From a political perspective, the great success of the monarchists in the republic referendum of the nineties was transforming the issue into one of giving the “politicians” a good kicking. Canny campaigning, but it was made possible by the lousy arguments put forward by some of the more, um, globalist voices in the republican movement. To take one example, Dick Woolcott, who seemed to think his difficulty in explaining the role of the GG, Queen, and PM in the events of 1975 to Suharto was somehow a convincing argument in support of a republic1. Yes, Australia’s constitutional eccentricities may cause occasional embarrassment to Australian professional diplomats, and the odd bit of perplexity and/or mirth in foreign capitals, but as an argument for supporting a republic it rightly went down like a lead balloon.
The recently-retired (in the footballer sense) Maxine McKew makes a case for a larger, denser Sydney in a speech reprinted in the SMH today. While cased in some unobjectionable sentiments, its core centers on two debatable propositions: the “relevance” of cities is measured, in large part, in their global recognition and influence, and that such “relevance” is primarily related to a city’s population.
McKew draws comparison between the emerging mega-cities of Asia with the stably-populated cities of Europe:
Cities that lose heart, are timid, or feel unwelcoming, are places that will gradually lose relevance. And in that context, I’m worried about Sydney. It is still brash but it certainly is not bold.
This when a new urban age has been proclaimed and when more than half the world’s population live in cities. Foreign Policy magazine makes the point that in the 21st century, cities, rather than states, are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. Alongside the global giants of London, New York and Hong Kong, is an emerging new category of mega city – city-states along the Persian Gulf and the super-populous cities of Mumbai or Shanghai. By 2025 China is expected to have 15 super cities with an average population of 25 million, where Europe will have none.
Talk of mega cities is the sort of thing that drives Dick Smith to produce Hobbesian-style nightmares that are aired on your ABC. He is part of the ”shrink Australia” crowd. We can, if we choose, sit at about 22 million, and say to the rest of Asia, ”sorry, we’re full.” And when they stop laughing in Shanghai and Manila and Jakarta, we’ll start to slip into irrelevance, just like Europe.
So, let us discuss the “irrelevance” of Europe. To whom is Europe going to become an “irrelevance”? Certainly not its citizens. So what about them? Are the citizens of Europe going to be impoverished? No. Is their enviable lifestyle (by world standards) going away? No. Their health care systems suddenly evaporate? No. What about their industries? No.
If by relevance, one means the ability of Europe’s political elites to bully the rest of the world, sure, that’s gone. But so what? Given the continued decline in military spending in Europe and the lack of interest of the European populace in assisting in American wars of choice, I think it’s an arguable hypothesis that most Europeans don’t give a toss about their wider “relevance” or otherwise.
Now, I’m sure that if you’re on a politician on a winter break study tour, a smaller Australia will undoubtedly get even shorter shrift in Beijing than it presently does.
But as an argument for a larger Sydney (and by extension Australia), this latter-day version of Manifest Destiny is about as convincing as Dick’s Suharto anecdote and deserves about the same level of respect.
1. Of course, the difficulty of explaining it does say something about the absurdity of our current constitutional arrangements. But whether our constitutional arrangements are difficult for professional diplomats to explain to impatient foreign leaders is the height of irrelevance, if Australians are genuinely happy with them.
Victoria is currently wealthier than New South Wales and Melbourne is currently growing faster than Sydney, due in part to the high levels of immigration [Gottleibsen] as international students drift into permanent residents.
I do not want to see all of our agricultural land in Werribbee and Cranbourne watered by rain plowed under for new suburbs. This makes us more reliant on the Murray Darling foodbowl with its diminishing rainfall for our food.
In my experience kids drift from the country to the cities for study and work opportunities. It takes a lot of focus and determination and lost wealth creation to decide to stay in your home town. Meanwhile city kids opt to live with mum and dad for as long as possible because rents are high and house prices on the suburban fringe are $320,000 and apartment prices in inner suburbs are $600,000 – not very affordable on incomes of $60,000 per year.
Increases in population in inner Melbourne has made my suburb safer because there are more pedestrians and tram users out after dark. There is now more nightlife.
Maxine was arguing for larger council areas to plan for increased population density. Thoroughly agree. Do we want denser housing developed house block by house block or do we want whole streets redeveloped. Looking at some of the older blocks of flats in Hawthorn or St Kilda leads you to question whether small is beautiful especially when contrasted to the Ministry of Housing developments on Beaconsfield Parade or the low rise in Prahran.
The latest 2 blocks of flats completed near me,
one has 48 units, underground parking and not a tree in sight or soil for any garden – evidently the overseas investors hate gardens
the other block is 6 ugly small dark boxes, despite the builders obvious pride in his work
Hooray for everyone who puts that wildly overused, frequently misused and almost as frequently misspelled word ‘relevant’, and all of its forms, in the ironic quotation marks it deserves.
‘Relevance’ to what, for goodness’ sake? Yes, I know that’s exactly what your post is saying, Robert — just expressing my furious agreement.
In summary, we need to increase the population density of Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane. The current suburban sprawl is not good use of land – how many people’s yards are just untended weeds or dumps, the population on the outer edges have hour long commutes that are increasing. Its difficult to provide services to the outer suburbs so they become dormitory suburbs where people sleep but they travel out for work, school or leisure activities.
House prices are unaffordable for people on low or average incomes as house prices start at $320,000. HOw many large houses are occupied by 1 or 2 people? Builders are now introducing ranges of smaller homes for first home buyers, downsizers and investors building rentals
Good post. I don’t think it’s as simple as providing increased density, particularly in areas (ie all of Sydney) where traffic congestion is already a nightmare, even if it is next to a station.
If we actually started taking that old concept of decentralisation seriously we might solve a wide range of problems.
And weren’t most of us going to be working from home by now, anyway.
And agree about relevance. Relevance to what?
I think Sydney is now a bit worried about losing its mojo to Melbourne. It’s always liked being Australia’s only ‘international’ city.
I agree both cities need areas of denser housing and a variety of ways of making housing cheaper. The cities need to become a little more European, in fact. If they don’t they’ll suffer, because people move to cities with cheaper housing. This is also interesting in terms of the RARA and NBN agenda. I know quite a few people who commute via train and bus from small cities and such as Ballarat, Castlemaine, Woodend etc. Geelong is only an hour away and is virtually a suburb of Melbourne now. (Don’t tell them that).
Bille, I recommend you have a look at the public housing flats on Raleigh St. Windsor. They’re great looking and use sustainable technologies.
Billie, I’m not opposing density, or larger cities per se. I’m just saying that I think the ability of city (or national) leaders to big-note themselves on the international stage (which is what “relevance” seems to boil down to) is a rubbish justification for it.
Fine@5:
Yes, possibly. But, in this context, who is this amphormous “Sydney” we are talking about, and why does it matter?
One of the elements that makes a great city is good urban design and architecture, and in this respect Sydney fails dismally.
Which is why most Sydneysiders correctly see increased urban density as code for more ugly apartment blocks with zero community ammenities and infrastructure to support the increased density.
In this sense, Sydney is dense enough already, in keeping with the government, planners and developers’ mindset.
And what is this ‘mojo’ we’re all scared of losing?
Me, I couldn’t give a FF is Melbourne takes complete ownership of this mojo.
Robert & adrian, I agree with you both. The idea of ‘mojo’ and ‘relevance’ is meaningless. But, it’s the terms McKew chooses to write in. It’s attempting to conjure up a vision of a gorgeous city by the Harbour, which isn’t relevant to most people who live in Sydney. For that matter, Melbourne’s chosen self-image as flogged by Vic Tourism, of the arty city full of people wearing black and drinking coffee in groovy little laneways, isn’t too relevant to the lives of most Melburnians either.
I’m always astonished at commentators who start by denouncing something as ‘irrelevant’and then devote their entire speech or column to the same topic.
See any right-wing business commentator discussing the trade union movement – which is apparently so irrelevant we have to pass stringent laws against it.
“Relevance” huh
Look out Maxine your cultural cringe is showing.
Just working my way through Recollections of a bleeding heart for the first time, only about 100 pages in, and Keating (as described by Don Watson) hooked the great Australian narrative of becoming a republic and getting our own flag into the push into Asia and talking to Suharto as a fellow neighbour. So yeah, he was able to make a globalist connection. Not really a globalist one, not an anti-nationalist statement, more of a true nationalist (rather than cultural cringe lost poms) one.
As opposed to more ugly suburban subdivisions with zero community amenities and infrastructure to support the increased sprawl.
Fine, I’ll have a look at Raleigh St.
I think some of the best housing in the area is the Ministry of Housing stock and private developers have built cheap nasty blocks of flats on blocks that are wall to wall concrete, cheek by jowl with other blocks of flats with no cross ventilation.
I also like the cream brick beehive flats in Dryden St North Melbourne, where you look out the window at an angle to the next flat, not straight into their rooms.
Sydney’s growth is into the Central Coast transforming Gosford from orange groves and fishing shacks into suburbs 90 minutes from the CBD, or down into Bowral or Wollongong. The cheap housing projects are being emptied of their tenants and the blocks are being refurbished for wealthy home owners. Already Manly council runs a commuter bus from the central coast into Manly for its low-paid workers who can’t afford to live in the area.
Fine said:
Quite right. I grew up in Sydney and have lived for nearly all of my 52 years here. I’d be lucky to have averaged 3 visits to the harbour in each of those 52 years.
On the substantive point though I do agree we need a very substantial increase in density, certainly within 25 km of the GPO. Ideally, you’d redesign the suburbs so that they were largely self-contained, cutting out “rat runs” (by limiting the entry and exit points) and linking each by some kind of rail.
High and medium medium density buildings could be designed to ensure lots of highly useable common space while preserving a sense of local ownership within developments. Depending on how you rolled this out one can easily imagine whole strings of suburbs separated by parks on multiple sides through which one could walk or ride a bike, but which would be denied to motorised traffic.
The buildings themselves, if they were large enough, could carry local services — small shops, services like childcare, the laundry and perhaps even a local gym and pool.
With more clustering, you could begin to reduce reliance on private transport, have more local shopping and local amenity — so that although you have much higher densities you do have a sense of community.
But … but … we are the antipodean outpost of civilisation Robert! The missionary preaching Western values to the Asian hordes! The Christian bulwark against the Islamofascist caliphate and godless communism!! It’s our historic moral obligation to have the best mega-city in our region in order to sustain the endless Anglo-American world empire but you seem happy for us to become a kind of South Pacific Norway, pottering around in our own little garden and minding our own business.
Well it sounds terrific to me but you’ll never sell it to the politicians. They read ‘Ozymandias’ at school and HATED it.
Flew over the article yesterday and it seemed like a Chinese vote-winning spiel. Not sure the article should be taken all that seriously.
On that note, some Chinese friends of mine from Sydney said before the election they couldn’t possibly vote for Jules, because she was living together with a hairdresser– and he must be an air-head, so she wouldn’t be able to talk to him about running the government.
Which reminds me of that other infamy: During the refi for constitutional small change, one nice fellow citizen opined on tv, he couldn’t possibly vote for the republicans, because he believes in democracy. And so it goes. Well, sometimes you wish it finally would!
Lots of could, would and should, Fran. Unfortunately until we get an architectural profession with some vision and imagination, urban planners with planning skills, and a government not beholden to developers and with just an ounce of vision, we will get an urban hell hole.
We won’t slip into irrelevance until they stop laughing in Manila, Shanghai and Jakarta. So, we’ve just got to find some way to keep them laughing!
Or am I being too literal?
I have an idea for that!
Let’s go visit the Shanghai office of the PLA and tell them that “cities, rather than states, are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built”.
Hilarious!
Adrian said:
Fair comment, though I think you’re a little tough on the first two classes of stakeholders, but as things stand what we get are outer urban wastelands. I’m far from certain that’s an improvement.
Yes but it shoudn’t be either or. We don’t need to have either.
If that makes sense.
Maxine’s piece is largely rubbish and I do not understand why you have bothered to take her to task on it, Merkel.
It looks to me like one of those write-to-order pieces where the features editor picks up a phone and says, “Hey Max, can you do us 1000 words on a bigger Australia?”
One could be cynical and say that McHugh is still chasing after her lost constituency in eastwood and Rydalmere, and loyally fighting the lost battle by Kev’s side (“You know what? I actually believe in a big Australia. I make no apology for that. I actually think it’s good news that our population is growing.”).
What is irrelevant actually, now, is Maxine and her polemic. It’s a lost battle because about 70 per cent of Australians do not want a bigger Australia. The fact that she fails to make her case is itself irrelevant – it wouldn’t matter if she could marshall her argument Hitchens-like.
A report on population growth published in April this year by Monash University’s Centre for Population and Urban Research produced a survey of more than 3000 people to conclude Treasury’s projected 2050 population of 36 million is not terribly popular – 69 per cent said a flat no to the idea.
Also, what was especially disingenuous was the mini-poll question at the foot of her article: “Do you agree with Maxine McKew that Sydney should be bigger and better designed?”
So, you have to buy the whole package here. I know these things are written by subs in a hurry, so we can’t be too hard on them, but presumably Maxine had more time (she has plenty, now) to think this one through.
Yes, fabulous. Manila and Jakarta, design for relevant, modern living. I can’t actually see Max and Hoggy slumming it in a shanty town myself. Perhaps they want cheaper hired help?
BTW, where do you get the “continued decline in military spending”? In relation to China it may look like a decline but France has actually increased its military spend according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute website, so has the UK, so has Russia. Italy has dropped slightly, and Germany, less so. (2000 to 2009 figures).
Finally, Merkel, since when has European populace had a say in assisting in American wars of choice or otherwise? Most of Europe had sent soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan and substantial numbers of those soldiers have died or had been maimed – Slovenian, Polish, Dutch, Danish, Belgian, Turkish, Irish, Swedish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Finnish, British, German, French, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian, Norwegian and Spanish. It’s a bit rich for you to just glibly paint them out of the picture.
As the war is not going too well many governments now want out, true. But you are gilding the lily to make the facts fit your argument.
Big cities are so environmentally destructive. I mean, I can’t take anyone seriously, who says they’d prefer to live in Hong Kong than Sydney or Melbourne.
Well, maybe if you belong to that caste of society that can go for weekend golf games in Japan, but other than that, quality of life in places like HK suck.
Adrian said:
We don’t need to have either.
If that makes sense.
It does — that would be my view — but at the moment, we are going to get one or the other, or maybe the worst of both.
Incidently, my nephew is a town planner and a pretty sharp guy.
Joe wrote:
Sydney is bad enough for most people, although I suspect a lot of them don’t quite realise just how bad it is.
Frankly I think we should keep quiet that you can live without traffic jams, crowds, interminable bus rides to the suburbs, jam packed trains, filthy beaches, a harbour too expensive to visit on a regular basis and house prices that are so out of whack with reality they make HK look sane.
Sydneysiders will tell you “it’s the events, the big city” blah blah blah, but they never go to the events and the big city is where dad goes at 6:30 in the morning and comes home at 9:00.
You can’t call it living – it’s… a kind of stupid survival based on a kind of stockholm syndrome – of being held captive by an always elusive prosperity that’s always two paychecks away.
There are plenty of alternatives in Australia but since everybody east of Katoombah thinks everybody west of there is some kind of scary, John Jarrett style redneck, they don’t ever consider it.
I agree with Sir Henry. The article is a mish mash of distorted ideas.
Re Living in HK- having done just that for nearly 20 years there are many great features to life there.
Some like Joe find it hard to believe that a reasonable standard of living is attainable unless you are very well off but when I left (2007)the average monthly salary was just over Australian $ 1500.
50 % of the population lives in neat clean but small government owned flats.They pay 10 % of their slary as rental.
You don’t need a car to get around and the extensive parks reserved for public use are protected from development and cover over 48% of the area of the territory.
Government provided health care is the best available in HK and the best and most qualified Drs and staff work in the public system. And it is basically free.
The most sought after schools( for the cantonese speaking population) are the public schools.
Public transport is cheap ,ubiquitous and runs all hours.
A strange conterpoint to Maxine McKew’s concept that this is a global city is the never ending debate in HK about how they should think of themsleves- are we chinese? are we a post colonial chimera of 2 cultures? The cities regular inhabitants usually dismiss this theorising as self indulgent crap but it consumes the elites.It isn’t a city with a strong sense of identity at all.
The deterioration of the environment is terrible however.A real tragedy and mainland China is going down the same path.
London and New York by comparison are self possessed and confident even in the worst of economic conditions but when I was in these cities I can’t recall ever having heard the inhabitants wondering about the identity of the city.Self confidence eliminates the need for such ponderings.
Oh and I agree with Ute Man- best policy for us to adopt is to keep a low profile, go quietly on our chosen way and derive confidence from knowing we share this country in it’s glorious isolation.
The final point I’d like to make is that almost no-one in Asia even knows where Australia is ,who we are or consider moving here.They wouldn’t laugh at our ideas – I’d guess they would just wonder why we thought any of them would care to share them !
Generally agree with you murph– but you make HK sound like a worker’s utopia
Americans have been adopting one of these ideas (limiting entry and exit) for decades in their suburb design, and the general view has been that it has been a disaster. Admittedly it might be slightly less of a disaster if they used more trains, but even in places where they occasionally do (like New Jersey) it isn’t a great success.
One big problem is that all those “rat runs” are often pretty good bike routes, especially for short trips. Forcing people onto major highways to get between adjacent suburbs ends up encouraging car use, and that just makes everything else worse. See this report on connectivity (PDF) for much more.
Maxine McKew said
She forgot to include Bangkok.
Yes, why would anyone want to raise two kids on a quarter acre block when one could raise .65 kids in a towerblock choked by pollution and grid-lock. Its a mystery, a puzzle.
And “irrelevant” Europe with its piffling (< 5 million) cities like Berlin, Oslo, Rome, Helsinki, Florence, Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw. These idiots don't know how to live.
PS London is pretty unpleasant place to visit now, hopelessly over-crowded and over-priced.
Really, there is no need to raise a sweat when having a go at post-modern liberals, they do all the heavy lifting themselves.
Robert, why do you embarrass yourself trying to defend lame positions like Republic and Big Australia. Theres a good reason why there is so little public enthusiasm for these changes: they only appeal to elites trying to big note themselves overseas.
Live life self-directed based on ones own tradtion, not cringing to the false values of foreigners.
Brian said:
I hope that I made clear that this limitation on entry and exit would apply entirely to significant motorised vehicles. Bikes and small scooters would not be constrained, and indeed, I’d be inclined to allow emergency vehicles more general access through electronically operated bollards.
Fran, I bags the moniker Brian around here:)
That was Brian W @ 29.
Given Suharto’s record I would think it would be he who had more difficulty explaining “the events of 1975″ to Mr Woolcott.
Say what you like about Sir John Kerr but at least he didn’t have half a million communists summarily executed.
TomR: yep, pretty much.