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Labor backflip on our city’s future
IN 1917, when Sydney’s population was 800,000, visionary engineer and planner Dr John Bradfield predicted a population of 2.2 million by 1950. (He was not far off; it took until shortly after 1960.)
Thanks to Bradfield, key infrastructure projects were built to serve this growing city: the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the underground rail loop in central Sydney and the electrification of the metropolitan train network.
Today Sydney faces continued growth. Infrastructure Australia predicts Sydney’s population will rise by 1.6 million between 2011 and 2031.
As in Bradfield’s time that makes it vital to plan and deliver new railways, roads and infrastructure that will preserve our city’s standing as one of the world’s best places to live.
Indeed such work is even more important than in Bradfield’s time, because the relative economic importance of cities, and of Sydney as our nation’s largest city, has increased so much.
In 1911 60 per cent of Australians lived in regional and rural areas. Today, 89 per cent live in cities.
And cities have an economic importance which hugely exceeds their share of our land mass.
Work by the Grattan Institute found 80 per cent of the dollar value of all goods and services in Australia is produced on just 0.2 per cent of our land mass — nearly all of it in our cities. The combined CBDs of Sydney and Melbourne — just 7.1 sq km in area — create almost 10 per cent of the total value of Australia’s goods and services. It may have been with these sorts of figures in mind that Labor’s Anthony Albanese, while infrastructure minister in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government, committed $1.8 billion to Sydney’s transformative WestConnex project.
It was a good decision. WestConnex will make travel faster and easier between the western and southwestern regions of Sydney and the CBD, the inner west and the east.
The project widens and extends both the M4 and M5 motorways and joins them together in the middle to form a continuous, free flowing motorway. It will take traffic off local residential streets, including large sections in underground tunnels — where motorists will bypass up to 52 sets of traffic lights.
The economic benefits to NSW are estimated to exceed $20 billion.
WestConnex will remove 3000 trucks a day from Parramatta Road; reduce travel time from Parramatta to Sydney Airport by 40 minutes; and the time it takes to travel between the city and inner west by bus will be halved. Recent enhancements to WestConnex are designed to improve the performance of the overall Sydney motorway network, for example, by adding a connection for a future Western Harbour road crossing. But last week Albanese reversed his position, with Channel 9 reporting that although Albanese funded WestConnex when in government, he now wishes he hadn’t.
Albanese put out a press release denying that he had provided $1.8 billion of funding — although he is on the record in 2014 as proudly proclaiming that he did.
Albanese is fighting for his political survival.
His inner city seat of Grayndler could be lost in a relatively small swing to the Greens — and will be even more vulnerable if the federal redistribution is finalised as expected. We saw the same pattern in Victoria last year with Labor desperate to hold inner city seats against the Greens. When Labor came to power in Victoria, it tore up signed contracts to build a sorely needed roads project to connect the east and west of Melbourne — costing taxpayers over $1.1 billion according to the Victorian Auditor-General.
Sydney needs vital infrastructure like WestConnex — so people can get to and from work as quickly as possible; freight can move efficiently around the city; and we all benefit from less time stuck in traffic and more time doing what we want to be doing. Sydney is an economic powerhouse for our nation as well as a very special place to live. In part that reflects infrastructure planning decisions going back one hundred years or more. But as Labor politicians become ever more distracted by chasing inner city Greens votes, they seem to have lost interest in meeting the infrastructure needs of the whole of Sydney. The Baird and Turnbull governments are working together to deliver vital new infrastructure for Sydney. Our city’s future — and our nation’s — depends on it.
Paul Fletcher is Minister for Major Projects in the Turnbull government, and Member for Bradfield, the upper north shore electorate named in honour of Dr John Bradfield
