Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Build it and they will come—that is the message. Australia is a nation of city dwellers. We are one of the most urbanised countries on earth. Three-quarters of the population live in our 17 cities with a population of more than 100,000 people. The majority of these live in the five biggest cities: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. When comp­ared to others around the world, Australian cities perform well in quality of life and other social issues, but this is changing—and not for the better. Australian cities face a large number of challenges, challenges in the areas of population growth, affordability, sustainability, demographic change, product­ivity and commutability.

One of the biggest and most significant factors creating these challenges is traffic congestion. Many Australians feel the frustration of traffic congestion every single day. The traffic chaos seems unavoidable and only adds to everyday stress. Apart from being inconvenient and stressful, congestion also has massive costs, both social and economic. The State of Australian cities 2010 report estimates that the avoidable cost of congestion to Australian capital cities was approximately $9.4 billion in 2005. The report estimates that this will grow to $20.5 billion by 2020. The fact that the State of the Australian cities 2010 report also states that the freight task—the movement of goods—is expected to grow by 70 per cent between 2003 and 2020 gives a lot of food for thought.

Congestion obviously lengthens the working day for many Australians. This has a social cost in tipping the work-life balance in a way that is contrary to the ideal. Congestion has a negative effect on air quality, on the environment and on quality of life. Cities are not just places where large numbers of people live, they are also our economic centres. Studies show that major Australian cities contribute more than 80 per cent of national gross domestic product and employ nearly 75 per cent of the Australian workforce. This is pretty significant.

As congestion grows, productivity declines and businesses expenses increase. But I believe that we can do something about all of this. Easing congestion may be a challenge for all levels of government, but it is a challenge that we can meet and that we can, in fact, exceed. While fixing bottlenecks in infrastructure can help, simply building bigger and wider roads is not always the right way to go. We know that, in Victoria over the last decade, many major new roads have been built, yet the overall level of congestion has remained steady—for a number of reasons. One is that if you build new or wider roads, traffic increases to match the new capacity.

But some good news came out of the Emerging Crises Summit held in parliament this week. We heard that one of the main reasons for congestion levels remaining steady in those cities where more roads were built was increased patronage of public transport—where public transport is actually provided. So we must place more emphasis on this and develop policies that improve transport options for commuters and reduce dependence on private motor vehicles.

In May this year, the government also released Our cities, our future:a national urban policy framework for a productive, sustainable and liveable future. In this policy framework, the government has highlighted that 28.6 per cent of people travel less than five kilometres to work or study. The majority of these trips, unfortunately, are made by car. But nearly a fifth of all people will walk, cycle or take other options provided the trip is less than five kilometres. So there is something we can do and this helps us inform policy development. The key determining factor in people choosing active transport is proximity between where they work and where they live.

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