Page 3730 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 29 October 2014
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Many of us in this place have lived in Canberra for some time and we have seen the city change very substantially. Certainly I feel there has been a strong difference, even in the last 20 years, as we have gone from being truly a country town to becoming more and more like a city. We have certainly picked up some of both the positives and the negatives that come with being a city. One of those negatives is increasing traffic congestion. I think Dr Bourke’s motion really speaks to that issue of wanting Canberra to be one of the cities that gets ahead of the curve and actually anticipates the problems that come with increasing traffic congestion arising from population growth.
In cities like Sydney in particular, where there has been a failure to invest in good alternatives and a focus simply on trying to build more and more roads for private motor vehicles, that simply has not worked. Sydney is now recognised as being dysfunctional in many regards because of its congestion problems. Dr Bourke in his motion sought to pick up on some of these issues and highlight the alternatives that we face.
Do we simply keep trying to build more roads, trying to keep up on an impossible treadmill, or do we make sure that we have a balanced transport system for our city which means that people have good alternatives? Those people who do need to drive for particular reasons—they have to be in many different places in a day, for example—should be able to use roads and we should be able to afford to maintain those roads and build further extensions where required, while also ensuring that not everybody has to drive everywhere all of the time.
There are good reasons for that. We simply cannot build the road capacity for it. It is not physically possible. Sydney has demonstrated that. Also there are social justice elements to this. Having to run a second or a third car in a household has an economic cost that is substantial. So providing decent alternatives is not just a good environmental or urban planning outcome; it is a social justice outcome as well, to ensure that people are not forced to spend the money that is needed for multiple car households. It is simply not sustainable either from an economic or from a personal financial viability point of view.
Mr Barr spoke about Portland, Oregon—a city that I know he has visited, and I took the opportunity to go there while I was on a recent personal trip to the United States. They had a really interesting fork-in-the-road point where they sat down and said, “No, we’re not going to do this. We’re not going to keep trying to simply build more and more roads through our city and turn it into a concrete jungle.” They have already done a little bit of that. There are great overpasses in Portland that in some places really dominate the skyline.
Instead they chose to start building their light rail network nearly 40 years ago. We have seen over an extended period of time, because they made that smart decision at the fork in the road, that they built a city that is really people friendly and that has an extensive network that they have built up over time. This goes to the issue of the politics of envy that the Liberal Party are seeking to build—as Ms Berry put it, seeking to construct a neighbour versus neighbour sort of discussion. But that network
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