Page 1126 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 6 May 2014
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It is interesting that a gentleman called Simon Anholt, who is probably most respected for his work on the identity of cities in the world, wrote a book called Places: Identity, Image and Reputation. It would be interesting, were we rated in his city index, to see where Canberra would fall. Mr Anholt says that to really be a city of the future, to have an identity, you have to have strategy, substance and symbolic action.
I think we would all agree that Canberra has substance, as the nation’s capital. Simon Anholt says this about substance:
Substance is simply the effective execution of that strategy in the form of new economic, legal, political, social, cultural and educational activity: the real innovations, structures, legislation, reforms, investments, institutions and policies that will bring about the desired progress.
The substance that we have has probably come from the federal government, over many years, in the construction of our cultural institutions, our arts institutions, our political institutions and some of our universities. Those that know Canberra know that we have substance. What we do not have is a strategy to build on that substance. What we do not have is, as Simon Anholt calls it, symbolic actions.
Mr Anholt comes up with a number of equations. For instance, he says that if you have strategy and you have substance but you do not have action, you are anonymous. The one probably most likely to describe the ACT I will get to last. He says that symbolic action minus substance minus strategy is failure. He says that strategy minus substance plus action is propaganda. He says that strategy minus substance minus symbolic action is spin. He says that substance minus strategy plus symbolic action is incoherence. I think that is what we get from the territory government. We have incoherence because there really is not a strategy to deliver a city heart. There really is not a strategy to deliver a great city heart. So what we suffer from is incoherence. Often what is picked up on the news around the nation is the social agenda that the government has or something that goes wrong in the ACT.
If we are going to overcome all of this, we need the three elements that will give a true indication to people that we are going somewhere and that we are doing the right thing. I doubt whether we will get it off this government, because their record says they just cannot deliver.
Not so long ago, Mr Rattenbury, Mr Barr and I were lucky enough to have dinner with Larry Oltmann, who had come in from overseas to assist with a forum on the convention centre. In the discussion that night, he said that this city will never go ahead while you have a void at the centre of the city—City Hill, in effect—and while you have basically a bypass that leads people through the city. I said, “New York has Central Park.” He said: “Yes. That is the point. It is not at the centre of New York. At the centre of New York are people and activity. You are talking about Broadway and Wall Street, where people come together and you have excitement, action and activity. And people want to be there.” He said, “A park at your centre does not work.” He said that, particularly for the ACT, you then have a high speed road that takes people past
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