Wherever you look it seems the boofheads are back in charge. And I don't just mean Abbott's bizarre elevation of militarists and monarchs. (Defenders of Sir Prince are conspicuously absent, yet I should point out in his defence that his single spoken syllable in my presence thoroughly befits an Aussie knight, being an imperative, "beer!")

No, I mean the diehard collusion of coal, cars and climate denial jack-booting up and down our land. But what saves boofhead culture – or rather, what sometimes saves us from it – is its incompetence. Here the WestConnex debacle offers a textbook case.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari.

I've always felt ridiculously proud that Sydney survived, roughly intact, the 20th century motorway mania that sent so many cities spiralling into self-destruction. It wasn't for lack of wishing. NSW road engineers would have levelled most of Glebe, Chippendale, Newtown, Redfern and Paddington, but for a serendipitous mix of government incompetence and hippie heritage awareness.

The death of Tom Uren highlights this piece of historical luck. The engineers had yearned to build motorways since the 1940s but the enabling plan, red-striping our inner-city like so much prime beef, wasn't gazetted until 1971. By then it was too late. The Whitlam era was already in the wind, with Uren expounding the urbanism that would value cities as places, not just thoroughfares. The inner city was saved.