional owners, when they do. I love Federation architecture, particularly its detailed brick and timberwork, and live in a [rented] late Victorian terrace, but can’t avoid the obvious relationship between the moral horror of Australia’s most chauvinist era (the fin de siècle into the 1920s) and our fierce protection of its architecture.

More generally, this failure of the heritage system is a product of Australian form-mindedness, an aspect of our culture which is rule-bound, officious, and obsessed with the appearance of fairness over its reality. We are incapable of having political arguments about worth or virtue in different possible futures, and have looked to ‘heritage’, over the past decades, to justify self-interest. Significance doesn’t simply exist as an inherent, independent quality of places, it’s a part of what we as a community decide to value and pass on, which is the entirety of the places we live in. What we have been doing is protecting the aesthetics of suburbs, with forms to fill out to stop medium density, in the hope that the cheap housing and freewheeling culture of the 1970s will come back—a politics of nostalgic fantasy.

The process was wrong, but the Council got it right. The decision wasn’t significant-or-not, it was between calling a place open for community housing, and to value the presence of new people, or protecting the building, and saying, in paraphrase of the well-known bogan slogan, ‘fuck off, we’re heritage’.

WHEN HE WAS MINISTER for Immigration (1972—1974), ‘Al’ Grassby had one dedicated staffer to assist him in his portfolio duties, and that was a secretary-receptionist-typist. How things change. In the last few decades, and at an accelerating rate, the numbers of unelected ‘staffers’ attached to Ministers, as well as electorate staff, has massively increased in Australian Parliaments. We are now at the point where the working and social world of staffers form their own societies attached to State Governments and the Federal Government in Canberra, an opaque one, closed to outsiders, self-regarding and self-contained, but with enormous importance for its effects on the rest of us. And as was shown in Monday’s Four Corners episode, it behaves, when it thinks it thinks it can’t be seen, with genuinely disgusting misogyny and self-entitlement.

Courts are premodern entities surrounding power. The monarchs of old régime Europe had them; most famously at Versailles and at Madrid, but they seem to have been a common habit everywhere where power centralised, and existed around the Sultan in Istanbul, around Mughal princes, at the Forbidden City in Beijing, and around the Emperor and Shogun of Japan. The cultures of Australian State and Federal government, containing as well their press galleries and lobby groups, are a new-old democratic form of ‘court’, with everything that implies. The personal role of the monarch has simply been abolished in our case and replaced with the symbolic sovereign of ‘the election’, an arbitrary absolute presence that demands complete obedience, even reverence. In the gigantic-kitsch New Parliament House in Canberra the court even finds its own bakufu in which all the arms of State (elected, public service, press, military) can gather, physically-symbolically.

The disappearance of ‘mass’ politics and its replacement with ‘democratic’ professional élites is well-known in the instance of the ALP and Coalition, but is also increasily a deeply ironic feature of the Greens, who profess grass-roots democracy, but whose MPs and staffers are skilful and highly professional democratic courtiers, cleverer and quicker to lever courtierist means of media and pseudo-event. Our society understands ‘politics’ as something that other people do in other places, with specific skills and practices, and we are interested spectators to it—knowing all the while that we don’t understand the full intricacy. Courts could be vital, interesting, surprising places, and ambitious outsiders regularly broke in where their talent couldn’t be repressed. Where previously a talent might rise through personality to be valido or favourite of the King, all a courtier needs is Senate quota and Latika Bourke’s phone number.

The culture of courts was and is marked by intrigue, powerful charismatic leaders-behind-the-scenes, small constantly forming and re-forming groups, favourites, juntas, camarillas, ostentatious displays of virtue and shaming, and a ‘spill’ culture of sudden shocking changes. In societies where politics is genuinely conducted at a level of secrecy and many-levels-of-intrigue, conspiratorial and magic thinking takes hold with the public at large. Does this sound familiar?

Courts are self-contained and intimate, both supportive and exclusive. Modern ones can’t quite be to the point of Versailles, where the great and the good emptied their bowels in front of each other (‘piss boy!’), but particularly in Canberra, where politicians and staff travel away from their homes and share temporary housing, there’s a real combination of private and public life. The atmosphere is highly charged, everyone simultaneously keeps secrets and knows everyone else’s business, the stakes are simultaneously high and low. A pre-modern courtier’s entire life was their workplace, and they would not have understood the concept of a ‘private’ life; in just this way, when one’s entire social circle is other staffers and journalists, engaged in the business of the public, that distinction disappears. A senior staffer or Minister ceases, for practical purposes, to enjoy real privacy, only that illusion of privacy granted by everyone’s complicity in the Canberra ‘game’. It is no wonder that hypocrisy and abuse thrive, only that more people’s secrets aren’t spilled more often.

Yes, it’s a modern workplace. Yes, ministerial staff and Ministers have formal Codes of Conduct. These are good and valuable things! But good materialists don’t look at the rules on paper to explain how people behave, they instead look at how people behave, to discover what the rules actually are. The Four Corners episode showed up the behaviour of some specific Ministers as self-entitled, possessive, hypocritical, disgusting, outside not only ordinary people’s standards, but against their own. We can assume that the ABC’s lawyers squashed other names from being named. So why was it that a TV programme replaced a formal mechanism of Code of Conduct, or the ruling of an independent umpire? Simply that courts, by definition, are their own political umpires. There are no rules.

Well, to a point. Since the Russian practice of simply murdering, imprisoning, or exiling one’s opponents is out, and there are no more gentlemanly duels of honour at sword or gunpoint, the only other means of court discipline—wit and scandal—takes huge importance. Our current politics, just like that of premodern courtiers, has long memories, and settles scores cold. We may not have Velázquez or Lope de la Vega, but we do have artists like David Pope and Jon Kudelka, we have a Press Gallery which trades short on insight but long on gossip, we have group chats, WhatsApp threads, and VexNews in lieu of anonymous pamphlets. The most important political ‘stories’ are scandalous ones, which expose the links between private behaviour and public decisionmaking; who’s sleeping with who, who’s been pushed in or out of a job, who’s giving who bottles of wine.

These things aren’t symptoms of a lack of justice and courtier discipline, they actually are the court disciplining itself. Since political sins rarely rise to the status of ‘crimes’ (which can be dealt with by the law, or by ICAC), scandal and behavioural shaming steps in as the only possible replacement. It’s notable that the two people who were most eager on Monday to reach into their filing cabinets for receipts, Malcolm Turnbull and Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, are both notable for public rectitude—educated, liberal, and cosmopolitan in Turnbull’s case, conservatively religious in Fierravanti-Wells’—and have the most to lose by their colleagues’ unrestrained hypocrisy. Right-wing sex pests threaten the greater right-wing project.

Theirs is not a politics of numbers and power, but a politics of behaviour, virtue, and democratic courtierism. I’ve written previously that Australian political-cultural life is fundamentally late-Hapsburg, and that our institutions are as benevolently tyrannical as Tsarist Russian departments. There’s little turning back from courtierism now, and courts, historically, don’t simply disappear or reform themselves (not without extreme violence). There’s no going back to twentieth-century mass politics—even if that were desirable. What our democratic court needs to recognise is itself, and own up to its status, and we as citizens need to recognise that ‘politics’ can be more than just this scandal-show.