One, Sydney Opera House falls under the "establishing shots rule" - it belongs to the class of locations that international filmmakers use to unambiguously communicate location (like the Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty or the Kremlin or what have you) and thus lives by its own rules. (Condensed: it's become a question of identity, not of value.)
Two, and very much related to the above, if you try to optimise too hard, you tend to end up not building such structures, because a lot of the value is in unquantifiable/esoteric/higher-order properties, and it's extremely hard to build a usable calculation that takes such things into account. "Optimal" policy should probably at some level permit a certain amount of suboptimality on its own terms to allow for such things.
(This again connects to my current brainworm about people trying to substitute rules for good judgement.)
Giles Gilbert Scott got the job of designing Liverpool Anglican Cathedral when the only thing he'd designed up to that point was a pipe-rack. So Utzon was pretty experienced in comparison.
I have benefited from that opera house, and I have never been to Sydney (or Australia for that matter).
I don’t believe in state lotteries, but if you are going to have one you should use the money for good public purposes. The use of all tax revenues should broadly benefit the public. We need not precisely match each tax source to each tax use. (If it’s within the law, I don’t care if Trump uses national park fees from Yellowstone on public parks in DC.)
One thing here that's often understated, especially if you're mainly relying on contemporary accounts of the project, is that *as it's actually used* the SOH is a cultural centre in a much broader sense, hosting pop/rock/EDM/hip-hop concerts, kids' pantomimes, fringe theatre, Broadway musicals, public events, a big food and drinks precinct that's predominantly used by non-theatregoers - it's better conceptualised as Sydney's equivalent of the South Bank complex rather than, say, the Hungarian State Opera House.
LOL yes - I have had a glass of champagne in the precincts of the SOH but I have never seen an opera there - and I am an opera goer! I usually make a point of attending an opera when I visit a city with a famous opera house. But nothing was showing at the SOH.
The possibility exists that this is a case where endeavoring to learn too much is itself a mistake- if some stochastic fraction of seeming boondoggles end up panning out, chasing after the whys is an exercise in over fitting. Broken clocks are right twice a day; people still love their unplanned children.
If you want a gut response, though- the opera house was already putting a finger on the scale by essentially being a public art project instead of transportation infrastructure. As soon as it had an interesting shape in an interesting location, it was well ahead on succeeding at its primary function of being interesting (I have paid for images of the Sydney Opera House; I have never utilized it as a venue). Concorde, from lots of angles, needed to do boring stuff like 'work' and 'make money.'
Of course, if, like me, you think that lots of aerospace endeavors are fundamentally monumental architecture for the set that thinks they're too hard nosed to be swayed by such things, the calculus gets more fraught...
The Sydney Opera House was indeed a public art project, financed by a lottery that paid for many cost overruns. I worked on it, as a union labourer. One plumber told me he had plumbed one particular toilet several times, as different architects had different, um, visions of it and kept it dancing left and right.
I had traveled overland (except for the odd ocean) and mostly hitchhiking from the UK to Sydney, in 1970/71. I arrived broke, to find that my brother was barely keeping his head above water. But he was friends with Mark Aarons, the son of the then head of the state Communist party, who was at college and needed a holiday job. So Mark asked the CP Treasurer to give a quick call to the hiring office of the Opera House (it was always hiring). Sure, they said, you guys are at the top of the list. Well, we had no experience but we could speak English, which was more than most of the Greeks, Turks and who-knows-who could.
Mark bailed when the next term started. I pocketed enough in about six months to fly to Kathmandu, rendezvous with a girlfriend and make it back to UK by bus, train and of course, in Europe, hitchhiking. Thank you, gamblers of New South Wales.
The plumber was probably telling the truth; there was a massive change of the internal organization halfway through as it was belatedly realized that an opera house and a concert hall are not actually the same thing (although it was commissioned as an opera building, the main tenant was meant to be the symphony orchestra, and orchestras have very different needs from opera companies, particularly with respect to the amount of stage relative to wings)
This isn't quite right - the venue was always intended to have two large halls, one of which was designed for opera and the other of which was designed for concerts. The thing which happened mid-construction and drove the biggest overruns is that lobbying from the ABC and the SSO persuaded the government to change the relative sizes of the opera hall and the concert hall, because otherwise the concert hall would only have been able to host smaller crowds than the SSO's previous venue.
(this is all relatively minor compared to the biggest issue, which was that at the time they started on the foundations nobody understood how it would be physically possible to build the structure, because computers weren't good enough but it was late enough that proving engineering safety in advance was considered desirable. Eventually, Arup had to redesign Utson's original shells into segments of a sphere in order to simplify the maths, which isn't really relevant but is a cool story).
If you attempted the valuation of the Opera House literally, as a venue for opera performances, it would fail miserably. Not only a classic megaproject disaster in the construction process (something we understand much better now thanks to Bent Flyvbjerg), but a second-rate venue (I think they had to redo much of the interior). It can only be valued as one of the wonders of the modern world, along with the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. No easy way of telling in advance whether a vision like this will come off, or be viewed as a folly, but those who backed it were vindicated by the outcome.
The critique of the Concorde is easy. It was never going to be anything but a vanity project providing luxury travel for a handful of rich people, and that should have been evident as soon as the jumbo jet arrived. A luxury airliner would have been OK-ish if demand could cover costs, but a standard market analysis could have shown that to be unlikely. The Anglo-French politics of the exercise seem, at this distance, to be of a piece with the Suez fiasco.
As for the space shuttle, the cost of a launch delay is a tiny fraction of the cost (economic, reputational) etc of a disaster. The implied acceptable risk is far below that of (say) convicting an innocent person where the standard is “beyond reasonable doubt”. So standard risk analysis says “don’t launch if there is any doubt at all”.
It's a rather odd question. My first impulse would be to push back. I've never been to Australia and don't go to operas. Why should I decide? If you asked me about whether to build a football stadium or not, my answer would be the same.
I suppose if I had control over a budget, I would ask about alternatives. What else could we fund with that money? For example, I quite like bridges.
But otherwise, I would see no reason to interfere with someone else's project.
It seems that the Sydney opera house has become a symbol of Sydney, and such symbols may cost a lot. Stockholm's old symbol was the Town Hall, also an expensive project, and a new one is the Globe Arena, another expensive project.
I would of course have voted against, but I am not much for expensive symbols, they boost power structures and nothing but. Neither do I like constructions made for looking expressive from a distance. I feel depressed by them. That is probably a personal trait, and I would like to know the personality of those Sydneyers who like the Opera house and those who don't.
I don't have a set of principles and I would be sceptical of any principles anyway - hard cases make bad law as the saying goes. One thing strikes me as very different between Sydney Opera House and Concorde. Sydney Opera House has little to do with Opera. It is a symbol of the city, a city that was little known in 1973. Maybe it would have become more prominent anyway but its opera house now makes it globally recognised on a par with the Eiffel Tower, the Tower of London or the Statue of Liberty. It would be worth the city keeping it even if no opera was ever performed there again.
Was this obvious at the planning stage? I don't know but probably not. It goes some way to explaining why the lottery worked.
Concorde had none of those things. Yes the plane was recognisable but Britain and France are not short of symbols. And the UK especially has plenty of more substantial engineering achievements to its name. And it was a failure of engineering typical of many public vanity projects. Getting a supersonic passenger jet was only part of the problem. It needed to be able to operate at a cost per seat that was commercially viable and in the end it wasn't. Why do I fear the massive uptick in European defence spending will result in a large breeding herd of similar white elephants?
The unforeseeable bit is which massive project failures will avoid white elephant status by being valued for something completely different to their original purpose. Sydney Opera House works just by sitting on the harbour. The Millennium Dome has somehow been transformed into a working venue. Concorde is pretty dull even as a museum exhibit.
Except... A large part of the case for Concorde, which was very explicitly made at the time, is that a big prestige joint project with the French was part of the project of joining the EEC ...
Ah interesting - I did not know that but it makes s a means to an end. Maybe we can make a new fighter jet with them now the Germans have bailed and get back in…
How many of the Sydney residents who defended the creation of the Opera House did so when presented with a list of alternatives that could have been made with the money used?
As far as I can tell, the fundamental appeal of the Sydney Opera House is that it is a big, cool, distinctive building that helps people build a sense of local and international identity. If your question is "should we build more big, cool, distinctive buildings for local identity purposes" then my answer is an unambiguous yes - I live in Hampshire and I think that the Spinnaker Tower for example is an absolutely fantastic building that is perfectly designed to give Portsmouth its own sense of identity and does just as good a job of doing so as the Opera House. They've done such a great job of tying in the crescent motif of Portsmouth's coat of arms simultaneously into the large scale design of the tower, and also much of the overall seafront (many of the lampposts for example are also designed with crescents in them) and I think it does an absolutely fantastic job of creating a genuine sense of local identity in a way which I'd wager easily competes with the Opera House.
It's definitely fair to say that the project didn't go to plan - I believe there was about a 200% overspend in the process of building it, however compare this the Opera House which was a *1400% overspend*. Am I willing to put up with a 200% screw-up in the pursuit of identity building? Yes, definitely. Am I willing to put up with a 1400% screw-up? Quite possibly, yes! But as soon as you get to that level, you are instantly winding up in a circumstance when you could potentially have gotten seven Spinnaker Towers and an absolute boatload of lampposts and have potentially hundreds of times the benefits without having lost anything.
I feel like most of the 'emotional power' of this question hinges on the fact that one the one hand, building big nice buildings feels like a frivolity, a form of conspicuous consumption, and that intangible senses of identity are difficult to talk about and quantify in the 'serious' environments of economics, but on the other hand, as soon as you lose that, you also lose a tonne of nice things which you find yourself constantly appreciating.
However, as soon as you accept that these things have value, which is this case is the moment you start to even entertain the idea of building the Opera House, then at that point it should cease to be a question of "Opera House or no Opera House", and starts being a question of "how can we go about arranging things so we get a Spinnaker Tower *and* a whole city makeover with money to spare, rather than just being lumped with one giant expensive building". In other words, the only reason why it feels like it's avoiding your usual critiques over the ideas of trade-offs, is because it is mixing in the fuzzy ambiguity that comes with nice things.
To invoke one of your other recent posts, I'd like to instead assert the notion that this question is an absolute cop-out, and that the far more interesting one is "Do we start with a Spinnaker Tower, or do we start with trying to make a lamppost shaped like a crescent and then go from there?"
Sorry to be late with this, but I was struck by the phrase “it’s exactly the same sort of white elephant prestige project”. I don’t think that’s right. Without dipping into the sterile pseudoscientific “utility” jargon of welfare economics, any Sydneysider, down to the most abject Bogun, can bask in the iconic status of the SOH and the status that goes with it. It’s one of the things that makes residents of Melbourne wish it was Sydney. Londoners who purport to be Manchester Utd supporters get the same pleasure when “England, Manchester United” are the only English words the man they meet on the Tashkent metro has at his command. Concorde was not that sort of prestige project. Its iconic status was far less widely distributed. Even at the time, I’m pretty sure its status was a step below the Spitfire and you may have younger readers who have not heard of either. The SOH is of a different order altogether. As was the Millennium Dome, which was a project entirely for the prestige of an individual or two (cf. the White House Ballroom/Washington Arch). IMO failure to cancel the Dome, which was universall unpopular as a project, was the first sign that Tony Blair’s New Labour was not going to fulfil the hopes of those who elected it. Concorde was I think far closer to the Dome end of the spectrum than the SOH. Positioning, say, the “Pompidou” Centre is a more interesting exercise.
The grand project of philosophy is, roughly speaking, to devise a coherent, self-consistent set of principles to live by and with which to interpret the world. We've been at it for 25 centuries and more, and while philosophy has certainly evolved, it seems no closer to its goal. Why should your planning process be a special snowflake exception to this? A consistent set of principles is a reasonable thing to want, but not one to expect.
On the subject of Oz, how do you feel about the Canberra-class LHDs? Should they be judged on functional grounds, in cost-benefit terms, or as a "prestige project"? So far as I am aware, the contingency for which they were devised - an opposed amphibious landing of two battalions - has not occurred in their operational history. But in the counterfactual world where Australia had been at war, which beach would they plausibly have assaulted? They seem to be of doubtful military utility. But on the other hand, does the modal Australian feel as proud of them as of the Sydney Opera House?
Very good! More mistakes! The cool thing about a land value tax is that mistakes hurt sooner. So you've got a system which is more dynamic, more commissions, more mistakes, more frequently, rather than the system we have right now if multi decade booms, busts, and stagnations.
Couple of thoughts:
One, Sydney Opera House falls under the "establishing shots rule" - it belongs to the class of locations that international filmmakers use to unambiguously communicate location (like the Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty or the Kremlin or what have you) and thus lives by its own rules. (Condensed: it's become a question of identity, not of value.)
Two, and very much related to the above, if you try to optimise too hard, you tend to end up not building such structures, because a lot of the value is in unquantifiable/esoteric/higher-order properties, and it's extremely hard to build a usable calculation that takes such things into account. "Optimal" policy should probably at some level permit a certain amount of suboptimality on its own terms to allow for such things.
(This again connects to my current brainworm about people trying to substitute rules for good judgement.)
Giles Gilbert Scott got the job of designing Liverpool Anglican Cathedral when the only thing he'd designed up to that point was a pipe-rack. So Utzon was pretty experienced in comparison.
But... Compared to the Catholic one?
I have benefited from that opera house, and I have never been to Sydney (or Australia for that matter).
I don’t believe in state lotteries, but if you are going to have one you should use the money for good public purposes. The use of all tax revenues should broadly benefit the public. We need not precisely match each tax source to each tax use. (If it’s within the law, I don’t care if Trump uses national park fees from Yellowstone on public parks in DC.)
One thing here that's often understated, especially if you're mainly relying on contemporary accounts of the project, is that *as it's actually used* the SOH is a cultural centre in a much broader sense, hosting pop/rock/EDM/hip-hop concerts, kids' pantomimes, fringe theatre, Broadway musicals, public events, a big food and drinks precinct that's predominantly used by non-theatregoers - it's better conceptualised as Sydney's equivalent of the South Bank complex rather than, say, the Hungarian State Opera House.
LOL yes - I have had a glass of champagne in the precincts of the SOH but I have never seen an opera there - and I am an opera goer! I usually make a point of attending an opera when I visit a city with a famous opera house. But nothing was showing at the SOH.
The possibility exists that this is a case where endeavoring to learn too much is itself a mistake- if some stochastic fraction of seeming boondoggles end up panning out, chasing after the whys is an exercise in over fitting. Broken clocks are right twice a day; people still love their unplanned children.
If you want a gut response, though- the opera house was already putting a finger on the scale by essentially being a public art project instead of transportation infrastructure. As soon as it had an interesting shape in an interesting location, it was well ahead on succeeding at its primary function of being interesting (I have paid for images of the Sydney Opera House; I have never utilized it as a venue). Concorde, from lots of angles, needed to do boring stuff like 'work' and 'make money.'
Of course, if, like me, you think that lots of aerospace endeavors are fundamentally monumental architecture for the set that thinks they're too hard nosed to be swayed by such things, the calculus gets more fraught...
The Sydney Opera House was indeed a public art project, financed by a lottery that paid for many cost overruns. I worked on it, as a union labourer. One plumber told me he had plumbed one particular toilet several times, as different architects had different, um, visions of it and kept it dancing left and right.
I had traveled overland (except for the odd ocean) and mostly hitchhiking from the UK to Sydney, in 1970/71. I arrived broke, to find that my brother was barely keeping his head above water. But he was friends with Mark Aarons, the son of the then head of the state Communist party, who was at college and needed a holiday job. So Mark asked the CP Treasurer to give a quick call to the hiring office of the Opera House (it was always hiring). Sure, they said, you guys are at the top of the list. Well, we had no experience but we could speak English, which was more than most of the Greeks, Turks and who-knows-who could.
Mark bailed when the next term started. I pocketed enough in about six months to fly to Kathmandu, rendezvous with a girlfriend and make it back to UK by bus, train and of course, in Europe, hitchhiking. Thank you, gamblers of New South Wales.
The plumber was probably telling the truth; there was a massive change of the internal organization halfway through as it was belatedly realized that an opera house and a concert hall are not actually the same thing (although it was commissioned as an opera building, the main tenant was meant to be the symphony orchestra, and orchestras have very different needs from opera companies, particularly with respect to the amount of stage relative to wings)
This isn't quite right - the venue was always intended to have two large halls, one of which was designed for opera and the other of which was designed for concerts. The thing which happened mid-construction and drove the biggest overruns is that lobbying from the ABC and the SSO persuaded the government to change the relative sizes of the opera hall and the concert hall, because otherwise the concert hall would only have been able to host smaller crowds than the SSO's previous venue.
(this is all relatively minor compared to the biggest issue, which was that at the time they started on the foundations nobody understood how it would be physically possible to build the structure, because computers weren't good enough but it was late enough that proving engineering safety in advance was considered desirable. Eventually, Arup had to redesign Utson's original shells into segments of a sphere in order to simplify the maths, which isn't really relevant but is a cool story).
Despite your warnings, I’ll give it a go
If you attempted the valuation of the Opera House literally, as a venue for opera performances, it would fail miserably. Not only a classic megaproject disaster in the construction process (something we understand much better now thanks to Bent Flyvbjerg), but a second-rate venue (I think they had to redo much of the interior). It can only be valued as one of the wonders of the modern world, along with the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. No easy way of telling in advance whether a vision like this will come off, or be viewed as a folly, but those who backed it were vindicated by the outcome.
The critique of the Concorde is easy. It was never going to be anything but a vanity project providing luxury travel for a handful of rich people, and that should have been evident as soon as the jumbo jet arrived. A luxury airliner would have been OK-ish if demand could cover costs, but a standard market analysis could have shown that to be unlikely. The Anglo-French politics of the exercise seem, at this distance, to be of a piece with the Suez fiasco.
As for the space shuttle, the cost of a launch delay is a tiny fraction of the cost (economic, reputational) etc of a disaster. The implied acceptable risk is far below that of (say) convicting an innocent person where the standard is “beyond reasonable doubt”. So standard risk analysis says “don’t launch if there is any doubt at all”.
It's a rather odd question. My first impulse would be to push back. I've never been to Australia and don't go to operas. Why should I decide? If you asked me about whether to build a football stadium or not, my answer would be the same.
I suppose if I had control over a budget, I would ask about alternatives. What else could we fund with that money? For example, I quite like bridges.
But otherwise, I would see no reason to interfere with someone else's project.
If "we are nowhere near the frontier" maybe we haven't really understood the constraints.
It seems that the Sydney opera house has become a symbol of Sydney, and such symbols may cost a lot. Stockholm's old symbol was the Town Hall, also an expensive project, and a new one is the Globe Arena, another expensive project.
I would of course have voted against, but I am not much for expensive symbols, they boost power structures and nothing but. Neither do I like constructions made for looking expressive from a distance. I feel depressed by them. That is probably a personal trait, and I would like to know the personality of those Sydneyers who like the Opera house and those who don't.
I don't have a set of principles and I would be sceptical of any principles anyway - hard cases make bad law as the saying goes. One thing strikes me as very different between Sydney Opera House and Concorde. Sydney Opera House has little to do with Opera. It is a symbol of the city, a city that was little known in 1973. Maybe it would have become more prominent anyway but its opera house now makes it globally recognised on a par with the Eiffel Tower, the Tower of London or the Statue of Liberty. It would be worth the city keeping it even if no opera was ever performed there again.
Was this obvious at the planning stage? I don't know but probably not. It goes some way to explaining why the lottery worked.
Concorde had none of those things. Yes the plane was recognisable but Britain and France are not short of symbols. And the UK especially has plenty of more substantial engineering achievements to its name. And it was a failure of engineering typical of many public vanity projects. Getting a supersonic passenger jet was only part of the problem. It needed to be able to operate at a cost per seat that was commercially viable and in the end it wasn't. Why do I fear the massive uptick in European defence spending will result in a large breeding herd of similar white elephants?
The unforeseeable bit is which massive project failures will avoid white elephant status by being valued for something completely different to their original purpose. Sydney Opera House works just by sitting on the harbour. The Millennium Dome has somehow been transformed into a working venue. Concorde is pretty dull even as a museum exhibit.
Except... A large part of the case for Concorde, which was very explicitly made at the time, is that a big prestige joint project with the French was part of the project of joining the EEC ...
Ah interesting - I did not know that but it makes s a means to an end. Maybe we can make a new fighter jet with them now the Germans have bailed and get back in…
How many of the Sydney residents who defended the creation of the Opera House did so when presented with a list of alternatives that could have been made with the money used?
As far as I can tell, the fundamental appeal of the Sydney Opera House is that it is a big, cool, distinctive building that helps people build a sense of local and international identity. If your question is "should we build more big, cool, distinctive buildings for local identity purposes" then my answer is an unambiguous yes - I live in Hampshire and I think that the Spinnaker Tower for example is an absolutely fantastic building that is perfectly designed to give Portsmouth its own sense of identity and does just as good a job of doing so as the Opera House. They've done such a great job of tying in the crescent motif of Portsmouth's coat of arms simultaneously into the large scale design of the tower, and also much of the overall seafront (many of the lampposts for example are also designed with crescents in them) and I think it does an absolutely fantastic job of creating a genuine sense of local identity in a way which I'd wager easily competes with the Opera House.
It's definitely fair to say that the project didn't go to plan - I believe there was about a 200% overspend in the process of building it, however compare this the Opera House which was a *1400% overspend*. Am I willing to put up with a 200% screw-up in the pursuit of identity building? Yes, definitely. Am I willing to put up with a 1400% screw-up? Quite possibly, yes! But as soon as you get to that level, you are instantly winding up in a circumstance when you could potentially have gotten seven Spinnaker Towers and an absolute boatload of lampposts and have potentially hundreds of times the benefits without having lost anything.
I feel like most of the 'emotional power' of this question hinges on the fact that one the one hand, building big nice buildings feels like a frivolity, a form of conspicuous consumption, and that intangible senses of identity are difficult to talk about and quantify in the 'serious' environments of economics, but on the other hand, as soon as you lose that, you also lose a tonne of nice things which you find yourself constantly appreciating.
However, as soon as you accept that these things have value, which is this case is the moment you start to even entertain the idea of building the Opera House, then at that point it should cease to be a question of "Opera House or no Opera House", and starts being a question of "how can we go about arranging things so we get a Spinnaker Tower *and* a whole city makeover with money to spare, rather than just being lumped with one giant expensive building". In other words, the only reason why it feels like it's avoiding your usual critiques over the ideas of trade-offs, is because it is mixing in the fuzzy ambiguity that comes with nice things.
To invoke one of your other recent posts, I'd like to instead assert the notion that this question is an absolute cop-out, and that the far more interesting one is "Do we start with a Spinnaker Tower, or do we start with trying to make a lamppost shaped like a crescent and then go from there?"
Sorry to be late with this, but I was struck by the phrase “it’s exactly the same sort of white elephant prestige project”. I don’t think that’s right. Without dipping into the sterile pseudoscientific “utility” jargon of welfare economics, any Sydneysider, down to the most abject Bogun, can bask in the iconic status of the SOH and the status that goes with it. It’s one of the things that makes residents of Melbourne wish it was Sydney. Londoners who purport to be Manchester Utd supporters get the same pleasure when “England, Manchester United” are the only English words the man they meet on the Tashkent metro has at his command. Concorde was not that sort of prestige project. Its iconic status was far less widely distributed. Even at the time, I’m pretty sure its status was a step below the Spitfire and you may have younger readers who have not heard of either. The SOH is of a different order altogether. As was the Millennium Dome, which was a project entirely for the prestige of an individual or two (cf. the White House Ballroom/Washington Arch). IMO failure to cancel the Dome, which was universall unpopular as a project, was the first sign that Tony Blair’s New Labour was not going to fulfil the hopes of those who elected it. Concorde was I think far closer to the Dome end of the spectrum than the SOH. Positioning, say, the “Pompidou” Centre is a more interesting exercise.
On the question of lotteries and their fairness, Canadian economist Reuven Brenner is instructive. Poor man’s capital market.
The grand project of philosophy is, roughly speaking, to devise a coherent, self-consistent set of principles to live by and with which to interpret the world. We've been at it for 25 centuries and more, and while philosophy has certainly evolved, it seems no closer to its goal. Why should your planning process be a special snowflake exception to this? A consistent set of principles is a reasonable thing to want, but not one to expect.
On the subject of Oz, how do you feel about the Canberra-class LHDs? Should they be judged on functional grounds, in cost-benefit terms, or as a "prestige project"? So far as I am aware, the contingency for which they were devised - an opposed amphibious landing of two battalions - has not occurred in their operational history. But in the counterfactual world where Australia had been at war, which beach would they plausibly have assaulted? They seem to be of doubtful military utility. But on the other hand, does the modal Australian feel as proud of them as of the Sydney Opera House?
Very good! More mistakes! The cool thing about a land value tax is that mistakes hurt sooner. So you've got a system which is more dynamic, more commissions, more mistakes, more frequently, rather than the system we have right now if multi decade booms, busts, and stagnations.
Too abstract. Is there a simple visual symbol?
Was Mt. Rushmore worth it? Was Big Ben? Was Brasilia or Canberra or the Sphinx or Göbekli Tepe?