Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There will be some bipartisanship on this. It is good to see that we have the blue team finally—after about 30 or 40 years—actually understanding that they must take an interest in the fate of the cities. They must take an interest because—as the member for Ryan has said—not only does the bulk of Australia's population live in cities but you need to understand the agglomeration benefits cities have that drive productivity. It is the bringing together of these specialised and diverse skills that has always been the engine of innovation and productivity, and that is why cities are punching above their weight in terms of the generation of wealth. Let us hope that they understand that mobility is the key to unleashing this agglomeration benefit. Public transport and the profound understanding that we need to integrate land use and transport planning must be at the heart of this proposition.

It is good to see that the coalition have followed Labor in appointing a minister for cities. Labor has a very proud tradition: we had the Whitlam government with its urban renewal projects; we had the Hawke-Keating government with its Building Better Cities program; and we had the Rudd-Gillard government with its Major Cities Unit, under the leadership of the member for Grayndler. We have been in this place for a long time and we are genuinely very pleased that there are some signs that we have finally got a coalition government along this path.

But I must demur from congratulating the Prime Minister on his particular appointment to this portfolio. I ask: why on earth did he not appoint the member for Ryan, who has demonstrated a deep attachment and understanding to the cities project? It is incredibly hard to see the appointment of Minister Briggs as a meritorious appointment. It is almost bizarre. It is sort of like appointing Barnaby Joyce to the portfolio for animal welfare. The conduct of Minister Briggs in his previous gig was certainly antithetical to all those insights that the member for Ryan outlined previously. This minister wants to plough giant roadways not only through highly valued community wetlands but through inner city suburbs. He is literally the last man standing in support of the Fremantle Eastern Bypass, a highly discredited 1970s plan to drive an expressway through the heart of Fremantle. It is a plan that successive state Liberal governments declined to build because they knew it would be completely unacceptable to the community.

I use this opportunity to urge the Prime Minister to abandon the love child of the Fremantle Eastern Bypass, the Perth Freight Link—now the project that dare not speak its name—and to show that his government really does understand this cities thing by putting the money back into the Perth urban rail project and getting on with the planning for the Outer Harbour. I just find it quite extraordinary that the same minister who was racing around as the minister for roads, the minister for ploughing over suburbs and the minister for ignoring how we integrate land use and transport planning has now, quite bizarrely, been given this job as the minister for cities.

I want to make a final reflection on the comments that were made by the member for Ryan on the issue of inner city schools. This is an issue I have been talking on now for around 10 years. There is absolutely no doubt that, as we have had a resurgence of people living in the inner suburban areas, with families being prepared to stay in more dense formations and stay in apartments well into their breeding phase, we have not provided for the schooling that we need in the inner city area. In Perth, as the Mayor of Vincent, I drove this and finally got a reluctant state government across the line to provide more kindergarten spaces on council land. But the tsunami of babies that we are seeing in the inner city is going to hit high schools in the next four to five years, and I am deeply concerned that, if we do not plan for this now, it is going to undermine that very important agenda that we have about increasing urban density in the inner suburban areas.

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