Whatever happened to planning? City planning used to be a thing – not a perfect thing, but real. It used to exist. There was a time when planners spoke straight, defended the public, changed the world. Being a professional meant standing up for principle not bending over for money, and planning's first principle was public benefit. Now, by contrast, with everything that you (or at least I) love about this town under threat, the city-making professions are conspicuous by their silence.

A wrecking ball hangs over Sydney. Map it out. Westconnex, the light rail, the Bays Precinct, Darling Harbour, public housing demolitions, Parramatta, Liverpool, Bankstown, Central to Waterloo. You'll see what I mean – but that's just the start. The suspension of legislative protections, the mass-sacking of councils, the presumption of corporatised government, the abandonment of process, the obsessive secrecy and the wholesale up-zoning of public land for private development means nothing is safe. In residential terms, we're looking at Hong Kong densities, three times Green Square, five times Pyrmont.

It's huge. As well as flogging every bit of public land and encroaching on every park (there's even a hotel proposed on public land at the zoo, for god sake), there's the greed-bleed on to neighbours. Everyone wants part of the action. The pressure mounts. Sydney will be unrecognisable. Your charmed heritage precincts, your safe-as-houses neighbourhoods? Zone them 35 storeys and see how long they last.

Yet every bit as conspicuous as these marching forests of towers and motorways are the missing voices. The eerie, echoic silence.