Opinion Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News. A t the turn of the century with John Howard in power and public debate running hot over asylum seekers, the left-wing Leichhardt Council in Sydney’s inner west draped a banner over Norton St showing which side it was on.
“LEICHHARDT COUNCIL WELCOMES REFUGEES”, the banner declared. It was more of a theoretical than practical welcome. The reality was that, by that time, the once working-class area of Leichhardt had largely undergone its full yuppification.
Rather than being the genuine Little Italy it once was, a home not just to recent Italian arrivals but others from post-war western Europe, Leichhardt had become the preserve of middle-class professionals and young aspirational homebuyers who had moved there from interstate. I was a resident there for a long time, one of those middle-class interstate arrivals. In so far as Leichhardt Council “welcomed” refugees, it seemed to welcome them in a couple of hours a week in their capacity as cleaners, whereby Conchita from El Salvador could pop in and do the vacuuming and dust your Scandinavian furniture before making the 30km trip back to her home with all the other refugees in Fairfield, Canley Vale or Bonnyrigg.
Bob Carr was premier of NSW and around the same time his Labor government came up with what I regarded as a clever and necessary plan to upgrade the Callan Park mental hospital on the Balmain Peninsula. The old .
