AAP General News (Australia)
04-01-2010
Qld: Growth summit focuses population debate
By Steve Gray
BRISBANE, March 31 AAP - When the 1954 census was taken, there was no such entity as
Queensland's Gold Coast.
Between Southport and Coolangatta 19,807 people were counted in a region then called South Coast.
Fifty-two years later, the 2006 census recorded a population on the Gold Coast of 524,667.
From bare sandhills to metropolis in 52 years - such has been Australia's growth.
And there's plenty more on the way.
By 2030, the city of Gold Coast will be home to some 900,000 residents.
With this sort of expansion comes growing pains, and mounting public concern over the
rate of change - which has convinced the Queensland government to host this week's Growth
Management Summit.
Whether it was an idle talkfest or a meaningful contribution to the future, only time will tell.
But the growth summit at least brought the population debate to the fore.
Or did it?
The debate was not primarily about population. But, as the name suggests, it was about
how to provide catch-up infrastructure for the past influx of people, manage the 2100
a week arriving in Queensland currently, and the million more on their way in the next
two decades.
Naturally enough, population is going to intrude on any debate about growth. But the
question many in southeast Queensland, and the nation more broadly, want answered - whether
or not population increase should be limited - was largely buried.
The question the growth summit was asked was not whether Queensland, and the state's
southeast in particular, should be swamped in people it can't accommodate, but how to
fit in the vast number who will inevitably arrive.
Already, there are two certainties to come out of the summit - densification and regionalisation.
Our cities are bound to go upwards and more people will be living in high-rise apartment
blocks and in hubs based along rail and bus routes.
Such closely-populated suburban hubs would satisfy Premier Anna Bligh's concept of
the 15-minute neighbourhood.
"We could be thinking locally of 15-minute neighbourhoods - where everything you need
to live, work and play is within 15 minutes' walking distance," Ms Bligh said.
"Before the car, it's how communities evolved, and in an era of climate change we should
do it again."
Regionalisation will occur on two levels. Firstly, by creating what demographer Bernard
Salt calls the "mosaic city", and secondly by efforts to attract people to regional Queensland
rather than just the crowded southeast corner.
Mr Salt sees the mosaic city as an alternative to urban sprawl and a growing population.
This would include a densely populated inner-city, but decentralised jobs in outer
suburbs for families and others who don't want to live in apartments.
"We are a suburban people," Mr Salt said.
"Live, work, play, recreate, go to university, go to hospital - all within a containerised
region.
"It's like a mosaic, a series of cells."
He said higher fuel prices will force regionalisation and lead to as many as one-in-five
city residents working from home as people reduce their travel.
"One thing that you can be confident about in the next 40 years is that, in real terms,
petrol will be $5 a litre," he said. This will force regionalism at the fringes of existing
cities.
As to inducing newcomers to settle in Townsville, Kingaroy or Cunnamulla - that's not
such an easy proposition.
Ms Bligh admitted as much when she said that no government had the power to tell people
where to live.
"Even if we did stabilise population, as some people are calling for, what we can't
do is stop people moving around," she told the 200 summit delegates.
The premier even floated the idea of a "second capital" to ease population pressure
in the southeast, specifically mentioning Townsville as a likely candidate.
It may be a good idea, but it's decades from fruition and it would certainly require
more than the measly $3000 she has considered as a first home owners' grant to tempt people
to the regions.
What is more likely is that the population will follow jobs and money to regional Queensland
as it develops.
Ms Bligh recognised this when she said the recent signing of $80 billion worth of LNG
contracts with China and Japan would attract people to the southwest, where the coal seam
gas is, and to Gladstone, the central Queensland industrial city where the raw material
will be converted to LNG and shipped overseas.
This resource boom-led population boost raises the major challenge of providing both
the social and concrete-steel-and-bitumen infrastructure to meet the increased population,
a field where Queensland has not excelled in the past.
The population debate in the southeast can be summed up in the different attitudes
of two local governments in the region.
Ipswich mayor Paul Pisasale has led the turn-around in the city's fortunes and is one
of Australia's strongest pro-growth advocates.
Ipswich is the epicentre of the South East Queensland Regional Plan which seeks to
provide for the influx of a million newcomers and, on the latest ABS figures, is experiencing
a five per cent a year growth in population.
Masterplanned cities are under construction on greenfield sites around Ipswich and
there is huge investment coming to the region.
"Growth is not a dirty word," Mr Pisasale said.
"The key is managing it properly.
"People are blaming growth for everything. They're blaming growth for the lack of koalas.
They're blaming growth for the lack of quality of lifestyle."
He blames poor planning for the angst felt by many in southeast Queensland.
Mr Pisasale has the support of his community, having gained 85 per cent of the primary
vote at the last local government elections.
Sunshine Coast mayor Bob Abbot (Abbot) also has the go-ahead from the community he
leads, with 70 per cent support in the primary vote for his policy of curbing population
and growth on the tourist strip north of Brisbane.
Protesters travelled from the Sunshine Coast for a noisy demonstration outside the growth summit.
A poll in the local Sunshine Coast Daily newspaper on the day following the summit
showed that 60 per cent were in favour of a population cap for the region.
Mr Abbot told AAP that if the summit merely promoted a new view on how to maximise
the population of southeast Queensland, then it had failed.
"But if we come out of this with a new view about how to spread the population growth
of Queensland right across the state, with some real values for southeast Queensland,
then it will be successful," he said.
Ian Christesen, a Sunshine Coast resident and member of the Sunshine Coast Regional
Council advisory panel, said the question asked at the summit is not the one people want
answered.
"What the community wants answered is: When are we going to move to a sustainable,
stabilised population," he said.
"What they're talking about here is: How are we going to cram them in. Are we going
to stack them on top of each other or are we going to keep bulldozing.
"That's not the sort of debate we need to be having."
Perhaps, but the population debate is now out there, and better focused than it was
before the summit.
It's a debate that will continue, even as 2100 new people arrive in Queensland each
week, and more than two-thirds of them lob into the southeast corner.
AAP stg/pjo/it/cdh
KEYWORD: POPULATION (AAP NEWSFEATURE) (PIX AVAILABLE)
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