The head of the Greater Sydney Commission (GSC), Lucy Turnbull’s pie-in-the-sky plan to decentralise Sydney into three activity centres was treated with skepticism by Fairfax’s Lisa Visentin, who questioned the plan’s lack of detail about how the proposed ’30-minute city’ would be achieved in practice:
It was inside a shed furbished like a train platform, next to a fake escalator leading to nowhere, and an hour’s drive from the city centre that the NSW government chose to unveil its new plan to make Sydney a 30-minute city.
As journalists pored over an array of glossy brochures and reports inside the model metro station at Rouse Hill, the simulated setting was not so much incongruent as perfectly fitting for the high-rhetoric accompanying the blue-sky vision of a Sydney some 40 years hence.
Sydney in 2056 would have 8 million people, most of whom would live, work and play without quantifying their lives in terms of years spent riding the train to work or sitting at traffic lights.
It was decreed “an historic day”, featuring a “landmark” strategy. A “magnificent” plan. “Visionary”, even. “A first for our state.”
Premier Gladys Berejiklian was not in attendance for this auspicious occasion.
Her emissary, Planning Minister Anthony Roberts, spent a portion of the press conference hosing down impertinent questions about his future…
Also present was Transport Minister Andrew Constance, who had a congestion-busting plan of his own to unveil…
Isn’t it surprising, one reporter inquired, that planning and transport haven’t worked together in the past?
The twin strategies reiterated the need for an extra 725,000 new homes across Sydney over the next 20 years.
But missing, again, from the government’s vision were details on the extra schools, hospitals and community centres that Sydneysiders would be frequenting in their 30-minute journeys of the future.
Now that Turnbull has a manifesto (the colourful maps are really neat) comes the hard part: convince the federal government, the state government and the dozens of councils that control street-level development to sign up. State grants should help persuade councils…
Presumably to avoid a distracting political fight, Turnbull isn’t pushing the North Shore or Sutherland Shire to build as many homes as other parts of the city – yet.
At the moment, these Liberal heartlands avoid extra pressure to accept more of the higher-density living that experts agree is necessary and many residents detest.
Witness the upper-middle-class anger over plans to convert Channel Nine’s studio in Willoughby to apartments.
The head of the Committee for Sydney lobby group – which Turnbull used to chair – has referred to this type of opposition as “high-octane nimbyism”.
That could change. Turnbull has made setting new housing targets one of the commission’s top objectives.
If she and her staff can turn their fine intentions into an agreement to fairly share the city’s upward expansion, and implement the other components of their plan, Turnbull will have given the city a legacy just as important as those beautiful concrete sails overlooking Sydney Harbour.
All of which was shot to pieces by a dose of reality from the Daily Telegraph, which points to pending water shortages as Western Sydney developments and never-ending population growth contaminate the city’s water supply:
Documents obtained by The Daily Telegraph can reveal WaterNSW and Sydney Water have voiced concerns that Sydney’s urban sprawl and booming population are putting increasing pressure on the water system, and steps need to be urgently taken to ensure Sydney is not hit by a water shortage.
WaterNSW has also revealed that housing developments built too close to pipelines and canals in Western Sydney have “already resulted in impacts to the water quality”. “Increasing urbanisation, particularly in western and southwestern Sydney, have resulted in increased pressure on the integrity of critical water supply infrastructure, namely the Warragamba Pipeline and the Upper Canal,” the documents state…
WaterNSW says that housing and land developments need to start considering the impact building is having on water supply. It is investigating “water augmentation strategies” to service the booming population…
Who would have thought: boosting Sydney’s population by 1.74 million people over the next 20 years (1.53 million via net overseas migration) dramatically impacts essential infrastructure like the water supply?
Under the NSW State Government’s own population projections – endorsed by the GSC – Sydney will somehow need to squeeze in an additional 725,000 new homes over the next 20-years, along with extra water supply, hundreds of new schools, several extra hospitals, more road space, and increased public transport capacity.
Where’s the detailed plan on how any of this will be delivered? And who will pay? Answer: there is no plan. Just a Utopia-style ‘vision’ that is spin over substance.
Mark Latham – a life long Western Sydney resident – said it best in June when he penned the following:
This is the snake oil of our time: the fantastic notion that in a city already heavily congested, we can swamp Western Sydney with new arrivals and new suburbs and somehow the magic of “improved urban planning” will produce a metropolitan nirvana.
The head of the Greater Sydney Commission, Lucy Turnbull, has said “we need to plan for an additional 1.74 million people by 2036”, mostly in Sydney’s West.
She’s part of the cheer squad for “improved urban planning”, with “an aspiration for a 30-minute city”, so everyone can live within half-an-hour of his or her workplace.
Tell her she’s dreaming.
The only way Sydney can become a 30-minute city is if the Turnbulls buy everybody a helicopter…
Excuse me, but whenever I hear those words “improved urban planning” I reach for the chuck bucket.
It’s a fraud on our community, and has been for 50 years…
It will never be a liveable city as long as massive immigration numbers overwhelm our suburbs and clog up our roads…
The business lobbyists, economists and MPs pushing for big migration numbers do so safe in the knowledge that overcrowding and congestion will never affect the gentrified, inner-city boroughs in which they live.
They use immigration as a giant Ponzi scheme: artificially pumping up economic growth at a cost to urban efficiency, housing affordability and wages growth.
We need an Australia-first migration program, designed for the benefit of the people who live here, not those wanting to come here.
For Western Sydney, this means abandoning Big Australia and limiting population growth into the region.
Lucy Turnbull can bang on about boosting supply and better planning all she wants (without actually doing much about it). But something needs to be done to stem demand, including the 77,000 new migrants projected to inundate Sydney each and every year.
Rather than navel gazing about ‘decentralisation’, clearly the best way to alleviate Sydney’s housing and infrastructure woes is for Lucy Turnbull to tap her husband on the shoulder and demand the federal government slash Australia’s immigration program. Because under current ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration settings, incumbent residents of Sydney are facing big cuts to their living standards along with hideously expensive infrastructure bills.
