For a demographer that is supposed to have his finger on the pulse of social attitudes, Bernard Salt sure sounds like a guy that likes to impose them instead, via the Herald Sun:
THERE was a time as recently as the late 20th century when Brisbane was fondly regarded by the locals as a big country town. Brisbane was different to Sydney and Melbourne and proudly so.
…I see the apartmentification of Brisbane as a social transformation that will deliver a new way of living and working in the 2020s.
The suburban model worked well for families for a century but it doesn’t suit today’s couples and singles and downshifters and the lifestyle that they want to lead. The same thing is happening in other cities; it’s just that Brisbane is coming off a far more suburban base.
It’s almost as if the Australian nation is now being led by a tripartite of eastern seaboard capitals all heading in broadly the same direction. Each, including Brisbane, is evolving as a big, broad car-based city but with a beating, creative, pedestrian, liveable heart. Brisbane is being reimagined between Teneriffe and West End.
The economic base of our biggest cities is shifting – out with manufacturing; in with the so-called knowledge worker industries. Brisbane’s universities, hospitals, research labs, corporate head offices and support services are key to delivering skills as well as jobs.
Sydney and Melbourne are morphing from an Anglo-Mediterranean base to include Asian, Indian and Arabic influences. So too is Brisbane but it is coming off a more Anglo base. By 2031 Brisbane along with Sydney and Melbourne will be more Asian cities, rather like Auckland and Vancouver today, as a rising middle-class diaspora from China and elsewhere reaches out to Western lifestyle cities across the Pacific Rim.
Amid the hype and the hubbub for new pieces of infrastructure required to keep Brisbane in touch with Sydney and Melbourne there needs to be investment in social infrastructure. Volunteering and civic-mindedness build resilient communities. Strategic planning on a grand scale ensures that there will be sufficient land for new housing estates in a decade’s time thereby avoiding the unaffordability crisis that has beset Sydney.
But above all the single most important investment any community can make in its future is to remain united and galvanised by love of city and of country. Brisbane may not be the big country town it once was but it can and it should remain proudly different – and perhaps with just a hint of “attitude” – to those other big cities on the eastern seaboard.
Salt is on some kind of QE QLD superspruik tour:
One wonders who is funding it.
I don’t dispute that this direction is the way that we are heading. The point to make is that the social, economic and political fractures it is creating bear no relation whatsoever to the utopia described:
- Brisbane is a few kilometers from the burgeoning base of One Nation power and this seamless vision bears no relation to rising race politics:
- the cities aren’t leading the charge, federally mandated mass-immigration levels are leading the cities;
- knowledge industries don’t export like old school tradables so this will see Australia’s current account deteriorate;
- if by “strategic planning on a grand scale” you mean maddening, widespread, worsening infrastructure strains then sure;
- like for instance, when last week we had Salt selling us the decentralisation vision to take pressure off the cities yet today it’s back to cities with a bullet?
My broad definition of insanity is when you’re so taken with a fantasy that you are no longer capable of looking after your own interests. This qualifies at the personal, professional and national level.
