22 October 2009If you want to find out what’s happening in Australia’s cities today, don’t go to the glossy planning documents, writes Peter Spearritt in Inside Story

AUSTRALIA’s big cities are in trouble. It’s true that they’ve survived the threatened recession courtesy of a vast amount of infrastructure spending, especially on roads, bridges, tunnels and continuing house and apartment construction. Booming real estate markets have hardly eased up, much to the regret of sensible economists. Overseas students still flock to our colleges and universities and help populate the new apartment blocks. The banks still throw money at negatively geared housing investors and can be coerced by first homeowner grants to give low-income earners a once-in-a-lifetime chance of securing a mortgage. And our biggest cities are still growing rapidly. In 2007–08 Melbourne added 74,000 new dwellers, the 200 kilometre city from Noosa to the Tweed 62,500, Sydney 55,000 and Perth 43,400. In percentage terms southeast Queensland is still growing most strongly of all.

Despite, or perhaps because of, all this growth, big-city dwellers are unhappy. Peak-hour traffic gets worse and worse; the cost of water and electricity keeps going up; and local councils provide fewer and fewer services – yet the rates still rise – and have outsourced almost all new building and renovation approvals, so ratepayers have to cough up for those as well. Some state governments seem so incompetent – New South Wales heads the list – that Armageddon appears nigh. The doom-watchers got very excited in 2006 when it looked like Brisbane would run out of drinking water, in 2008 when petrol prices spiked and again this September when Sydney and Brisbane were covered with red dust and they literally ground to a halt. Suddenly climate change came to the front door of every apartment, house, office and school, and there didn’t seem much that our many ministers for climate change – are they for it or against it? – could do...

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Photo: University of Queensland