Tony Burke, Sustainable Population Minister, has asked Sunshine Coast mayor Bob Abbot to join a federal group of like-minded experts to spell out sustainability for Australian communities.
The expert panel will be headed by former NSW premier Bob Carr, and it will draft an issues paper for parliament. The day after Mr Abbot’s appointment (June 30) he told HT Editor Michael Berry why it was time to change direction on population policy.
THIS IS A great opportunity for us to get in at the ground level and show that there are communities around like ours that are living and breathing sustainabilityright now. It’s where the Sunshine Coast has gone in the past two years. There’s been leadership from the Council and there are strong feelings from the community generally that there need to be changes in the way we do business.
I’ll be taking the argument to this panel that population is not the strong economic driver that is argued by some. On the contrary. I see continued population growth as a pyramid selling scheme – that you can’t continue to rely on the jobs created by building 1000 homes to provide the work for and 2000 people.
I want us to look at the capacity of communities to survive long term, what population levels can they sustain and how do we spread that load across the country. I want to look at decentralisation issues – how do we reverse the way that governments have been funding growth over the past 20 years?
For example, years ago governments invested millions of dollars in developing decentralised rail systems that fanned out across their states. Yet here in Queensland, we’re now talking about pulling ours out or selling it. I think we’ve lost our way.
States have had a blinkered view on sustainability in the past, and I think the federal government has to take a stronger position on how we develop this country in the future. I don’t think they can rely on the states anymore, because none of them have a population plan.
I have been talking about this issue for years and this Council is already moving towards a model of sustainability for the Coast. First we have invested in a Broadband network – a national network in miniature. That shows we recognise the broader issues. We have helped established Sunshine Coast Enterprises, an organisation set up to drive our economic future; we have our economic development strategy in place and we now have the tourism industry combined working together.
To tackle sustainability generally, we’re going to have to decentralise our economy. The Queensland Premier’s recent report on the Growth Summit said that we now have to recognise decentralisation as a critical path for our future. It’s interesting that the Growth Summit reflected the values that this community has already recognised and has been working on for some time.
No longer am I just championing this cause on the TV or in council meetings. Sustainability is a mammoth job and I only have a relatively short time left in this political game. I am not going to swing around this boat single-handedly in two years or six years or eight years. I now have the opportunity to work on this with people who think similarly at a federal level, and that is a critical point for me.
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