There’s
another election in the air. Local councils throughout New South
Wales face the voters this coming September. Hence the flotsam
of colourful ideas floating from the office of Clover Moore,
Lord Mayor of Sydney’s City Council. And there’ll be plenty more
by election day.
During her term, Clover has pandered mightily to her inner-city
constituency’s almost pathological loathing of motor vehicles
and equally extravagant ardour for all forms of public
transport. ‘Light‘, ‘metro’ or ‘heavy‘, anything on rails has
her undying love. And if rail can’t do the job, pedestrian
walkways and bicycle tracks must fill the gaps. Just no more
smelly, polluting cars.
Beloved of green activists and journalists, this line suits
Clover’s electoral interests to a tee. If it doesn’t suit the
rest of the city, so what? The inner-city is special. Clover’s
support base is in suburbs ringing the CBD. They are full of
people who trek the short distance to the CBD for work and
leisure. Most are white-collar office workers, and many work for
government. Central Sydney is already a well-serviced public
transport hub. So few drive very much, and motor vehicles are
marginal to their existence. Life would be so much nicer without
them.
Such attitudes may seem selfish and impractical. But not to
Clover. For her they have the makings of a ‘vision’. And in the
cause of turning vision into reality - or at least into another
election victory - she lured a prophet to our shores. Last year,
Danish architect Jan Gehl
(pictured) spent months investigating Sydney’s CBD before
issuing his prescription, a weighty report calledPublic Spaces,Public Life Sydney 2007.
His central point? You guessed it - too many cars.
To be fair, Professor Gehl is a lifelong advocate of
pedestrian-oriented urban design, having spent a career advising
cities how to save their streets from the evil motor vehicle. He
casts a long shadow over Copenhagen, apparently. Clients know
what they are getting, as did Clover. He didn’t let her down.
Gehl came up with the near-utopian idea of banning private
vehicles from George Street, Sydney’s central thoroughfare, or
’spine’ as he aptly calls it, along its whole length from
Circular Quay to Central Station. It should be reserved for
public transport, he says, preferably light-rail, and bicycles.
That way people get to stroll at leisure, without having to stop
at pedestrian crossings. Most of his suggestions hang off this
radical proposal. Three large public, and vehicle-less, squares
should punctuate George Street at Circular Quay, Town Hall and
Central. And Park Street, which crosses George Street, should
also be closed to private vehicles. Some streets should be for
pedestrians only, he says. The report goes on, smiting vehicles
left, right and centre.
Professor Gehl spent nine months in Sydney, but it clearly
wasn’t enough. While there’s plenty of scope to improve the
city’s traffic management, he missed the point entirely.
Three constants govern the growth and character of Sydney’s CBD.
First, it is a relatively small space enclosed by physical
boundaries on three sides - Darling Harbour in the west, Sydney
Harbour across the north and the Domain-Hyde Park along the
eastern flank. Expansion is forced upward or southward. This
accounts for the high concentration of skyscrapers in the most
conveniently located blocks. While this concentration of office
space attracts considerable traffic, entry and exit points are
limited by the physical boundaries. Flexibility of traffic
routes, therefore, is at a premium. Also, the small area and
commuter volume rule out a dense transit network like Paris‘s
Metro or London‘s Underground. Most internal journeys by typical
city workers or visitors are within walking distance. The
massive cost would simply outweigh any real benefits.
Second, Sydney is a modern city and a commercial centre, not an
historic or administrative one. Nor is it a national capital
like Gehl’s cherished Copenhagen. Sydney was never laid out to a
plan, but grew organically. There are no extensive blocks of
grand, historic state buildings as in many European cities. It
has few structures or monuments of historic significance.
Buildings are raised up and torn down according to commercial
imperatives. Overwhelmingly, building stock is allocated to
commerce, and commerce means traffic.
Third, the harbour will always be Sydney’s most aesthetic
feature. The demand for office space is most intense in northern
blocks and declines southward. Street closures can only work on
the premise that development will shift south, but this is to
deny the gravitational pull of the harbour. In Sydney, those
with the dollars compete for views of that spectacular waterway.
Anyone who can will crowd northward, as close as possible to the
water, the bridge, Circular Quay and the Opera House.
If these are the CBD‘s ‘iron laws’ of development, Gehl’s
blueprint violates them all.
The CBD is a mini-economy, sucking in and spewing out countless
services each day. Many traders and customers aren’t based there
and don’t live anywhere close. They come, transact their
business and go. Greater Sydney is evolving into a polycentric
conurbation. But Sydney CBD still interacts with a vast urban
hinterland, stretching up and down the coast and across to the
blue mountains. Those glass towers feed a host of outside
contractors: maintenance crews, carriers, technicians, security
staff, couriers, caterers and the list goes on. Not to mention
thousands of tourists and adhoc visitors. Street closures,
light-rail lines and other impediments to the circulation of
traffic erode the CBD‘s vitality. This is more true of Sydney
than many western cities.
Neither Clover nor her supporters have much stake in the CBD’s
commercial velocity, so to speak. As employed office workers or
city dwellers, their interest is in the city’s street-level
amenity. Hence the aversion to stepping around cars, vans and
trucks.
Professor Gehl resorts to a cardiac metaphor to describe Sydney.
‘Its heart is congested’, he says, ‘choking on the noise and
fumes of the internal combustion engine’. In fact, circulating
traffic is like blood entering and leaving its aortic chamber.
Every street closed to private vehicles is a blocked artery.
Without the lifeblood of traffic, the CBD is liable to cardiac
arrest.
Were Professor Gehl‘s ideas ever implemented, Sydney won’t just
be a city for pedestrians, but a very pedestrian city.
The
housing affordability debate has taken a strange turn lately. So
strange that we need to ask a basic question. Is it about
economics or social welfare?
The general answer, of course, is that it’s both, but to widely
different degrees. For a clear majority of Australians, housing
has always been an economic issue. Their needs are met in the
marketplace, by buying and selling properties. For a minority
who can’t break into the market, state and commonwealth
governments have funded schemes for public or social housing on
strict eligibility criteria. At any rate, in Australia social
housing has been a marginal sector, a safety net for the
disadvantaged. It represents just 5 per cent of the nation’s
housing stock. Julian
Disney
So, what’s the point? There are early signs that the policy
distinctions between private and welfare housing are breaking
down. If these signs turn into something more tangible,
Australia faces a startling new development. Home ownership will
slip beyond the reach of low and middle income workers. Only the
well-off will dare to dream of owning a home, especially a
single-family house.
In the affordability crisis, welfare activists see their best
opportunity in decades. A key social movement of the 1970s,
welfare advocacy lost ground in the shift to market-oriented
solutions over the past 25 years. On the housing front, it was
trampled in the stampede to upscale outer-suburban dwellings,
part of a generational rise in living standards and disposable
incomes related, ultimately, to economic deregulation. Today the
lobby has a lower profile, but retains its turf. Advocates for
state intervention fight on, scattered throughout government
schemes and agencies, charities, churches and university social
work faculties. Their disdain for market solutions remains
undimmed.
Those with long memories will be familiar with
Julian Disney
(pictured). As president of the NSW and Australian councils of
social service, Disney was once the high-profile face of welfare
advocacy. His career mirrored the lobby’s own trajectory. In
recent years he has settled into a comfortable academic post,
Director of the Social Justice Project at the University of NSW.
He’s more visible, these days, as chair of the
National Housing
Affordability Summit, a coalition of welfare groups
and trade unions.
Voices in and around the summit, most prominently Disney’s, have
deftly exploited the heightened sense of urgency around housing
affordability, not to mention the heated election year climate.
Above all, they have been busy planting a distinct narrative in
the public mind. On
14 November,
Disney gave it a spin on the Sydney Morning Herald
features page. It goes like this. Cities have reached the outer
limits of feasible expansion. Their outskirts have stretched too
far from where jobs are located. These days, both partners need
to enter the workforce, and mothers juggle work and children.
For most couples, the time and expense incurred in travelling
such distances isn’t bearable. They are forced to live near
their jobs. But land is scarce in these areas, so house prices
are exorbitant. Couples must resign themselves to renting.
Governments should intervene to expand the stock of rental
accommodation.
Disney claims ‘many households now have a stronger need to live
near a wide range of job options’ and ‘these changes have
contributed to the gentrification of inner suburbs and house
price inflation’. Many are being forced to ‘live in substandard
housing or a long way from job opportunities and community
services’. The government must ‘remove excessively generous tax
benefits for wealthy landlords and owner-occupiers’. Evidently,
Disney is no fan of The Great Australian Dream.
There’s at least one glaring flaw in this analysis. It’s just
absurd to suggest that jobs are concentrated in the ‘inner
suburbs’. Disney describes the typical city of 30 or 40 years
ago. In the modern service-oriented, motorised and
communications technology linked economy, jobs follow consumers
and gravitate to where costs are lowest. They aren’t tied to
fixed transportation nodes like ports, waterways and rail lines,
and haven‘t been for some time.
The Herald runs a generally anti-suburban line, but
Catharine Munro, the paper’s urban affairs editor, is fine. On
24 September, her article
‘Tale of a city turning
inside out’ noted that ‘there was a time when
business was done in the city and people went home to the
suburbs’. Now, ‘large companies are embracing suburbia while
Sydneysiders are taking to inner-city apartments at a faster
rate than they are to houses’. Munro refers to the new ‘business
park’ phenomenon, amongst other things.
And the NSW Government’s City of Cities plan earmarks zones in
outer western Sydney for expected employment growth, such as the
Western Sydney Employment Hub near the M4 and M7 motorways.
If there’s a drift to inner-city apartments across all income
and occupation groups, and that’s not clear, job location has
little to do with it. In this context, it’s interesting to note
former Labor leader Mark Latham’s election commentary in the
Australian Financial Review of 9 November. Latham denied any
housing affordability problem, let alone a crisis. He also
thinks home buyers are abandoning the fringe, though not because
of jobs - rather, for ‘water views and boutique shopping’. His
evidence: ‘In south-west Sydney, for example, home buyers can
purchase a three-bedroom brick house in a decent neighbourhood
for less than $250,000’.
Looking at it more deeply, the position is rather more
complicated. Neither jobs nor lifestyle are turning buyers away
from the fringe. Prices are actually holding up across many
fringe suburbs.
Latham’s $250,000 price claim needs to be put in context. Just
peruse the Herald’sDomain website,
which posts median house prices across Sydney’s suburbs. Why is
the median price in Rouse Hill on the far north-western fringe,
yet to be connected to Sydney’s rail network, as high as
$510,000? Why are medians in nearby fringe suburbs of Kellyville
and Beaumont Hills as high as $550,000 and $575,000
respectively? Turn to Latham’s case of the south-west. The
median in Campbelltown region is $340,000. Inside the region,
medians can be as low as $265,000 in Macquarie Fields. But move
further out towards the fringe in adjacent Wollondilly Shire,
and medians can be as high as $482,500 in Glen Alpine and
$415,000 in Blair Athol.
Adverse social factors appear to be depressing prices in places
like Macquarie Fields and other Campbelltown suburbs. Sadly, the
region struggles with a history of failed public housing
projects. Pockets of unemployment, welfare dependency and crime
persist. In February 2005, Macquarie Fields erupted in an
unprecedented four day riot. Inevitably, buyers will not be
drawn to suburbs with poor reputations (however unfair that may
be on the locals, most of whom are law-abiding and gainfully
employed).
These are special cases, nevertheless.
Judging by prices in the vicinity of Rouse Hill and Glen Alpine,
distance from ‘the centre’ is less critical than welfare flacks
like Disney insist. Arguably, prices on much of the fringe are
still too high for new buyers, and this is a function of supply
as much as anything else. It’s about the system of land
releases.
Affordability pressures are still susceptible to market
solutions, if policymakers will grasp them. Sure, freeing up
land supply will deflate current values, and this entails a
political risk. But it comes down to a question of national
priorities. Australia is an affluent, land-rich country with a
low population density. The notion that our housing arrangements
should slide into the clutches of a quasi-welfare apparatus is
ludicrous.
Australian families will not relish a future crammed into
high-density apartments, nor perpetual obeisance to a landlord.
Disney and friends should stop trying to hijack the agenda for
their purposes. They occupy a corner of it, and there they
should stay.
On
30 November 1999, delegates gathered in Seattle for that year’s
World Trade Organization ministerial conference. Today the event
is remembered less for an abortive round of trade negotiations
than for the mayhem wreaked on the city’s streets. In what
became known as the ‘Battle of Seattle’, around 40,000
anti-globalisation protesters converged on downtown Seattle,
leaving a trail of smashed shopfronts and bloodied police in
their wake. Cleanup costs and police overtime bills amounted to
$US3 million. Losses due to property damage and business
interruption were estimated at $US20 million.
The era of anti-globalisation activism entered a new, menacing
phase.
Riots soon became a routine feature of peak economic and trade
forums. Leader and ministerial meetings of the WTO, the G8, the
G20, the World Economic Forum and even the Commonwealth Heads of
Government (whose members mostly represent poor countries)
proceeded in a state of virtual siege. The 2001 G8 Summit in
Genoa, Italy was perhaps the most shocking of all.
Confrontations between police and up to 200,000 protestors ended
in 400 receiving severe injuries and one fatality. A 23-year-old
activist was shot by police as he hurled a fire extinguisher
into their jeep.
On our shores, a history of anti-globalisation disturbances
culminated in street violence at last November’s G20 Summit in
Melbourne. Protesters rampaged through streets around the summit
venue, disrupted traffic, pummelled vehicles, trashed fast-food
outlets and, in some cases, assaulted police. Several were
arrested and charged. Again, the summit’s agenda was
overshadowed by images of protestors slamming garbage cans into
windscreens.
What was in store for Sydney’s week-long APEC leaders summit?
After all, Melbourne was just a gathering of finance ministers.
Sydney would be hosting 21 heads of government, including the
Great Satan himself, George W Bush at the nadir of his
popularity.
APEC organisers had every reason to expect civic meltdown. Trade
was on the agenda as well as climate change, which joined the
post-Seattle list of gripes against global capitalism. Above
all, passions aroused by the Iraq war, along with his refusal to
sign up to Kyoto, made Bush the stock villain of protest
politics. Surely, this was an opportunity not to be missed.
Anti-globalisation militancy was a genuine concern.
The anti-globalisation movement is a loose coalition of
well-meaning if misguided aid agencies, charities, labour
unions, feminists, indigenous groups, environmentalists and
students. Most are socialists or anarchists of various stripes,
clinging to the Marxist view of free trade as a licence for
corporate pillage. Some represent sectors in the developed world
threatened by cross-border investment. The cause is a fertile
source of slogans, but anti-trade rhetoric doesn’t stand up to
close analysis. Its proponents lack rational arguments, so they
resort to street marches.
They mobilise for campaigns against economic forums or visits by
foreign leaders, and converge under an ad hoc umbrella. ‘Stop
Bush Collective’ was the tag chosen by Sydney’s anti-APEC crew.
The nearest thing they have to a guiding body is
Peoples’ Global
Action, ‘a worldwide coordination of resistances to the global
market, a new alliance of struggle and mutual support’. PGA
dispenses manifestos, action plans and ideological instruction,
making liberal use of communications technology.
The movement is for the most part non-violent, but has a
sinister fringe. Lurking in the shadows are elements that could
almost be described as paramilitary. They incite vandalism,
civil disobedience and violence as a calculated strategy, hoping
to discredit the institutional framework of trade talks. Riots
are executed military-style, with operational code names like
‘N30’ (November 30: the Seattle protest). The authorities have
no legitimacy in their eyes. Even elected governments are
puppets of marauding corporations.
These extremists owe little to traditions of peaceful protest
like the civil rights or moratorium marches of the 1960s and
1970s. Their progenitors are far-left terror outfits of the
1970s - the Italian Red Brigades and German Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof).
Operating in disguise, they specialise in running charges
against police, a tactic called ‘black block (or bloc)’. They
were the shock troops of Seattle and Genoa. In Melbourne, black
block tactics were used by the anarchist groups ‘Mutiny’ and
‘Arterial Bloc’. Around 25 of them in spray painter suits and
surgeons’ masks led charges against police.
(Black blocking came out of the German ‘autonomen’ movement of
the 1980s. Autonomen wore black during militant protests and
solidarity demonstrations for the Red Army Faction.)
As of 2007, radicals were close to winning the public relations
war against international cooperation. It was just a matter of
time before major cities, deterred by the prospect of violence,
gave up hosting trade-related forums altogether. To their shame,
many progressive journalists, always soft on the antics of
left-wing demonstrators, conspired in casting police as the
villains.
And so APEC came to pass - not with a bang but a whimper.
In retrospect, some argue the security arrangements were
overblown. Anyone familiar with anti-globalisation militancy
knows better. These clearly enunciated and aggressively enforced
measures defused a ticking bomb.
In Sydney, law enforcement won hands down. The forum’s logistics
fell to the APEC 2007 Taskforce, a unit of the Department of
Prime Minister and Cabinet with state-based branches like the
APEC NSW Police Security Command. They chose a remarkably
clear-sighted approach to the challenge before them.
The taskforce drew together a security plan coordinating the
dimensions of space, time and people.
Security agencies were in full command of the space around APEC
venues, including the Opera House, Government House, and hotels
accommodating visiting leaders and their delegations. Taking
advantage of the topography of Sydney’s CBD, a narrow stretch
surrounded by water on three sides, critical blocks north of
Bridge Street were sealed off by intense police presence and a
steel fence. This barrier contained an inner security ring, the
‘declared area’, backed up by an outer ring, the ‘security
zone’, where activities were monitored and if necessary managed
by police intervention.
Before the ‘Stop Bush’ march, police obtained a court order
preventing protesters from entering the security zone. Riot
squad officers skilfully confined marchers to a narrow corridor
from the Town Hall to Hyde Park, just a few blocks away.
These arrangements ensured there would be no repeat of Seattle,
where protesters blocked streets leading to meeting venues, or
Genoa where a secured ‘red zone’, aside from being breached, was
so small that chanting mobs drowned out proceedings.
APEC timeframes were geared to pre-emption. As the Prime
Minister put it, ‘a decision was clearly taken - the right
decision - that pre-emptive and forward action was better than
retaliation …’ Months in advance, security agencies made contact
with activist ringleaders, and compiled a list of ‘excluded
persons’, such as the worst Melbourne G20 thugs. They were
banned from the city centre. As the summit approached, a
drumbeat of warnings issued from the Premier, the Deputy
Premier, the Police Commissioner, the taskforce commander and
others. Police expected trouble, and were authorised to respond
in force. An ominous mobile water cannon patrolled the streets.
Naturally enough, all of this drew the ire of civil libertarians
and ‘experts’. A politics lecturer at Wollongong University,
Dr
Anthony Ashbolt, claimed the measures went too far. ‘You can, in
fact, create the very circumstances you are trying to avoid’, he
said. How wrong he was. Comments on the website of
Resistance,
an activist group, attest that the government’s firmness hit
home: ‘Publicly explaining that the Stop Bush collective is
aiming to hold a peaceful rally will make it easier to mount a
political defence against government attempts to deny us our
right to protest.’
While ‘Stop Bush’ organisers expected
20,000 marchers, only around 3000 showed up.
From start to finish, crowd control was marked by zero tolerance
of breaches and the highly visible presence of 3500 police and
1500 defence personnel.
Anti-globalisation thuggery debuted in Seattle; Sydney is where
law enforcement came into its own.
That Sydney could pull off a meeting of world leaders, including
George Bush, without carpets of shattered glass is quite an
achievement (reminiscent in many ways of the pragmatic
efficiency on display at the Olympics). It will no doubt be
studied by law enforcement and security agencies all over the
world.
APEC 2007 was an instance of Sun Tzu’s foundation principle in The
Art of War: ‘to fight and conquer in all your battles is not
supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the
enemy’s resistance without fighting.’
At a time when
Premier Peter Beattie is under fire for his bold plans to redraw
Queensland’s council boundaries, Morris Iemma may be
contemplating the proverb ‘fools rush in where angels fear to
tread’.
Still, the issue won’t go away. A groundswell of discontent is
steadily rising across Sydney. The time has come for serious
reform of local government, including council boundaries. That
dangerous word ‘amalgamations’ is in the wind. It deserves a
spot on Mr Iemma’s short-list of big second term items.
The latest round of grumbling was occasioned by two related
developments: release of the Department of Planning’s
Local
GovernmentPerformance Monitoring 2005-6 report and
planning minister Frank Sartor‘s adoption of more powers to
override under-performing councils under the Environmental
Planning and Assessment Act.
The monitoring report says that in 2005-06 local councils
determined some 105,000 development applications (DAs) with a
total value of nearly $20 billion, a hefty slice of the state’s
economy.
The ‘mean gross time’ for determining a development application
was 68 days (this figure includes the time taken to refer the
matter to government agencies and the time taken by applicants
to provide further information when requested). A total of
twelve councils reported gross average determination times of
100 days or more.
The following table, based on data in the report, sets out
twenty councils with the highest gross average determination
times (measured in days) and twenty councils with the highest
number of DAs determined.
Highest 20 Councils
(gross average time
(total DAs determined)
in days to determine DAs)
1. Leichhardt
185
1. Sydney 3,389
2. Strathfield
158
2. Lake Macquarie 3,075
3. Canterbury
152
3. Blacktown 2,998
4. Ashfield 130
4. Gosford 2,955
5. Botany Bay
115
5. Wyong 2,561
6. Port Stephens
113
6. Shoalhaven 2,544
7. Woollahra 111
7. Baulkham Hills 2,484
8. Wollongong
106
8. Newcastle 2,230
9. Holroyd 102
9. Penrith 2,110
10. Upper Hunter
101
10. Hornsby 2,051
11. Great Lakes
101
11. Liverpool 2,040
12. Pittwater
100
12. Fairfield 1,865
13. Rockdale 98
13. Coffs Harbour 1,756
14. Walgett 97
14. Port Stephens 1,738
15. Eurobodalla
89
15. Bankstown 1,692
16. Newcastle 89
16. Ku-ring-gai 1,651
17. Kogarah 89
17. Wollongong 1,625
18. Shellharbour
88
18. Sutherland 1,610
19. Warringah 88
19. Warringah 1,543
20. Young 88
20. Parramatta 1,531
Interestingly, there is
no apparent relationship between determination times and the
volume of applications handled. For instance, the slowest five
councils, Leichhardt, Strathfield, Canterbury, Ashfield and
Botany Bay don’t make the top twenty with the highest output.
This is prima facie evidence of serious inefficiency in
many council administrations. And the determination times are
only averages, so many residents and businesses will have
endured far worse service than suggested by the figures. It’s
not uncommon for residents of Leichhardt, for example, to
experience delays of up to twelve months for a determination
concerning structural alterations to a house.
As Sartor’s spokeswoman pointed out, applicants are in large
part ‘mums and dads waiting to add a car port or make minor
alterations to their homes’. Why do some councils take, on
average, around six months to process their paperwork?
Councils have long been a concern for the state government. On
his accession to the premiership, Iemma confronted a sluggish
economy widely linked to the property market slump. He declared
New South Wales ‘open for business’ and started hacking away at
as much red tape as possible.
As minister, Sartor pushed through a series of measures
impacting on council approval powers. Last year the government
passed amendments to the Environmental Planning and
Assessment Act which empowered the minister to appoint an
administrator or panel to oversee planning developments without
a council’s consent. This month these powers were strengthened
when DA determination times were added to factors the minister
can take into account.
Naturally enough, a lot of mayors and councillors are nervous.
Some reacted to perceived encroachments on their turf with
radical schemes. City of Sydney Councillor
John McInerney
called for the creation of a ‘super-council’ to run Sydney’s
metropolitan transport system, airport and big planning
projects. This so-called ‘Central Sydney Authority’ would
consist of the mayors of Leichhardt, Woollahra, Marrickville,
North Sydney, Randwick and Botany Bay.
The superimposition of a new layer of government on to existing
structures, however, would surely be a recipe for chaos.
Nevertheless, McInerney was on to something. The multiplicity of
Sydney’s local government jurisdictions hampers economic
efficiency, and councils are too small to deliver effective
administration.
The
Sydney Chamber of Commerce noted McInerney’s
proposal,
and backed calls ‘for a major rationalisation of the city’s
municipal governance’, saying the existing ‘clumsy arrangement’
was stifling development. Chamber executive director Patricia
Forsythe said ‘Sydney is spectacularly over governed with 43
local government areas and over 400 local government
politicians’.
Compare Sydney’s mosaic to Greater London Council, or New
York’s five boroughs.
The skills base available for local government service is spread
too thinly, and information technology systems can’t be brought
to bear on a large scale. That makes it so much harder to juggle
the complex economic, social and environmental forces that shape
a modern metropolis. No wonder the minister needs to intervene.
More importantly, councils are increasingly vulnerable to the
electoral and media techniques that drive pressure group
politics.
When asked about her council’s dismal ranking, Leichhardt Mayor
Alice Murphy claimed inner suburbs are different. ‘Especially in
the inner city and the inner west where neighbouring
developments really affect people’, she told local newspaper
The Village Voice, ‘just because of the fact that we all
live so close together’.
Boiled down, she means the balance of power rests with
development opponents, not development proponents. We hear a lot
about councils captured by unscrupulous developers, but less
about those captured by community activists and naysayers. The
smaller a council’s population, the more vulnerable it is to
disaffected elements acting alone or in highly organised action
groups. Many councillors acquiesce in bogus claims that these
groups represent ‘the community’, and abdicate their
responsibilities as elected officials. Sydney Council even
accords them quasi official status.
The Council’s website lists
a series of activist groups as if they were branches of its
administration.
Cheered on by green-tinged local media, resident activists are
adept at using the techniques of political campaigning, like
advertising, letterboxing and public
meetings, along with websites, email and mobile phones to
influence, delay or arrest the progress of development
proposals. Nor do they hesitate to distort facts and spread
fears about sham environmental or health impacts. As currently
constituted, councils rarely have the resources to resist
hysterical campaigns of this type.
Short of intervention by the minister, councils can be saved
from capture by expanding population catchments enough to dilute
the clout of special interests. This means amalgamations.
Admittedly, this is easier said than done. But the government
will have to confront the problem sooner or later. Why not at
the start of a new term?
Unlike other major cities,
greater Sydney’s municipal administration is fractured into 38
separate local government areas. One of the smallest in area is
the Council of the City of Sydney, which attracts
disproportionate attention because it covers the city’s
spectacular central business district and some trendy inner-city
precincts like Potts Point, Paddington, Surry Hills,
Darlinghurst, Newtown, Pyrmont and Glebe.
It is a strange feature of Sydney’s civic discourse that the
elected head of the council, who glorifies in the title Lord
Mayor while most other municipal leaders make do with Mayor,
tends to be regarded as a spokesperson for the whole city. This
is noticeable on occasions like the Olympic Games, welcoming
parades or visits by foreign dignitaries.
In fact the City’s boundaries contain a residential population
of about 150,000, so the Lord Mayor represents no more than
around 3.5 per cent of Sydney’s 4.2 million people. Sydney Lord
Mayors have always argued this underrates their role, given that
the City is such an important employment hub. That is open to
question, but the working population is only around 350,000 in
any event, or 8.3 per cent of Sydney‘s total population.
None of this deters the current Lord Mayor, Clover Moore
(pictured). She is always ready to don the mantle of
spokesperson for all Sydney.
And yet the
demographics of the City’s voting constituency makes her an
inapt person for that role. City residents are very different
than the average Sydneysider. Just consider this:
40 per cent are aged between 20 and 35.
The median age of 31.3 years is one of the lowest for any local
government area in NSW.
53.3 per cent aged 15 and over have never married.
45 per cent live in one-person households.
45 per cent were born overseas.
Of those aged 15 and over, 57.9 per cent possess a post-school
educational qualification including 37.1 per cent with a bachelor degree
or higher.
47.2 per cent are employed in high skill occupations (managers, administrators or professionals).
Almost 30 per cent walk to work.
One third use public transport to go to work and 25 per cent drive a car
to work.
The median weekly income for those aged 15 and over of $605 is
35.9 per cent higher than the median metropolitan Sydney individual
income.
15.3 per cent earn over $1500 a week as individuals, compared to only
6.7 per cent of residents of Sydney metropolitan area.
All of which brings us to the Lord Mayor’s most recent foray as
Sydney’s saviour. The content of her address launching ‘Sustainable
Sydney
2030’ was entirely predictable. An edited
versionappeared
on the 6 June features page of the Sydney Morning Herald,
whose own horizons don’t stretch much further than the City’s
turf.
‘Our thoughts of the future’ declared Clover, ‘are challenged by
catastrophic predictions of global warming’. She then lays out
an agenda that just happens to suit the demographic profile of
her voters.
The spectacle of community and political activists hijacking
climate change for their own purposes is all too familiar. The
inner city is and always has been an arc of high-density
development. And yet many of today’s educated and articulate
residents clamour for a historic transformation. Resident action
groups proliferate along with high-minded rhetoric about
environmental protection. Their real motive, of course, is to
combine the locational advantages of inner-city living with the
enhanced property values that accompany open space and
parklands.
In this cause, the Lord Mayor is their servant and mouthpiece.
‘Some of the challenges that must be addressed’ she says, ‘are
air quality, living amenity, water, waste and open space‘.
Inevitably, her address homed in on the state government’s
largest City development proposals: ‘… we are already grappling
with population and congestion pressures, and planning of large
new urban renewal developments such as Green Square, the
Broadway brewery site and East Darling Harbour‘. Each of these
concerns the renewal of derelict industrial sites. The
underlying purpose of Sustainable Sydney 2030 is to oppose such
projects, despite the rhetorical wrapping.
Other elements of Clover’s vision also have scant relevance
outside the inner sanctum.
Her remarks about transport mean nothing to the vast majority of
Sydneysiders who either prefer or need to drive to work. Talk of
‘integrated transport systems, including better and safer
pedestrian and cycling routes’ adds nothing to the broader
Sydney debate on how to ease traffic congestion.
Nor does she have anything serious to say about the challenge of
economic development and job creation in the city’s greater
western region. Since most of her constituency is employed,
affluent and highly educated, her emphasis is on ‘how we might
attract, and keep, skilled innovative workers’. This is a rather
soft objective, so she can afford the nonsense of quoting
British urbanist Charles Landry, ‘who argues that successful
cities of the 21st century will be “living works of art where
citizens can involve and engage themselves” in the
transformation of their city‘.
Families in western Sydney grappling with housing
affordability will no doubt be reassured that ‘New York’s mayor,
Michael Bloomberg, said at the recent C40 conference, tackling
climate change is “the only pro-growth strategy for the long
term”’.
The sub-text of these references is that Clover doesn’t care for
pro-growth strategies that deliver benefits to most of Sydney’s
people.
This points to a worrying blind spot in the thinking of
contemporary urban thinkers and planners. Rarely does Australian
discussion about urban development escape the confines of
anti-growth environmentalism on the one hand, and special
pleading of the ‘creative class’ variety on the other.
Proponents of urban growth are usually dismissed as greedy
developers or their agents.
Even advocates for western Sydney, a low density region with
social and economic drivers favouring suburbanisation, seem
beholden to the conventional wisdom. When David Borger, Lord
Mayor (another one) of Parramatta and newly elected MP, spoke
out against the relative paucity of cultural educational
facilities in the west - a valid complaint in itself - he framed
the discussion in ‘creative economy’ terms. At least this earned
him
space on the Herald’s features page.
Thankfully, there is a fresh alternative on the horizon.
Australia’s urban debates will benefit from the appearance of
American urbanist Joel Kotkin’s new thinking on ‘opportunity
urbanism’, which he proposes as an emerging paradigm for the
twenty-first century. Kotkin’s ideas on cities as engines of
social mobility should go along way towards illuminating the
blind spot that obscures our sight of the real Sydney.
Has there been a
breakthrough on the housing affordability front?
We have long argued that the affordability crisis comes down to
one overwhelming factor. Planning authorities haven’t been
releasing enough residential lots to keep the land component of
house prices low.
Along with the Institute of Public Affairs, the authors of the
DemographiaInternational Housing Affordability Survey
and others, we maintain the crisis can, in large part, be
sheeted home to urban consolidation, the official policy of most
state planning departments over recent decades. Driven by
misguided economic, social and environmental concerns, planning
authorities have sought to impose restrictive urban boundaries
and urban infill at the expense of suburban growth.
Across the country, the result has been escalating land prices.
The small band of dissenters have, on the whole, had to contend
with political and media indifference at best, or outright
hostility at worst.
In Sydney, proponents or suburban growth have had to grapple
with two major obstacles: a state government set firmly on the
urban consolidation track by former premier Bob Carr, and a
leading newspaper of record, the Sydney Morning Herald,
with a rigid ultra-green editorial line.
The Herald has been known to depict outer suburban
residents as polluting Neanderthals who live in gaudy
‘McMansions’ and drive petrol-guzzling FWDs.
It may be that both obstacles are starting to melt away,
however. We were pleasantly surprised by the different
tone of two articles appearing in the Herald’s 7 May
edition, written or co-written by Catherine Munro.
‘Great housing land if anyone could afford it’, which
appeared on the front page, came as close as the Herald
ever has to endorsing the land supply argument. ‘As debates over
Sydney's home affordability crisis continue’, wrote Munro, ‘the
supply of new houses on the city's fringe is at historic lows of
2300 a year compared with a 30-year average of 7500’. The
article catalogues a series of complaints against the state
government’s exorbitant infrastructure levies. This is quite a
departure, since developer levies to fund social infrastructure
and environmental protection were a mainstay of the Herald’s
grudging attitudes to suburban development.
In the second article,
‘Levies halt the flood of housing’, two of the country’s
largest developers get to make the case that developer levies
are slowing the release of more lots on to the market. And they
aren’t even depicted as greedy ogres.
These interesting pieces were followed on 11 May by another
Munro
article highlighting the Housing Industry Association’s
recent
HIA-APM Land
Monitor survey, which reported that Sydney land prices rose
11.7 per cent, and the cost of land was 57 per cent of the
overall value of a new house, compared with 48 per cent on
average across Australia. Munro’s closing comment says a lot
about her diagnosis of the problem: ‘In NSW, the State
Government has established a Growth Centres Commission to speed
up the process of zoning and planning new land on Sydney’s
outskirts’.
The Herald’s new found interest in land supply is matched
by a perceptible change of emphasis on the part of the NSW
Government. Unfortunately, the Government’s overall planning blueprint,
the City of Cities plan, still dictates that only 30 to
40 per cent of Sydney’s future housing needs will be built on
greenfields sites. This is an artificially low proportion.
Nevertheless, Planning Minister Frank Sartor is
cranking up the release of lots in two designated ‘growth
centres’ on the city’s south-western and north-western
outskirts. Despite contrary noises prior to the March general
election, Sartor has clearly taken the land supply argument to
heart.
The question is whether this flawed aspect of the City of Cities
plan is destined for a rethink. Hopefully, we are witnessing signs of better
things to come.
Traffic
congestion. After real estate values, it’s Sydney’s greatest
obsession. Dramas like the Cross City Tunnel and the Lane Cove
Tunnel kept us entertained for weeks. And some of the few
animated moments during the recent state election were about
none other than traffic. Sydneysiders didn’t give a toss about
disruptive visits from foreign dignitaries like Vice President
Dick Cheney or the majestic liners Queen Mary and QE II. Just
give us free-flowing traffic.
Most pundits come to the issue from an auto-phobic perspective:
there are too many cars on the road
And every other month, it seems, another report hits the deck
warning that the city is headed for traffic Armageddon. The
latest couple of installments have done nothing to lower the
temperature.
A federal Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics (BTRE)
report says the average delay due to congestion in Sydney will
grow from 0.285 minutes per kilometre in 1990 to 0.374 minutes
this year, and to 0.527 minutes by 2020. In terms of time
wasted, vehicle operating costs and pollution, the bureau found
the social cost of congestion will rise from $3.5 billion to
$7.8 billion between 2005 and 2020.
Meanwhile, according to NRMA (National Roads and Motoring
Association) research, 57 per cent of Sydney businesses say
their fleets spend up to four hours longer in traffic each week.
More than 80 per cent of businesses observed traffic congestion
to increase over the last year. Further, 12 per cent of
businesses say their annual operating costs increased by as much
as $20,000 because of more time spent on the road.
These reports got more attention than usual when the NSW
Minister for Roads, Eric Roozendaal, felt it necessary to
retract his election campaign comment that Sydney’s congestion
is no worse than it was 10 years ago.
Congestion is by definition bad. It’s frustrating. People feel
it’s contrary to the natural order of things. They will readily
blame either the government or the relevant state agency - in
this case the Roads and Traffic Authority - for stuffing things
up. This sort of mindset can easily foster the illusion that
there is a clear solution, if only the government had the brains
or courage to see it.
For some, like progressive urban planners and environmentalists,
it’s all a simple matter of dragging people from their cars and
onto public transport. Their particular illusion is that masses
of people can’t wait to ditch their cars and hop onto buses and
trains. If only the government would build a better network,
deliver more services and introduce convenient timetables,
traffic congestion would be history.
Unfortunately for them, things are more complicated. Using the
2004 household travel survey, the NSW Transport and Population
Data Centre has found that over 24 years, peak traffic periods
have expanded from 8am to 9am to 7.30am to 9.30am, and from 3pm
to 6pm to 2.30pm to 7pm. The Centre explains that not all
drivers at those times were engaged in essential trips like
commuting to work. About one in five trips in the morning peak
related to ‘discretionary activities’ such as shopping. A
significant proportion of these trips were made by housewives,
retirees and the unemployed. At 3.30pm around 38 per cent of
trips were discretionary and in the second afternoon peak at
around 5.30pm more than 40 per cent were discretionary.
Sydney’s traffic peaks have been profoundly affected by changing
patterns of workforce participation, like higher rates of women
in part-time and casual work, and demographic changes like the
aging of the population. Add to these rising affluence, making
car ownership, and multi-car ownership, more affordable and the
growing dispersion of residential, commercial and employment
locations throughout the greater urban region.
Only 13 per sent of Sydneysiders work in the CBD and greater
western Sydney has achieved 75 per cent employment containment.
These denser, ad hoc travel patterns can’t be serviced by public
transport. And the state can’t afford a transport network that
is anywhere near as efficient and convenient as car use. Little
wonder then, that when
surveyed, most Sydneysiders preferred their cars even if the
standard of public transport improved.
There’s no turning back to the 1960s.
While some urge the carrot of better public transport, others
raise the stick of penalising car use. According to the BTRE
report, ‘if a pricing mechanism could be put in place that
obliged all motorists to base their travel decisions not only on
their private costs but also on the additional costs imposed on
others ... then transport choices would alter.’ This brings us to the
holy grail of urban planners: a London-style congestion charge.
This was a special gift to Londoners from Lord Mayor ‘Red’ Ken
Livingstone. As Nico McDonald
points out, however, the charge isn’t such a success: ‘More
generally, the Congestion Charge doesn’t appear to be designed
to reduce driving in central London during the busiest periods.
For instance, drivers, such as commuters, pay a single daily
charge. Once paid, there is no incentive to avoid the charging
zone or period when driving back from work. In additional,
drivers are able to pay the Charge for a year ahead, which
incentivises them to use their car rather than other modes of
transport.’
Unpalatable as it is to planners and activists, the solution has
to include more and better road construction. The NRMA will be
dismissed as a self-interested motoring association, but the
organisation is right when it says ‘a transport corridor is
needed along the northern beaches, which combines public
transport options and the upgrade of local roads’, and ‘Sydney
also needs to act now to ease traffic around Port Botany and
south and south-west Sydney by completing the F6 and M4
extensions’.
Sydney’s freeway and
orbital motorway networks are integrated systems. Failure to
complete certain sections renders the whole network less
efficient. A case in point is the M4 East, the ‘missing link’ of
the M4, a lateral east-west axis across the city. Plans to
complete the M4, which now terminates at Strathfield, but is
meant to terminate close to the city centre, is on hold due to
community opposition. Community opposition should be
distinguished from public opposition, however. The M4 East
corridor crosses the greenie heartland of Sydney’s inner-west,
where a highly organised coalition of resident action groups,
Greens, local councillors and MPs is always ready to mobilise
for action.
These activists are really concerned about property values, but
will resort to tired old slogans to fight their cause. One of
these is the well rehearsed line that road construction never
works because more roads just mean more cars. But this depends
on the circumstances. According to the international consultancy
Demographia, for
instance, in the 1980s Houston, Texas had the worst traffic
congestion in the United States but reduced it by 45 per cent
after building more road capacity. Few other cities across the
world have tried it.
Perhaps it’s time for a novel thought. Let’s reduce congestion
by building more state of the art roads.
This
comment was republished by
On Line Opinion, Australia's
e-journal of social and political debate.
Exclusive: Rory Robertson is wrong on house
prices, by Alan Moran
Australians are heavily
focussed on house prices. As well as their home, most people
recognise the family house as their most valuable asset.
The “haves”, those who own their homes are keen to see their
worth maintained. The “have-nots”, mainly younger people, are
constantly looking at house price levels that are depressingly
receding away from their affordability horizons. As renters, the
“have-nots” also recognise the increased costs they are shelling
out for a roof over their heads.
There are those who argue that it is only demand that is forcing
up house prices. The SMH and the Age’s property
writers have been suckered into this theory which is being
popularised by Macquarie Bank’s Rory Robertson.
Mr Robertson
thinks the reason why house price have gone up in some places
but not others is because some places are “sexy”. He defines
these as those cities he likes: Australia is rather flattered by
this perspective because all our capital cities are sexy. They
are joined by US cities including New York, LA, San Francisco,
and Honolulu, as well as British cities like London, Bournemouth
(Fawlty Towers territory) and Cardiff (famous only when the
Wallabies or All Blacks visit!). New Zealand, with Auckland also
scores a Robertson rose as does Vancouver in Canada.
Those cities Macquarie Bank considers to be “dull” include
bustling Toronto; Houston the world’s space industry capital;
Cosmopolitan Quebec; and Dallas, one of the premier energy and
high tech centres in the world. He also argues, “Important
coastal cities are expensive everywhere”. Presumably those that
aren’t expensive – including Halifax, Nova Scotia; Toronto (on a
Great Lake) New Orleans and Melbourne (that’ll be Melbourne,
Florida) as well as Houston, are not in Mr Robertson’s view
“important”.
Like Beauty, sexy is in the eye of the beholder. What really
distinguishes those cities that have affordable housing prices
from other cities is the supply of land on which the authorities
allow new houses to be built.
Cities like Houston, Dallas and Atlanta have house/land packages
roughly half the price of Melbourne despite growing faster than
any Australian city. This is because government in those cities
does not restrict land releases for housing.
And, on the basis of urbanisation, Australia has the lowest
level of urbanisation in the world – in Australia 99.7 per cent
of our land has no urban development.
If there were no restrictions on land for building, it would
cost under $50-70,000 for a fully serviced block on the fringe
of Melbourne and under $100,000 on the fringes of Sydney. Yet,
according to the Urban Development Institute, the average price
is $145,000 in Melbourne, having doubled since 2001, and
$300,000 in Sydney.
In NSW current levels at under 30,000 per annum compare with
50,000 in the early 1990s indicating that there is no building
constraint. The figures tell the Sydney story – the number of
lots the government has allowed to be made available has fallen
and, Lo and behold, price has increased. The same pattern can be
seen throughout Australia.
Another element of demand that
is often blamed for high house prices is interest rates.
Interest rates are important for house prices but they will only
inflate prices if supply cannot be increased. Other high value
consumer durables like yachts, light planes, and Mercedes cars
did not increase in price with lower interest rates. Just as in
cities like Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and a host of others in the
US, this was because supply is flexible and not regulated by
government.
Alan Moran
is Director of the Deregulation Unit at the Institute of Public
Affairs.
The
mid-north and far-north coasts of New South Wales boast some of
the most charming shorelines in the developed world. And for
regions offering so many natural attractions, they are also
amongst the most sparsely populated. The reasons are well known.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, coastal townships and villages
like Forster, Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour and Byron Bay
became the chosen refuge of retirees, ‘alternative
life-stylers’, so-called ‘sea-changers’ and others hoping to
escape the Sydney rat-race. Byron Bay, in particular, became a
sanctuary for pot-smoking - and cultivating - hippies, ‘ferals’,
dole-bludgers and assorted celebrities from the entertainment
industry.
Some of these centres became famous for their laid-back,
counter-culture ambience, and, over time, for something else - a
ferocious resolve on the part of residents to stop more people
joining them. Having acquired their slice of paradise on earth,
they were determined to keep it all for themselves. Love, peace
and the brotherhood of man were fine, so long as the brothers
stayed in Sydney.
A distinct type of political activism took root in these areas.
Diverse action groups sprung up with a singular focus - to block
development. Any proposal showing the slightest promise of
attracting residents and commerce would be opposed vehemently.
These activists, and their elected representatives on local city
and shire councils, became adept at dressing up instances of
selfish exclusivity with the weasel words of environmental
protection. Their success is clear for all to see. The far-north
coast region covers an area of 10,293 square kilometres but
contains only 228,000 people. The mid-north coast region,
roughly double the size, only 333,400.
Just consider that these figures translate to a population
density in the far north coast of 22 people per square
kilometre. By comparison, the population densities of the UK and
France are 244 and 109 respectively.
Judging by the recently released planning ‘strategies’ for these
regions, there is little political appetite for a challenge to
the nimbys (not in my backyard). After all, this is a difficult
election year for the state government. The
Far North Coast Strategy plans for a colossal - wait for it
- population increase of 60,400 people over 25 years. And the
Mid North Coast Strategy? No less than 91,000 over 25 years.
You will find more people living in a single Shanghai
neighbourhood. These numbers are pathetic. We are talking about
regions that could, if unlocked, attract some of the brightest
and most dynamic people in the country, not to mention the
world. The strategies amount to nothing less than abject
capitulation to the nimbys.
They are very odd in another respect. Both fret over the fact
that the regional populations are aging, and yet this is simply
accepted as a fact of life. There is no sense of urgency to
replenish the stock with younger blood. According to the
far-north coast strategy, the median age is projected to
increase from 39 to 51 years, due to more than doubling of the
population aged 65 and over. Similarly, the median age on the
mid-north coast is expected to increase from 41 years in 2001 to
55 in 2031, and, again, the population aged 65 years and over
will more than double. So what should be done? ‘Currently 80
percent of all dwellings in the region(s) are detached houses’
say the strategies, ’but with demographic change and lower
occupancy ratios there will need to be a greater proportion of
multi-unit dwellings in future to provide accessible and
adaptable housing choices’. Prepare for pensioners. If these
strategies are implemented, the northern coast will end up
‘terra nullius’. Even nimbys die eventually.
The residential settlement pattern promoted by the strategies is
based on the underlying premise that things mustn’t change too
much. Consider this typical planning euphemism for a policy of
mediocre growth: ‘The Regional Strategy identifies and promotes
a settlement pattern that protects environmental values
and natural resources while utilising and developing the
existing network of major urban centres, reinforcing
village character, and requiring efficient use of existing
services and major transport routes [emphasis added].’ In other
words, we’ll keep the masses out. This paragraph also lets drop
the voguish planning word ‘village’, code for ‘not suburban’.
Since suburbs, and detached houses on sizeable blocks, are the
preferred destination for young couples with children, this
policy will guarantee the coast’s geriatric future.
Nor do the strategies have much of interest to say about
employment. The emphasis is on tourism, a convenient industry
catering to people who don’t stay.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s editorial on the strategies,
having described them as ‘laudable’, ends on a rather incoherent
note. ‘The State Government must back the warm sentiments of the
coastal strategies with the cold hard cash to underwrite the
employment and services needed to attract and retain people of
working age. Otherwise the future of the NSW coast, north and
south, will be only as the world’s longest retirement village’.
Notwithstanding the Herald’s reversion to 1970s-style
Keynesian pump priming, economic dynamism is built on different
foundations in the twenty-first century. It is built on low
taxes, inflation and interest rates, and growing concentrations
of people with assets and disposable incomes. These are the
conditions in which the modern, predominantly service economy
thrives. But the strategies are designed to prevent such
concentrations. While they see centres like Coffs Harbour and
Port Macquarie emerging as more sophisticated economic hubs,
complete with high rise office blocks, it would take a much
larger population base to underwrite the transformation of these
sleepy towns.
All of this is a pity. If not for heavy handed restrictions on
market forces, alluring places like Coffs, Port Macquarie and
Byron could become important national cities with international
reputations as nodes in a network of service industries - like
education and information technology - stretching from Sydney to
Brisbane.
According to the Herald,
Byron Shire Mayor Jan Barham, a Green, ‘welcomed the strategy as
consistent with the council’s vision for her area’. What a
surprise. The government should be concerned about that
endorsement. When the Greens support a planning strategy, it’s
bound to be a dud.
This
comment was republished by
On Line Opinion, Australia's
e-journal of social and political debate.
Many
Labor activists have long lived with the assumption that their
aims are more or less consistent with those of the Greens. This
era of complacency is rapidly coming to an end, however. The
climate change debate is opening up fissures that won’t be
closed. The Greens’ irrational and uncompromising prescriptions
are just not compatible with the interests of workers. Unions
are beginning to recoil from the grave ditch into which
environmentalists, inside and outside the ALP, are leading them.
This low key clash came to a head over the proposed coal mine at
Anvil Hill in the Hunter Valley. Newcastle is the Hunter’s
capital, so it’s inevitable that the city’s civic officials
should squabble over the region’s planning controversies. By all
accounts, Newcastle City Council’s meeting on 7 November was quite an occasion.
Councillors pushed through an extreme motion crammed
with demands on the NSW government along these lines:
1. A cap on coal exports from Newcastle at existing levels.
2. An independent inquiry into the environmental, social and
economic sustainability of the current coal industry and
proposed expansion of the Hunter Valley coal industry.
3. Pending such an inquiry, a moratorium on new coal mines at
Anvil Hill and elsewhere in the Hunter Valley and Gunnedah
Basin.
4. Mandatory renewable energy target of 25% by 2020, with 20% by
2014 as a first step, in keeping with targets set by the South
Australian Government.
5. A levy on the coal industry to fund the transition to
sustainability in the Hunter beyond coal.
The councillors have plenty of gall, if little else. Having
adopted this radical scorched-earth policy, they invited trade
union representatives to address the council at ‘a public voice
session’. In other words, the prisoner was allowed some final
words before slipping on the noose. It’s unclear whether any
union reps accepted the invitation.
The motion preceded a controversial decision by Judge
Nicola Pain of the Land and Environment Court to reject the
developer’s environmental assessment for the Anvil Hill project
(see this edition’s editorial).
Of course, it’s all the Greens’ handiwork. Greens councillor
Michael Osborne put up the motion. When the City of Newcastle
votes to abolish the Hunter’s chief economic mainspring - the
NSW coal industry is worth $9 billion - then the lunatics have
truly taken over the asylum. As we have
argued, closing down
the coal industry will do nothing to mitigate global carbon
emissions, but it would certainly undermine Australia’s
international efforts to promote clean coal technologies.
Sadly, two of the lead characters in this farce were Labor
councillors, Marilyn Eade and Paul Scobie. They voted with the Greens to
form a 7-2 majority in favour of the motion. Presumably they are
familiar with the Hunter’s unemployment rate. Presumably they
know a substantial proportion of the Hunter’s working people
depend on the coal industry. Presumably they know the Anvil Hill
mine will bring at least 240 jobs to Muswellbrook directly and
more indirectly.
If not, they should pay more attention to their federal Labor
member, Joel Fitzgibbon. ‘Extreme environmentalists are
launching a jihad against the industry in an attempt to close it
down’, he said while denouncing the motion, ‘and the community
must be told the other side of the story’. That is how any
self-respecting Labor supporter should respond to the current
wave of climate change hysteria.
This episode demonstrates that Labor has truly reached ‘a fork
in the road’. The choice is between Green propaganda and
economic reality.
Inner-city residents are familiar with grandstanding Green
councillors. Their motions are a pointless indulgence in
localities with no economic link to whatever industry they are
demonising that week. But when it happens in the heart of a
region where thousands of people depend on the industry under
attack, we have reached a crisis in the quality of our civic
discourse.
Local newspapers around Sydney’s inner-west are, on the whole,
little more than ad sheets and mouth-pieces for the latest
resident action group to come along. The publishers of familiar
publications like The Glebe, The Courier and The Village Voice believe their commercial interests lie in
embracing any or every anti-development cause celebre.
They calculate that such campaigns are close to their readers’
hearts and pockets, since it's mostly about preserving property
values - even when dressed up in green mumbo-jumbo.
As for blue-collar jobs, they belong on another planet.
Heroic struggles over Callan Park (Rozelle), the Bells site
(Balmain), the water police site (Pyrmont) and the White Bay
cement terminal have long filled the pages of these papers. The
latest controversy concerns a proposal by Baileys Marine to
build and operate a marine fuel depot and supply facility at
White Bay (the cement terminal was knocked on the head). Action
groups are forming, outrage is being expressed.
Amongst all the predictable anti-development babble, it is
refreshing, and somewhat surprising, to see a ray of common
sense from a writer for a less well-known inner-west
publication, Ciao Magazine. Russell Edwards sent a
pointed letter to local publishers which, alas, didn’t get much
of a run, but which deserves a wide readership.
Today I was handed a flyer about Bailey’s at Rozelle Market,
which I read. Though it didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t heard
before. Similarly worded material is produced whenever anyone
wants to do anything at all in Balmain. Producing anti-growth
flyers is probably its only growth industry.
Or the only one which is tolerated. And it is never short of
funds or zeal.
Once upon time a group of people brought into “working-class”
Balmain and Rozelle because they liked its ambience. But as soon
they got here they found they didn’t like the “working” bit. Or
the “class” bit either. Pretty soon that was sorted, the prices
they were able to pay for real estate saw to that.
So they set about getting rid of all the industry they didn’t
like – especially on the waterfront. Real estate interests –
developers and their supplicant politicians – pricked up their
ears… And responded by closing down the port. That made sense
too, after all that land was exceptionallyvaluable. The
last successful “anti industry” campaign (at White Bay) was run
by (surprise!) a real estate agent.
Since there is so much money at stake you will hear from many
people about Bailey’s, and almost all of them will use the word
“community”. I do hope that you – whose job it is to assess
these plans – are able to understand just how abused the word
has become.
And just how disingenuous these people are. And consider the
interests of the people of NSW as well.
Those who are complaining do not speak for everyone, even all of
Balmain. I live just on the other side of Iron Cove, so maybe my
view is irrelevant anyway. But not everyone has a twisted,
vested interest in watching this state become any more of
economic basket-case than it is fast becoming. A situation
accelerated by timid politicians listening to professional nay-sayers
like the ones who organised the petition I was handed.
That their interest in the price of their properties happily
coincides with the interests of residential property developers
should be noted – by you at least.
How true. And yet Mr Edwards is but a voice crying in the
wilderness.
COMMENT: Urban growth
- the escape from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
The classics of art, literature and cinema are so easily
reinterpreted to suit contemporary fads and fashions. Take
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is now
commonly held up by many academics and writers as an attack on
corporatised, ‘neo-liberal’, capitalism when it’s really about
the horrors of Stalinist communism.
This sort of revisionism was recently invoked during a minor
eruption, of all places, on the letters page of the Australian Financial Review.
On 7 November the AFR carried a story about the NSW
government’s Six Cities initiative, a strand of its broader
Sydney metropolitan strategy. Spearheaded by the
Cities Task Force, the initiative represents a plan to turn
the spotlight from Sydney’s CBD to outlying regional and
suburban nodes including Penrith, Liverpool, Parramatta, Gosford,
Wollongong and Newcastle. The initiative is a commendable, and
long overdue, effort to reorient resources towards the greater
Sydney region’s fastest growing centres.
Quoted in the
AFR article, the Taskforce’s head, Chris
Johnson, says the initiative is part of a global shift towards
polycentric cities with a ‘rich combination of densities and
uses’ right across the metropolitan area. Johnson’s appraisal of
the global trend is spot on. The American urbanist Joel Kotkin
has written extensively on the continuing drift towards lower
density free-standing homes, and how this is transforming the
spatial distribution of commercial activity across the world.
‘They are not mere bedroom communities with malls’,
writes Kotkin of the new suburbs springing up across the US,
‘but boast well-developed business parks, town centres and, in
some cases ... a large amount of well-preserved, natural open
space’.
‘It’s about getting confidence into these (six) cities’,
explained Johnson. His next statement reflected basic common
sense: ‘jobs are the driver of what a city centre should be
about’.
Sense is not so common, it seems. The following day, Johnson was
blasted on the AFR‘s letters page. ‘Tell that to
Manchester, Rheims or Prague’, wrote Andrew Woodhouse of the
Australian Heritage Institute from Sydney’s ritzy, harbourside
Potts Point. ‘[E]ach of these vibrant, pro-resident, regional
cities is not based on jobs growth’, pontificates Woodhouse,
‘but on a symbiosis between residential activity including
parks, pools, live theatre, concerts, art galleries, cafes,
markets, their heritage and sympathetic business activities’.
Inverting Johnson, Woodhouse asserted ‘jobs are the end of a
living city, not a driving cause’.
The average high school student will spot the flaw in this
portentous outburst. Penrith, Liverpool and Gosford have a lot
going for them, but how comparable are they to the venerable
cities of Manchester, Rheims and Prague? The analogy is simply
facile. But Woodhouse does little to redeem himself. He follows
up with a series of blatantly false propositions.
‘The post-World War II concept of a city proposed by Johnson is
a doug
There’s
another election in the air. Local councils throughout New South
Wales face the voters this coming September. Hence the flotsam
of colourful ideas floating from the office of Clover Moore,
Lord Mayor of Sydney’s City Council. And there’ll be plenty more
by election day. 
The
housing affordability debate has taken a strange turn lately. So
strange that we need to ask a basic question. Is it about
economics or social welfare?
On
30 November 1999, delegates gathered in Seattle for that year’s
World Trade Organization ministerial conference. Today the event
is remembered less for an abortive round of trade negotiations
than for the mayhem wreaked on the city’s streets. In what
became known as the ‘Battle of Seattle’, around 40,000
anti-globalisation protesters converged on downtown Seattle,
leaving a trail of smashed shopfronts and bloodied police in
their wake. Cleanup costs and police overtime bills amounted to
$US3 million. Losses due to property damage and business
interruption were estimated at $US20 million. 
Traffic
congestion. After real estate values, it’s Sydney’s greatest
obsession. Dramas like the Cross City Tunnel and the Lane Cove
Tunnel kept us entertained for weeks. And some of the few
animated moments during the recent state election were about
none other than traffic. Sydneysiders didn’t give a toss about
disruptive visits from foreign dignitaries like Vice President
Dick Cheney or the majestic liners Queen Mary and QE II. Just
give us free-flowing traffic. 
The
mid-north and far-north coasts of New South Wales boast some of
the most charming shorelines in the developed world. And for
regions offering so many natural attractions, they are also
amongst the most sparsely populated. The reasons are well known.
Many
Labor activists have long lived with the assumption that their
aims are more or less consistent with those of the Greens. This
era of complacency is rapidly coming to an end, however. The
climate change debate is opening up fissures that won’t be
closed. The Greens’ irrational and uncompromising prescriptions
are just not compatible with the interests of workers. Unions
are beginning to recoil from the grave ditch into which
environmentalists, inside and outside the ALP, are leading them.
