Botany Bay and Catchment Alliance

Suggest that Sydney will grow beyond 6 million and hear the collective groan.  Projects such as the Kurnell Desalination plant, Port Botany expansion, Sydney Airport expansion, massive land releases in Western Sydney, truck tunnels, tollways, and infill developments in established suburban Sydney are all part of growing the city bigger to compete with the top ‘Alpha globals’ - London, Paris, New York, Tokyo ( Sydney at present is a ‘Beta Global’).  No one has asked the majority of residents in Sydney, nor NSW for that matter, if they want an ever expanding Sydney.  Talk to the average Sydney resident and the response is Sydney is bursting at the seams - too congested, too polluted.  Why don’t we have a decentralisation policy  you hear them say. 

Decentralisation only works if the government takes leadership and is interested in visionary projects.  Property developers and large construction companies make bigger profits growing Sydney than they would in regional centres.  Regional centres don’t need tollways, tunnels and massive highrise.   Growing Sydney is the easy option and the government has recognised that.  On page 23 of the Metropolitan Strategy(endorsed by the Premier and Minister for Planning) this is what they have to say:

Decentralisation - encouraging the population to grow in regional cities and other areas of the State - has been raised as an option for reducing Sydney’s growth pressures.   Regional and rural NSW have experienced substantial changes in their population over recent years and further changes are anticipated.  Regional centres are growing while many smaller towns are experiencing population losses.  To reduce population growth in Sydney, the attraction of alternative places would need to increase and/or that of Sydney would need to decrease.  Sydney is a global city.  Restrictions on the growth of Sydney are more likely to result in businesses moving interstate or overseas than to regional areas.  Currently, regional areas outside the Greater Metropolitan Region lack the employment base or infrastructure investment to sustain or attract large increases in population.  Significant levels of diversion to regional areas may come at a large cost in terms of infrastructure provision in a dispersed rather than a concentrated (metropolitan) setting.  A 50 per cent increase over the next 25 years in the population of the 19 largest regional centres in inland and coastal NSW could only put back Sydney’s growth by six years.  The Government does not envisage a significant share of Sydney’s population growth being diverted to regional and rural NSW.

Sydney’s growth over 6 years could range from (2004 rate) 162,000 to (1988 rate) 375,000.  Those numbers in Sydney mean more congestion, higher pollution, reduced livability, a bigger ecological footprint (metropolitan footprints are higher than regional).  In regional centres the additional numbers could mean the difference between a university or none, a theatre or none, a hospital or none, a bus service or none, prospects for youth employment or a forced move to Sydney or more likely Brisbane.   Perhaps NSW as a whole would be a better place for MOST of us to live if we were content for Sydney to be a Gamma city like Copenhagen, Prague, Stockholm, Amsterdam, or Rome rather than an Alpha city like Los Angeles, Hong Kong or Chicago.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 1331 and is filed under Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.