Page 1782 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 June 2014
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The Ernst and Young report makes a startling prediction for overall jobs brought to the city by light rail, predicting a “footprint” of 50,000 jobs by 2049 when the corridor is a hive of … activity.
But the authors urge caution in interpreting the figures, warning that they are the “gross employment footprint”, and most of the jobs are not new to the territory but drawn from elsewhere in the ACT.
This is the problem with a lot of the development that has gone on in Canberra. It is particularly the problem with this government in the way they develop the city, in that we are constantly moving the focus of the city to anywhere but the city, and that has implications.
Every time we move the focus, they are not new jobs. As the Ernst & Young report says, these will not be new jobs; they will be taken from somewhere else. So to make capital metro work and to get the full benefits of capital metro, what is it that other areas of the city must sacrifice?
What I am saying today is that we must have a process that allows us to have employment and concentrations of population where they logically are, and we have to stop shifting them every time the government want to open a new land release front, because this is a government with an addiction to land sales. They have to constantly shift where they are going and open up a front.
For instance, we currently have about eight development fronts—Gungahlin, Molonglo, Riverland is coming, the brickworks is coming, the next phase of Kingston Foreshore, city to the lake, city plan, the Northbourne capital metro corridor, and then, of course, the infill. The problem is that you cannot keep shifting it if you do not create new jobs to support the population.
What we are saying in this motion today is that it is time to genuinely start to grow the private sector in the ACT for the long term. My belief is that you must start with the city and you must stop avoiding the city, primarily in and around London Circuit, which is still pretty much empty. We know Mr Corbell had a plan, nothing of which has happened a decade later. Suddenly, we have abandoned City Hill, although we have the city plan, which is a spatial plan. We have city to the lake. We now have the Northbourne corridor.
Where are the people coming from and where are the jobs coming from to support these people? The only place they can genuinely come from in the long term, so that we have long-term, sustainable jobs and thereby create a long-term, sustainable city, through which, of course, we hope to improve the wellbeing of all Canberrans, is through the private sector.
To do that, we need to make sure that we build the city. Great cities have great city hearts. We then must find the sectors and the markets in which to build our private sector, and then we must make sure that we sell the message. “Confident, bold, ready” is not selling the message. People like Simon Anholt who have done a lot of work on the identity of places say you have to have a strategy. You must back it up with substance and then you must have significant actions. If you do not have all three of those, it is just propaganda, it is just spin or you end up being anonymous.
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