Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also welcome the timely publication of the Building up & moving out, the report of the inquiry by the House Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport and Cities into the Australian government's role in the development of cities. I also want to acknowledge the contributions from the members for Grayndler, Bruce and Scullin and their much deeper expertise in these issues than mine and their extended interest in them. I am, however, disappointed in the lack of government speakers on this report, because it is a pretty good report. It's a report with support from both sides of the House.

With Australia's population reaching 25 million and over 90 per cent of Australians living in our cities and towns, urban planning and cities policy has never been more important. In Melbourne's west, the area that I represent, we're at the coalface of the challenges of urban growth in Australia. I've spoken many times in this chamber about our demographic change. Melbourne's west is the fastest growing region in the fastest growing area in Australia. In the last decade Melbourne has added nearly a million new residents and is forecast to surpass Sydney in size and become the largest city in Australia. Melbourne's west has grown at twice the speed of the rest of Victoria. That population growth has meant that all of the challenges that Australian cities face we feel most acutely in Melbourne's west. The committee, in this report, concludes:

The evidence presented to the Committee indicates that Australia's current population growth and changing demographics are placing increasing stress upon our cities and regions. Urbanisation, the ageing of the population and the transformation of the economy towards service and knowledge based industries are causing profound changes in the urban and regional landscape.

As I say, we see that firsthand in Melbourne's west. The committee also points out, importantly:

The outcome of these changes—

for good or for ill—

will depend very much on how they are managed. I draw the chamber's attention to this conclusion, because the last 12 months have seen a series of calls for Australia to respond to the challenge of population growth by drastically cutting Australian's immigration rate. Senator Hanson, the member for Warringah, the member for Dickson and even suspects like Bob Brown have all been preaching from this same hymn sheet.

Immigrants have all too often been the battering ram for our country's problems—for rising housing prices, straining infrastructure and loss of jobs. The committee's conclusion represents agreement that it is how we plan for population growth, regardless of the source of that growth, that will determine what our future cities will look like.

For decades Australia has had bipartisan support for our immigration program. Reforms of Australia's immigration system, emanating from an unlikely source—the newly-elected Howard government in 1996—but then largely being supported and continued by governments of both political persuasions, have dramatically changed the scale, nature and composition of our immigration intake. The creation of a demand-driven skilled migration program at the beginning of the longest period of sustained economic growth in our history resulted in more people in raw numbers coming to our shores than ever before.

These people have made a significant contribution to Australia. The Treasury, the Reserve Bank and the Productivity Commission all agree that immigration has had a positive effect on the Australian economy over the last two decades. Indeed, a 2018 joint report from the Treasury and the Home Affairs department cited research that estimated that immigration was responsible for nearly one-fifth of the growth in GDP per person enjoyed by Australians over the past 40 years. Indeed, it went so far as to suggest that 'migration helped the Australian economy successfully weather the global financial crisis and the slow global growth and poor economic conditions that followed'.

We can put in context the contribution of immigration to Australia's economic growth. It's often argued that the mining boom saved Australia during the GFC. While the RBA estimates that the mining boom raised real GDP in Australia by six per cent, by 2050 immigration is predicted to add more than 40 per cent to Australia's GDP. That's more than six times the impact of the mining boom. This economic growth is a function of the way that migrants have flourished on their arrival in Australia. Contrary to populist arguments, it wasn't Chinese demand for Australian resources that helped save Australia from the GFC; it was Chinese migrants.

Migrants raise the labour productivity of the Australian economy as overwhelming they are high skilled, young and able. They make the budget bottom line stronger and they give more than they take. By whatever measure of economic and social success in a community that you can think of, Australian migrants have thrived and their children have done even better. Across employment, entrepreneurialism, earnings and crime, migrants generally do at least as well as those born in Australia and frequently do much better. When immigrants are blamed for poor infrastructure and rising house prices we need to call this for what it is: it's politicians blaming immigrants for their own failures. The member for Warringah is the prime example of this.

The previous federal Labor government committed more funding for urban public transport infrastructure than every government going back to Federation combined. That was investment commensurate with the scale of population growth in Australia. Chief among those investments was the $3.225 billion invested in the Regional Rail Link project, which separated regional trains from urban commuter trains, significantly increasing capacity on urban commuter routes and constructing new train stations in Melbourne's west. Labor also committed $3 billion for the Melbourne Metro rail tunnel, increasing capacity by 60 per cent on the Sunbury line through my electorate and connecting Melbourne's west to the rail, health, higher education and employment hub in Parkville for the first time.

But in 2013 the newly-elected Abbott government took a rusty knife to urban transport infrastructure investment, withdrawing Commonwealth funding for the Melbourne Metro rail tunnel that Labor had committed and delaying by two years the Melbourne Metro rail tunnel—the most important infrastructure project for managing population growth in Australia—all while the member for Warringah called for a pause in migration in Australia. He'd stopped running and he'd stopped responding to the growth, and he blamed immigrants for his failures.

Despite the obstructionism of the federal coalition government, the Andrews Labor government has now broken ground on the Melbourne Metro rail tunnel on its own. It's heartening to see that one of the committee's recommendations is to 'actively promote investment in the development of a public transport network that is capable of meeting the goal of the 30-minute city'.

Transport infrastructure decisions that governments make or do not make now will shape our cities for decades. Time matters. Long-term transport planning and infrastructure investment must continue to keep pace with population growth. Melbourne is forecast to reach a population of 7.7 million by 2031. We need to ensure that the next big investments in expanding road and rail capacity in corridors of rapid population growth are well in place before we reach the next crush point. In the past I've spoken about the importance of the Melbourne Metro 2 rail tunnel, running from the Werribee line through Newport to Fishermans Bend, increasing capacity for my electorate.

The committee report also recommended to:

… ensure that governments at all levels:

…    …   …

Actively promote investment in the development of a public transport network …

Active transport: that is cycling, walking or using non-vehicular transport to get from A to B. And in Melbourne's west, we need to make active transport infrastructure a priority.

Investments in active transport infrastructure will reduce pressure on our roads and public transport networks, particularly during peak hours. Good active transport infrastructure is about making it easier for anyone to choose to cycle safely or to walk to school, TAFE, uni, the shops or wherever. It won't be the right option for every person for every trip, but more than one in every two vehicle trips in Melbourne today is of less than six kilometres in distance. With the right infrastructure, a trip like this would take just over 20 minutes on a bike.

Many of these trips could be made on bikes, and every trip that is made on a bike frees up capacity on our roads and on our public transport networks. That is why this is a serious mainstream infrastructure issue that affects everyone in Melbourne, and in Melbourne's west in particular. It's not only about congestion either; numerous studies show that cycling and increasing walkability decrease the risk of heart disease, cancer and general causes of death in our community. This means that people not only have a more liveable life but that they live healthier and longer lives. Active transport also reduces pollution and increases an area's liveability.

Despite these benefits, Melbourne's west has a relatively low active transport utilisation rate. This is because we don't have the same infrastructure as the rest of Melbourne. Our cyclists and pedestrians are forced to compete with thousands of truck movements a day on our residential streets. There are 20,000 truck movements a day in my seat alone. In Brunswick, nearly one in every five people cycle to work. In Footscray, a suburb of the same distance from the CBD, it's just one in 20. Why do people cycle at nearly four times the rate in Brunswick, despite those suburbs being the same distance from the city? Why do people cycle at nearly three times the rate in Thornbury as in Newport, another suburb at a similar distance from the CBD? The answer is that if you're cycling from Thornbury you're not competing with 20,000 trucks on residential streets.

People don't feel safe cycling without the right bike paths and barriers. Melbourne's west is still mourning the tragic death of Arzu Baglar, who was struck and killed by a truck while cycling to a friend's house in my electorate. We need investment that increases bike safety and encourages more people to cycle. Just last month, an Infrastructure Victoria report showed that in Sunshine there are around 20,000 daily trips that could happen by cycling and walking which weren't happening.

We need federal government leadership to turn these potential active transport journeys into actual active transport journeys. Cutting immigration won't make our problems easier to solve or our governments better. Instead, we need a plan, as this report argues.

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