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Contest at Bondi.
Gael Walker, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney
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Bondi Beach is a site of systematically distorted communication. Dialectical research over two years into the experiences and understandings of all the main activists fighting for No Stadium on Bondi Beach has produced a picture of a cultural Bondi lifeworld intimately tied to family histories and personal values. It leads to a critique of corporate actions and a search for more effective modes of organising against such corporate and government intrusion into the lives of people. Habermas’s communicative rationality forms the basis of a critical social theory which can be a source of insights for avoiding a repetition of this incident. This study shows how communicative action reproduces social and political relations and follows a theoretical perspective that considers the relations between the communication process and social consensus on values.
The domination of the corporate voice in this public sphere is exposed with its distortions and false consciousness as international and national Olympic organisations used the legitimating role of mediated communication to promote the corporate and government view. Analysis of the 1993 Sydney 2000 bid document shows how the beach was sold as a product while the Olympic Coordination Authority proclaimed, "There is no Plan B" despite offers from more suitable sites to host the Volleyball Stadium. Olympic sponsoring media set up a contest between those citizens who thought they should support the Olympics at any cost and what it stereotyped as the NIMBY protesters of Bondi. Technocratic consciousness was victorious, symbolised by the 10,000 seat prefabricated metal structure erected in the centre of the most popular beach in Australia, effectively blocking the very view people came to see.
