Opinion: sorry end to Darling Harbour's cruise history

Plans announced this week for the redevelopment of the site now known as Barangaroo make it seem as if cruise shipping was always going to conveniently move aside in time for the developers to roll in.

The overhaul of the site was presented as if it were an after-thought once break-bulk and the ro/ro trade moved south to Port Kembla.

However, this was always a package deal – a plan which boosted job prospects in the Illawarra region and freed up space to create lots of cash from the Darling Harbour site, and to a lesser extent White Bay and Glebe Island.

For a government which has become accustomed to keeping property developers happy, this was standard practice, albeit on an all-too-obvious scale.

So the government needed a diversion.

When asked in 2006 why it was closing Darling Harbour to shipping, the NSW Government chose to employ a trick straight out of Debating 101: attack the foundation of the question.

The government correctly pointed out a technicality: while most vessels were heading south, the cruiseships would still call at Darling Harbour and so, by definition, “shipping” was not moving anywhere.

That was until Philip Thalis’s original plan for Barangaroo was scrapped.

Unsurprisingly, no one in Macquarie Street saw fit to make any noise about what effect that would have on the cruise berth.

This week’s announcement was spun as giving the cruise sector certainty and protecting Sydney’s reputation as a world-class tourism destination.

NSW ports minister Paul McLeay also noted “severe” disruptions to customs and migration-exclusion zones during the development of the site.

In short, the cruise ships, and the development that supports them, were considered inconvenient.

Meanwhile, the state’s shipping industry has been forced to make Port Kembla work – a task considerably smoother than expected – while the cruise sector ponders if passengers can really get used to disembarking in White Bay and catching a bus back to the city.

Now it appears many Sydneysiders are divided on the merits of the new layout of Barangaroo, including plans for a 230-metre red building which looks more like a multi-storey carpark.

That’s the sort of structure which might have come in handy when Patrick was still operating on the site two years ago.