Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the for Senate the opportunity to make a contribution with my Greens New South Wales colleague, Senator Lee Rhiannon on the matter that the Deputy President has just read into the record. Senator Rhiannon is going to address it at greater length, but I will acknowledge the coalition of eight groups that has today launched an exceptionally important and timely report into the state of Australian cities and in particular what the design of our cities is doing to our population, our kids, our time, our jobs and where we can live. This new study was commissioned, conducted and supported by eight groups ranging from the Planning Institute, the Heart Foundation, public transport advocates and the property sector to take a long, hard look at what has happened in Australian cities in the last 50 or 60 years—effectively in the postwar era—where we have allowed the domination and priorities of the private car to take priority over people and over the livableness of our great cities.

This report estimates that traffic congestion now costs the economy $9 billion per year. It is not the first time I have seen figures like that as to the economic cost of traffic congestion, but let us pull apart how these estimates are made. That figure is made up, in part, of your unpaid time sitting in traffic jams between where you live and where you work and the loss of that productive time to you which you could have been spending in leisure pursuits, with family, studying or at work earning an income. The staggering figure of the of $9 billion per year cost of congestion is derived in part from this gigantic loss of amenity and loss of time for each of us who find ourselves condemned to traffic congestion.

I note this study is not anticar, and there is no purpose to being anticar. There is no imperative here to ban the use of private cars, but we actually need to knock it off its pedestal and provide transport choice to people. What we have done in the planning of our great cities is eliminate choice. If you live in the middle ring or outer suburbs in an Australian city, particularly if you have kids, you need one private car per working adult whether you are a greenie or not, whether or not you care about atmospheric pollution, the cost of petrol, lost time, the frustration of sitting in traffic jams, the elimination of urban bushland for road projects or the unsustainable sprawl of our cities. Whether or not you pay regard to those things and whether or not those are your priorities you have no choice. It is very difficult as a working adult to live in an Australian city without a private vehicle unless, like me, you are lucky enough to live close to a major railway line and have access to cycling infrastructure. That infrastructure costs money and it requires investment. It requires planning and requires a change in the way that we think about our cities

The way that we have planned transport has also had a dramatic impact on housing affordability. It has become something of a cruel joke that the concept of housing affordability in Australia now means a brick-and-tile air-conditioned box, way over the horizon—20, 30 or 40 kilometres from where a person works. Maybe that is where the cheap land is, where we build over urban bushland or plough under market gardens or peri-urban agricultural land, losing forever the valuable soils and biodiversity. Maybe it is affordable to get into those areas, but it is certainly not very affordable to live there. What you never see in the glossy real estate ads is the cost of maintaining a private car per working adult because you have been stranded on the fringes of a city. The $9 billion a year in congestion costs do not accommodate those costs. They are absorbed by private individuals, as is the lost time sitting in the car trying to get to work, trying to get the kids to and from child care or trying to get out of the city. So transport affects housing affordability, it affects amenity and it affects many, many other things. We have never really acknowledged in the Australian context the true cost of building ever-larger houses, with ever-shrinking numbers of people living in them, further and further away from centres of amenity, jobs, services and public transport. We have to reverse this tide. Today's report is one important step towards doing that.

Australian cities are some of the most car-dependent in the world, and the greater Perth metropolitan area now stretches nearly 120 kilometres from end to end. To my mind a coalition government in Western Australia has never laid a single kilometre of railway line. They talk about it, and every now and again they close a railway line, but they have never taken the time or the investment to open one. But, with the support of the Greens, Perth does have a good public transport network, but it simply has not kept pace with the growth of the city, and now many residents of Perth have been stranded.

These challenges are very, very difficult to confront and cities move slowly; there is no quick fix. Planning decisions made in haste can be regretted for many years and decades afterwards. One of the ways in which the Greens have chosen to make an impact is to co-author, with the Property Council of Australia and the Australian Urban Design Research Centre, AUDRC, a report called Transforming Perth, which I was proud to launch with those two organisations and Senator Milne when she was in Perth with us last week. The report is effectively a study that builds on the work of Victorian urban planner Professor Rob Adams, who is the Director of City Design at the City of Melbourne. It asks: what if, instead of simply letting the sprawl go and maintaining an effectively unregulated or even over-regulated low-density sprawl in Perth, we developed medium-density corridors along public transport corridors—areas where high-capacity public transport can take some of the road space and give people that transport choice that they need? When you combine that with networked cycling infrastructure and a reorientation of the bus network, you can do extraordinary things. The Transforming Perth study identified more than 1,500 hectares of land along seven high-capacity transit corridors in Perth and showed that if you built medium density dwellings—not high rise; not Hong Kong-looking towers along these corridors—of four or five storeys, you could potentially fit between 94,000 and 250,000 dwellings along these corridors. This would effectively overbuild areas of urban blight—light industrial areas along these corridors, areas of car parks. The study took out heritage areas, green space and areas that local communities find valuable and netted out 50 per cent of strata title blocks and said, 'What would happen if you took the remaining space and created diverse, sustainable, affordable, medium-density housing?' What that has done in the context of this study and Professor Adams's work is that it leaves 90 or 95 per cent of the urban fabric untouched, and it simply develops and concentrates people along these activities corridors. If they are put in appropriate housing that is designed for that context—diverse and affordable housing—we can actually eliminate sprawl. We can not just reduce but actually eliminate greenfields development and bring the city back to the people; we can bring services, public transport, childcare centres and jobs back to the suburbs which long since ceased to have access to those things. That is the reason why you see these extraordinary figures being quoted in this report that has been released today.

It is a study that I am proud to have been a part of. It has been an unexpected joy working with the Property Council and a cohort of developers that they brought in to keep our feet on the ground. My thanks go to William de Haer and to Joe Lenzo, the Executive Director of the Property Council of Australia, for their committed work in bringing this report to fruition; to Dr Anthony Duckworth-Smith, who is assistant professor with AUDRC; and principally to Chantal Caruso and her team of volunteers and interns in my office for bringing a lot of very, very sharp policy ideas to bear. Now comes the crunch. This work needs to be funded. The public transport infrastructure does not come for free; neither does the cycling infrastructure. It will pay for itself, including in those reduced $9 billion congestion charges that we all absorb as citizens of poorly designed cities. It is imperative for the government to levy appropriate taxation on some of the companies that are dragging extraordinary profits out of this country so that we can afford to build the infrastructure in Perth and in other cities around the Australian continent, so that we can afford to put in the infrastructure that people deserve. Without appropriate taxation, that will never become a reality.