The cranes are everywhere. Not the spindly, leggy kind. Not the “wax on, wax off, no can defend” kind. No, these cranes are the “lift very heavy loads from here and move them over there” kind. No matter which direction you face your view encompass a crane or two. The city has become one large construction site. Someone in some government department obviously decided that the best thing for Perth is to knock it down and rebuild it. Bonus points will be awarded if they can do it while making things more difficult for pedestrians..

Case in point: there used to be a covered, pedestrian overpass that spanned Wellington Street. Commuters could make their way from the Wellington Street Bus Station into the City with ease and comfort. This was a boon when it was raining. Actually it was also a boon when the Summer sun was trying to strip the skin off your bones. The overpass was such a convenience that it had to go, of course. It was torn down so commuters now have to cross a large expanse of open space and wrestle with traffic. Someone collected a truckload of bonus points for that decision.

“Excuse me, but that overpass you tore down; was it in danger of collapsing?”

“No, sir! It was very well built, sir. It would have stayed up another hundred years.” The civil servant was as proud as punch. “Another thousand years.”

“So why did you pull it down?”

“It was old, sir!” The civil servant was shocked to his very core.

And that’s the crux of the matter. It seems like a lot of the work is simply carried out because someone wants to replace a slightly weathered building with a shiny new one. The cynic in me can’t help but think that this flurry of activity is designed to deflect our attention from the lack of progress in, say, putting more beds in hospitals and providing the requisite staff to look after their occupants. People won’t see the miasma at street level when their eyes are turned towards the sky.

I hope that I’m wrong. I hope that there will be a shiny, new City once the cranes leave. Until then we have to put up with the ugliness of a construction site that is the City of cranes.