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Yes, Prime Mover - 4th November 2006 SMH
IT WAS, perhaps, an inevitable clash between the perfectionist and the pragmatist. The former prime minister Paul Keating is a man who collects empire clocks and spent years undertaking a meticulous renovation of his house in Potts Point.
This week he unleashed a blistering tirade against planning in Sydney. It was an ugly city and getting uglier by the day as the "creeping eczema" of modernist architecture obliterated its sandstone heritage.
Frank Sartor is the state's Planning Minister and the city's former lord mayor, an office he held for 11½ years, until 2003. In both roles he must take some credit or blame for the shape of the city centre.
After all, it was Sartor who implemented the Living Sydney policy, bringing hundreds of thousands of residents to the CBD to reside in the high-rise that sprang up around the southern end. Some people refer to it as Meritonia, an uncomplimentary reference to Harry Triguboff's Meriton developments, which proliferate in the area. So, when Keating described planning ministers as the mayor for Triguboff, it was widely interpreted as a slight on Sartor.
Not so, says Sartor, who claims Keating told him that he did not mean him at all. Nonetheless, Keating's delightfully poisonous barbs have thrust the architecture of our city and the role of Sartor in its shaping back into the limelight.
To understand Sartor and his legacy, it is important to understand his philosophy on public office.
"If you've got a job in a responsible public office, you have to give it your best shot or get out, because you're not in it for the money," he says. "You're motivated by the public good - hopefully - so you might as well give it your best shot, work like buggery - sorry, work hard - and then get out when you're finished."
And giving it "your best shot", according to Sartor, means making decisions, and not getting too bogged down in getting it absolutely right.
"It's the law of diminishing returns. Whether it's making an LEP [local environmental plan] or running the council, you'll never get it 100 per cent right, no matter how hard you try. If you can get it 80 to 90 per cent right, you can amend or improve it later," he says.
The 80-20 rule governs Sartor's life. For him it's a bit like jogging. If you do three lots of exercise you'll be about 70 per cent fit. To reach 95 per cent fitness means running every day, and it's just not worth the extra effort.
This pragmatism, combined with a short fuse, a big ego and an inability to suffer fools - has made Sartor admired and reviled. He has fallen out badly with two people who served with him on the City of Sydney Council: Elizabeth Farrelly, the Herald's architecture writer, and the Lord Mayor, Clover Moore.
Moore declined to comment on or off the record about Sartor. Farrelly is a constant critic.
Then there was the famous falling out with Lucy Turnbull, when he was overheard berating her from an airport lounge phone after she took over as lord mayor. The two appear to have got over the highly publicised row, but it earned Sartor the tag Cranky Frank.
There's no doubt Sartor's abrasive personality, and seemingly endless capacity for work, wears some people down. Some staff have found his manner too much to cope with; others have an admiration for the fact that he just keeps pushing forward, when a lesser man would let the bureaucracy weigh him down.
A conversation with Sartor can leave a normal person feeling exhausted. He exudes busyness and frankly admits to having no close friends apart from his wife, just because of the pressures of time.
That Sartor is fully preoccupied with the present is clear. Ask him about his childhood, and you draw a blank. "Look, it was miserable and poor. I don't want to talk about it. You've written all of this before," he says.
He grew up in Yenda, near Griffith, the fifth in a family of eight. His Italian migrant parents were farmers and the family spoke Italian at home. Sartor won a scholarship to Sydney University and worked for Colgate-Palmolive, then the oil company Total, while studying for a commerce degree.
He married, had two sons and still found time to run a high-profile residents' campaign against an ugly block of flats in Newtown, where the family lived. In 1983 he began work for the public accounts committee in Parliament and in 1984 Sartor and a team of independents won control of the city council.
As lord mayor Sartor was a doer. He turned the finances of the council around, faced down the legendary town clerk Leon Carter, turned Sydney into a metropolis in which people live and prepared the city for the 2000 Olympics.
It was the former premier Bob Carr and the former treasurer Michael Egan who lured him to state politics and to an immediate elevation to the front bench.
But not everything has been easy for Sartor. His first marriage ended, and his next partner, Hephzibah Tintner, died of cancer in 2001.
It clearly had a major effect on Sartor, who became minister for cancer and dedicates himself to achieving improvements in funding and policy in the area.
For a few years Sartor seemed more irascible than usual, until he met his new wife, Monique Flannery. It seems that happiness has mellowed Cranky Frank. But that's not to say he's a pussycat these days.
In Parliament he was asked to apologise to a group of residents for calling them "Putney lunatics".
Then there has been the celebrated brawl with Mick Mundine over the redevelopment of The Block in Redfern and his argument with the Mayor of Byron Shire Council, Jan Barham, over the development of the Club Med/Becton site.
But surprisingly Sartor has earned respect from most of the interest groups that he deals with.
"My experience is that he's passionate about the job. I don't always agree with him, but you can disagree with him, and it's not the end of the world," says the Mayor of North Sydney and head of the Local Government Association, Genia McCaffery.
McCaffery and Sartor disagree on the extent to which the State Government now intervenes in council decisions, but McCaffery says part of the problem is that she's battling the Government's "open for business" approach, which developers have taken as a licence to push harder.
Sartor, at least, is open to being persuaded, she says.
The Property Council finds Sartor a breath of fresh air. The previous minister, Craig Knowles, seemed frozen to the spot when it came to finalising the hard parts of the metropolitan strategy and plans for areas such as the Central Coast and the Hunter. Sartor got stuck in and finalised several problem areas.
"His great strength is that he's smart, passionate, and he knows this area because he's been lord mayor," says the council's executive director, Ken Morrison.
Even environmental groups such as the Total Environment Centre rate Sartor - although it has growing reservations about the Government he works for.
"Frank Sartor is intelligent, humorous and has a capacity to understand the position of each stakeholder. Despite this, Frank can't escape being seen as the primary deliverer of the Government's pro-development agenda," says the centre's director, Jeff Angel.
The centre points to the Lower Hunter strategy, released a month ago, as a case in point. "On the one hand he negotiated for significant private land to be protected, but on the other he acquiesced to allow the wrong development in the wrong places and contrary to good planning principles," says Angel.
Sartor admits the Lower Hunter strategy, with competing pressures of population growth, mining, sensitive environments and agriculture, was hard.
Sartor has his own strategies for keeping developers at bay. He almost always has the department present at meetings and sometimes he drags in the council as well.
On fund-raising he has favoured big functions over intimate dinners because "they are transparent and everyone can see who was there".
"I don't think it's a big issue for me. At the end of the day all I have got is my integrity and I want to hang on to it," he says.
Even though Sartor is one of the Government's big performers, he stands no chance of becoming premier. His next job is almost certain to be the even more difficult health portfolio. Perhaps he once harboured lofty ambitions, but four years in the Labor Party have perhaps taught him what a tribal party it is.
Sartor's tendency to bluntness also causes him problems inside the Government. It's no secret that Sartor and the equally volatile Treasurer, Michael Costa, don't get on, although he seems to have the respect of the Premier, Morris Iemma.
He clearly hankers for the days when, as independent lord mayor, he had more autonomy. " I watched all the episodes of Yes Minister before I arrived, but there's still more to learn. I reckon I could write a couple more series," he says.
