Dispatch from Sydney

It was a humid afternoon, and the regulars on the 17.30 to Manly looked every bit as frazzled and distracted as they might if returning from a nasty day at the office in New York or London. They were checking their voicemails, fiddling with their iPhones, moaning to their wives or mistresses, doing the crossword, reading and dozing.

But the irregulars were reacting differently: they were awestruck. This was the Manly Ferry across Sydney Harbour, generally accepted as the world’s greatest commute. Are there any rivals? The Star Ferry in Hong Kong? The trip over the Bosporus? You can definitely rule out, on a February evening, the 17.30 train from London Paddington to Reading.

The journey starts from Circular Quay: the bridge lies aport; astarboard the opera house. (So are they meant to be sails? Or seashells? Or nuns playing leapfrog?) The boat turns east and gathers speed, threading its way through hundreds of hedonists in their own craft. Then we pass the Heads, the gap through which Captain Arthur Phillip sailed in 1788 to discover this amazing haven beckoning him. Here the onrushing Pacific ruffles us gently; on a stormy night it would give a more vigorous shake. On other days, during the right season, the captain might point out whales or dolphins, though some of the commuters might not notice if Moby-Dick himself rocked the boat.

Yet no red-blooded tourist can ever have visited Sydney and taken the ride to this particularly beguiling suburb-on-sea without fantasising about life amid the surf and the sunshine – and got at least as far as the Manly estate agents’ windows before turning away in horror at the prices. I once took the ferry to have dinner with friends in Manly on an evening of billowing cloud and unearthly light. I finally understood why Sydney is called The Emerald City. It was so beautiful I cried.

It is of course an illusion, at least in part. The greatest advantage of the ferry, says former five-day-a-weeker Malcolm Knox, is that it never gets delayed by traffic. But, he adds, “the ferry starts to pall the same as any other commute. It’s actually quite inconvenient unless you work right by Circular Quay, because it can take a long time to get anywhere else by bus or train.” Knox is even more blessed now: he’s a well-established novelist, working from home.

And it is an illusion that has long bothered the New South Wales state authorities. The Manly service is merely the flagship of an extraordinary network of green-and-cream boats with friendly names like Charlotte and Golden Grove and Lady Northcott. They chug around eight different routes covering the harbour and its attendant coves, inlets and rivers delivering Sydney’s workers to their offices from tiny landing stages such as Birchgrove, which looks more like a private jetty at the end of a back garden.

A squillion-dollar back garden at that. There are parts of the ferry network that seem like Camelot: a place from which poverty, ugliness, bad weather and unmown lawns have been banished. This is the Australian dream.

The ferry service is dearly beloved, even by the seemingly hard-boiled commuters. But it has been a financial basket case for much of the past 60 years. And two years ago, an inquiry after two fatal crashes uncovered a shambolic organisation that had been through 12 chief executives in 15 years and was, as barrister Bret Walker put it, little more than “a working ferry museum”.

In the state of New South Wales, the crucial political word is always “rort”. This is a splendid Australianism best defined as a scam, scandal or fraud, but no more than you would expect, so hardly worth fussing about. For years, the maritime unions had a thoroughly rorty contract that allowed such items as an allowance for those who worked afloat. This extended to ticket sellers whose booths happened to be on pontoons rather than the shore.

On the map, Sydney seems to be transportation heaven. You can travel round by train, ferry, light rail, monorail and bus; a planned metro line was axed this week. You might think this betrays a certain strategic incoherence, and you would be right. “The multiplicity of modes of transport has helped to cause the incoherence,” says Rodney Smith, professor of politics at the University of Sydney. “You have different agencies running different bits of the system. And there is no overarching plan.”

Sydney, in keeping with its reputation as a whizzy, forward-thinking world city, followed global fashion and scrapped its vast tram system in 1961. Its sleepy rival Melbourne was so backward it kept its trams, making it function infinitely better to this day. Sydney has never recovered from this mistake, compounded by governmental indecision, general rorting (in 2008 Australia’s anti-corruption commission uncovered 96 different cases of corrupt conduct in the New South Wales RailCorp) – and the distraction of the 2000 Olympics.

“If you live within about 10km of the city centre, this really is the glittering city of Oz,” says Andrew West, the Sydney Morning Herald’s transport reporter. “If not, it’s increasingly unliveable.”

And the Sydney of the imagination, of the harbourside, of the ferries, is not the reality for the vast majority of its inhabitants. They live in distant inland suburbs in homes normally far better than they left behind in Europe or Asia – but to them the beaches are a rumour. So, in many of the suburbs, are trains. The upshot is world-class congestion. “Despite new motorways, travelling times have got longer,” says West.

The Labor party has run New South Wales for the past 15 years. It has done little enough to improve transport for its own voters, so it is hardly going to waste time on the ferries, serving the wealthiest suburbs. It did have a plan for ferry privatisation but this foundered amid public and union opposition. Labor is considered almost certain to lose power next year, and its putative successor, the Liberal-National coalition, is committed to reviving the policy.

Rodney Smith doubts that will ever happen. The shadow treasurer, Mike Baird, is also the member for Manly, representing thousands of regular ferry-users. “Last time the coalition ran New South Wales, it was at the height of the Australian passion for privatisation and they didn’t get round to privatising the ferries then. If they privatise and something goes wrong, Baird would be very vulnerable.”

There is already a privatised jet boat service, which shaves 12 minutes off the journey time and has a bar. But it is a joyless journey, and the rush-hour service I went on was almost empty.

Alcohol-free or not, museum piece or not, the green-and-cream commute is the thing. But, trudging back to a frigid English winter, it was reassuring to know that paradise is not quite as good as it is cracked up to be.

matthew.engel@ft.com

Matthew Engel’s Dispatch appears fortnightly