An interesting thing happened on television last night. Dick Smith railed against a bigger population — and most of Sydney tuned in.
His self-funded ABC doco drew a respectable national audience of close to a million people, Glenn Dyer reports in Crikey. It was the 17th most-watched show of the night in Melbourne and Brisbane; 14th in Adelaide and Perth. In Sydney? Number one with a bullet — 378,000 people crowded in front of the box to watch his Little Australia crusade.
Population growth as an election issue bites hardest in Sydney. When Essential Research asked the question of voters in July, most respondents said our current growth rate was too high, and most of those — by some distance — lived in NSW.
Sprawling Sydneysiders — idling in traffic, fuming over public transport — are choked up and hijacking this election campaign with their justified, if misdirected, anger. They argue, quite reasonably, the country’s largest city can’t cope with more residents. Immigration must be cut; boat people must be stopped.
The city can’t cope with more residents, but it’s not the fault of Julia or Tony. Sydney is choking due to the miserable failure of successive state governments to adequately plan for and roll out the necessary people-moving infrastructure. Labor’s rail line from Epping to Parramatta — the single biggest election promise in this campaign — acknowledges the real population problem but barely begins to fix it.
Much smaller cities around the world cope with much bigger populace and still manage to be much more livable. This isn’t about quantity of people, it’s about quality of life. Government has failed to deliver it.
Dick is right on one thing — we need a plan. Nobody in state or federal politics has one, so we’re having an unedifying immigration debate by default.
Thanks a lot, Sydney.
Thank you for the lovely patronising tone.
While I am in favour of Australia increasing its intake of refugees considerably, we should not be aiming to increase the population of Sydney until we have some serious urban consolidation and public transport improvement underway.
Until anyone commenting on growth of any sort (population, both locally and worldwide, economic, emissions, resource use etc) addresses the issue of limits I cannot take them seriously.
At least Dick Smith is bringing that to the fore. A pity no one on Q&A last night really engaged on his statement of a need to examine economic systems that aren’t based on the Ponzi model.
Don’t Blame Me, I Live in Newtown.
*sips latte*
Of course you don’t need a massive increase in infrastructure to move a massive amount of people around if you don’t have massive amount of people who need to be moved around!
There is no reason at all to turn Sydney into Tokyo or Mexico City, even though it’s certainly possible to do that – in fact, that’s the inevitable result when people slip into denial. If you want high population density combined with low resources, move to Bangaladesh. See ya!
Right now, and increasing every day, “low population density” combined with “a high level of resources” is going to be as good as it gets on Planet Earth. So why not plan for it?
If you can jump 10 feet, you go out for the basketball team. If you have a comfortable population density and adequate resources, you protect that at all costs, if you are smart!
Your comments explain why so many Sydneysiders tuned in, but totally fails to address the point of Dick’s program, namely why is growth considered to be good, and when should the world stop growing. There are really three separate topics: the immigration issue, the poor Sydney transport infrastructure, and the economic Ponzi model described by Ern Malley’s cat. It does nobody any good when these issues get confused.