You go north and we have all these reserves and you go south and you have all the reserves and they are the best part of the coast. That is crazy. We should be building on this area. If they want to see trees, they can go to Katoomba, there are plenty of trees there.
Triguboff also believes in open borders. He thinks that Australia should admit 130 million immigrants by 2050, and that Sydney's ideal population by this time would be 20 million.
He doesn't care if these immigrants speak English or not:
What's more important for me - a guy who can fix my tap or a guy who can speak English.
It's easy to see why Triguboff would think that such measures are in his economic interest. If you're making a fortune building city apartments then having ever larger quantities of both land and people would seem to be a good way to increase your profits.
So if all that we were to follow was a free market mentality, then Triguboff might appear to be a reasonable man.
I don't think, though, that anyone who follows the free market alone can accurately describe themselves as a conservative.
After all, the logic of Triguboff's position is not to conserve the natural environment, but to develop for profit even the national parks fringing Sydney.
Similarly, the logic of his position is to overwhelm the existing population with so many immigrants that the established Australian people, culture and tradition would not be conserved.
What this means is that to be a real conservative it's not enough to follow the free market alone. The slogan of freedom and the market won't do by itself.
There must be other 'goods' we seek to conserve which aren't derived from individual profit seeking within a market.
It is a hollow rendering of our nature to see the market alone as constituting the good in human experience.
Most real conservatives, for instance, will be responsive enough to nature to want to live close to it - closer, anyway, than an occasional visit to Katoomba to see a tree.
And most real conservatives will feel connected to their own tradition and want to protect it, even if this means placing some limits on profit seeking within the market.
This is not to say that conservatives must be anti-market. My own position is that an intelligently regulated market is the best option. The ideal is to harness the power of the market so that it drives economic growth and provides a ground for healthy competition, without undermining other more important goods within a society.
