John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Intergenerational Report predicts that Australia’s population will reach almost 36 million by the year 2050. We are undoubtedly in an age of growth and will be for the foreseeable future. From a personal perspective this makes me consider that when my 17-year-old son, Charlie, reaches my current age, our nation’s population will have increased by 60 per cent. Are we making suitable preparations for this kind of increase? As our population grows, will our nation grow with it? Like any worthwhile business, do we have a master plan for our own development? It should be a government’s obligation to plan for the future and make provision for such growth.

Our world will not end at 2050, hopefully, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is a genuine absence of federal policy designed to seek the most efficient development and population spread for our country. Sometimes it appears that our population increase has taken us by surprise, with more and more people simply shifting into two major cities, and no incentive to look beyond. At a meeting of town planners recently, one commented, ‘Had we known Sydney was going to grow like this, we would have planned very differently.’

This has brought us to a point of paralleling the perils that plagued the major northern cities of the United States in the seventies, choking on their overpopulation and insufficient infrastructure, the cost of living and the cost of doing business rising to a breaking point, and crime rising as more and more people could not afford to live in their own cities. A shift occurred through a huge investment in infrastructure, resulting in a new wave of growth and enormous migration to what is now referred to as the sunbelt, stretching from Florida to California. In particular, the population of Atlanta, Georgia, grew 60 per cent in just 20 years, from 1960 to 1980, preceded by an intensive campaign of road, rail, airport and housing developments together with an active chamber of commerce that attracted big businesses to relocate their headquarters to Atlanta to enjoy cheaper running costs whilst providing an improved quality of life for their employees. In quick succession, businesses recognised the advantages of relocating to the southern regions. The arguments were comprehensive and have stood the test of time in providing companies with greater efficiency and a competitive edge. Businesses and families were attracted as a result of the master planning that had taken place. The highways and airports were built in anticipation of future needs rather than just trying to keep up with existing needs. This helped to facilitate growth, to the point that Atlanta’s international airport is now the busiest in the world.

Over recent times we have witnessed Australia’s acceleration at a furious rate without any form of master plan. Development has been ad hoc, leading to haphazard housing construction and insufficient transport infrastructure. It could be argued that Sydney and Melbourne have already gone past the need for strategic master planning because we were travelling too fast and simply missed the signpost. Without genuine master planning of our nation, the disproportionate growth of the major cities has occurred while regional areas have been left behind. Maximum efficiency will be achieved through the construction of vital infrastructure services just in time to meet current needs. This is a far better option than the current scenario we witness in our major cities whereby the available services are not even coming close to meeting current needs.

The greatest problems facing our major cities, especially Sydney, are the cost of living, which is directly attached to the cost of doing business, and the quality of life that this cost affords. The electorate of Bennelong that I represent is a perfect example of a concentration of all of the factors that impinge on this quality of life: overdevelopment, overpopulation and infrastructure not keeping pace. If we had had appropriate master planning, and just-in-time infrastructure construction had occurred, all the needs of today’s population and into the future would have been catered for in the most efficient and effective way possible. Instead, Bennelong is confronted—

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