Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Schools) Share this | Hansard source

This is an important report, and I like to think of it as, in all likelihood, the longest and undoubtedly most sincere love letter the member for Grayndler has ever received! I will go on to explain why, Mr Deputy Speaker Andrews, and you may well be sympathetic to that perspective, and I'm sure you'd be sympathetic to him receiving such a letter.

This is a very important report. It deserves close reading and proper debate in this place and in the community. More than that, it deserves a serious response from government. Whatever the government does, Labor will give this report, the work that underpins it and its recommendations their due consideration.

I think, though, it is important to remember that the report and its recommendations do not appear out of nowhere. It was very pleasing for me to have been present for the contributions of the two previous speakers, the member for Grayndler, and, of course, my friend the member for Bruce, who touched upon some really critical questions about how we fund and finance public infrastructure. These are critical questions for government, and matters that require very close exploration as we try to distinguish between the rhetoric of the present government and its much less impressive record.

In making a contribution to the debate on this report, as a member of the committee, I should acknowledge the excellent work of the chair, the member for Bennelong. I think all of us know the passion that he has for cities and for transport, and it was a pleasure to work with him and to share some of his enthusiasm. Can I also acknowledge the work of the member for Cunningham, the deputy chair, who made a very significant contribution to this report—in particular, in focusing on the needs of our regional cities, a critical part of meeting Australia's settlement challenge, our infrastructure challenge and, indeed, our productivity challenge.

Also it would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the work of the secretariat. I think this is a very important and impressive document, and that it is so is not so much down to the work of the members who participated in the hearings but to the work of the secretariat. All of us in this place know what a privilege it is to work with the staff of parliamentary committees. On this occasion, they did a particularly outstanding job. I'm very pleased to have had the opportunity to work with them and particularly pleased to have the opportunity to acknowledge that in this place.

This report has built together a body of evidence across a wide range of issues that affect Australia's cities and built a body of evidence and a series of recommendations that are a road map for significant public policy change. What emerges, beyond dispute, from reading the report is this: our cities must be at the core of our national debate and be a core concern for our national government. We are the most urbanised nation in the world, if we exclude city-states, but our national government has only intermittently recognised this.

I'm very proud to be part of a Labor tradition—a modern Labor tradition from Tom Uren and Gough Whitlam, from Brian Howe and of course the member for Grayndler—which has acknowledged that this has got to be a central part of our national challenge. We will not be a prosperous nation if we do not have livable, sustainable and productive cities, particularly our major cities, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth—and I should obviously mention Adelaide in this context as well, even though it faces some different challenges from the other major mainland capitals.

Our challenge really is to combine two things. We need to continue to harness the great benefits of economic agglomeration, which are doing great things for many people and many businesses in Melbourne and Sydney in particular, but also to recognise that this presents great challenges. There are challenges that directly impact productivity—and it is pleasing to hear the government talk about the imperative of congestion busting now, but I'll come back to that in reference to my love letter to the member for Grayndler. But the cost is impacting on people's lives, including the lives of too many of my constituents. I don't want to be reading A Tale of Two Cities as a modern-day descriptor of life in Melbourne or Sydney, and that is unfortunately a realistic prospect, for all the reasons that have been set out by previous contributors on the Labor side. This report recognises that national planning is critical to ensure that we continue to harness the great benefits of agglomeration whilst ensuring that our cities remain livable and affordable. Obviously, the focus on housing is a really critical part of this puzzle.

But—going back to the member for Grayndler, as I'm sure he'd like me to—in large part the recommendations contained in this report take us back to the future. They take us back to about 2013, to the sort of institutional framework that the Rudd government had for dealing with cities, transport and infrastructure. And that's a good thing. It's very pleasing to see the unanimous recognition by all members of the committee, members from both parties and an Independent member, that that was a framework that was and remains fit for purpose.

Of course, the other side of this is that we've had five wasted years, five years of refusing to invest in urban public transport until much too late, five years of not continuing to develop our understanding through the State of The Cities reporting and the work of the Major Cities Unit. What is going on in our cities? What are the patterns of settlement? What are the patterns of development? We've had five years of not having the benefit of the work of the Housing Supply Council, and all of us understand what a cost that has had.

So it is really pleasing to see recognition of the importance of that architectural framework and of course to update it. The member for Grayndler touched effectively on the central recommendation in this report, the first recommendation, which is pulled out at greater length throughout the report, of moving towards the adoption of a national plan of settlement and ensuring that this is a cooperative enterprise, pulling together national government, states and territories and local government. It is a road map for the sort of cooperative federalism that one might have hoped could have been a feature of that white paper on the future of federation, which was announced with such fanfare and went absolutely nowhere. This is an opportunity to refresh that debate and to have another go at seeing our national government work together to overcome some significant constitutional hurdles to ensure that Australia's national interests are being advanced, regardless of the differing views and the differing imperatives, too often, of different levels of government.

I think the focus on housing is very important. We need a debate about housing that—as the member for Bruce so effectively put it in his contribution—isn't just about treating it as an asset class like any other but looks to its fundamental importance to how we all live and indeed how our communities function.

The report also has some very effective work that goes to our thinking about how cities work as ecosystems. I commend that aspect of the report to all members, and, perhaps, senators too, because I think these are issues that should not lead to any great partisan divide but are critically important to understanding how most Australians in the suburbs of our major cities are living their lives and to how we can more effectively respond to those challenges.

The work that is done in thinking about the structural role of government is important. I think it should not be regarded as an immutable template, but it shows some deep thinking about how national government can get better at coming across all of these challenges, and, of course, implementing those in conjunction with other levels of government. I am pleased to see the report recognise the good work of the Liberal government in New South Wales in establishing the Greater Sydney Commission. I think that is a model worth understanding and exploring for other state capital cities.

In making some concluding remarks about the report and its significance, I want to restate that it is a very important contribution to an important and vital debate in Australia, but it leads us to some significant challenges in this place. One challenge is a fundamental one: Is there the political will to carry forward the debate contained in this report? Is there the will within government to carry this forward? We've had a number of ministers with responsibility for cities. I hope that the member for Aston can go further than simply talking about congestion busting and look at some of the structural challenges that his role requires be done justice to.

There's a big challenge for all of us, because the challenge of making more-livable, more-sustainable and more-productive cities isn't simply a technocratic one; it's also fundamentally a democratic one. We've got to find more ways to involve those millions of Australians who live in our cities, in particular in the growing outer suburbs of our major cities, in shaping the decisions that determine their lives—the places where they live, the places where they work and the places where they raise their families. This democratic involvement is a critical part of the challenge posed for all of us by this report.

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