Page 5740 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 6 December 2011
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As we come to the end of our first century as a city, however, there is a need to take the talk and the action to a new level. There is a need to be smart, effective and mature. Our city is growing, but so is the surrounding region, with some of the nearby local government areas growing at a rate that outstrips our own. The projections are that this growth will persist in the coming decades. As the service centre for the region, particularly in areas such as health and higher education, we need to be in close, confidential and clear conversation with our neighbours about what this growth will mean, how we can collectively meet the demands it will create, and how we can leverage what we do in order to bring prosperity and quality of life to all in our region.
Recent national forums, for example in the area of health, have added impetus to this new mood of collaboration. And there are significant opportunities on the horizon—high-speed rail is one; the national broadband network is another—where speaking with a regional voice, speaking as half a million people in one of the fastest growing regions of the nation, might give us a weight that none of us could muster alone as individual communities separated by distance and state boundaries. But we cannot seize these opportunities or strengthen our voice or our hand in these national conversations unless we have vision enough to rise above parochial parish-pump politics and claim our ownership of the big issues and big opportunities.
There are benefits for both the New South Wales and ACT governments flowing from the signing of the MOU. As our region grows, it is critical that cooperative leadership and management of strategic growth in key population centres throughout the ACT-south-east New South Wales region are pursued. We need to share demographic data and other information earlier and more openly. We need to agree on how to maximise the benefits from the growth of the region. And we need to recognise the mutual interdependencies that exist in service delivery, economic development and resource management.
Ms Porter mentioned the hospital system and the way in which we have leveraged the critical mass of the region to secure a health system we could not have sustained for ourselves. We need to identify other areas where, working together, we might achieve similar results.
The MOU sets out some initial priority areas for collaboration. These include strategic regional direction and priorities, land use planning and infrastructure and integrated service planning initially focusing on health and education, and, I hope, on transport as well. Importantly, this is not just a high-level document which will sit in a drawer somewhere. In the coming months, detailed work programs will be developed for each of these priorities, and these work programs will be publicly released.
The work program for strategic regional direction and priorities will involve the development of a strategic regional directions statement that will articulate the opportunities and priorities for maximising economic development. Our governments and officials will work together with regional stakeholders like the Regional Development Australia boards, the regional organisation of councils for the south-east region and researchers from Canberra Urban and Regional Futures. Each of these
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