Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When I'm out talking to people in my community on an ordinary day—not a day when they come to my office, when they're filled with passion or it's the worst day of their life, but an ordinary day when they're just going about their normal life—they say to me quite commonly now that they feel a lack of power. They see decisions being made about their cities—about new buildings going up, traffic issues and a whole stack of things happening around them—and they don't feel they have any control over that anymore. It's like a loss of power. They also talk about how the city itself doesn't work the way it used to. They can walk through the city, from home to the train station, and not see a single person they know. They feel a lack of connection, and they seek that connection again. It's almost as if the city itself has passed its use-by date. They're looking for something else, and they're not getting leadership from government—either federal, state or local—and they don't really know what to do about it.

We are at a time of rapid change at the moment. We really are in the middle of an age change, where the way we did things as societies is profoundly changing, and in many ways we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We were, for a time, a place where people lived and worked in the same suburbs. Economies of scale was essentially the way that business prospered. And the economies of scale meant that we built big factories and big organisations in our communities, so we lived and worked in the same suburb as our parents and the kids we went to school with, and that created a sort of social cohesion. So we knew each other. Then the economies of scale grew far too big and made communities their customers and not their workers, and we started to lose that connection that kept us together. We lost full-time work. The baby that we threw out with the bathwater is actually the cohesion—the cohesion that came because we lived and worked in the same suburb, and we lived and worked for the same company for most of our lives. That created that cohesion that made our communities far more effective and supportive than they are now. It also created a flow of information and common understandings and views. So we were better decision-makers back then.

Now we find our communities talking about a lack of power and a lack of cohesion, walking through cities where they know nobody, spending an hour and a half to two hours in traffic every day—so, again, they're not spending that time with family or friends. We really have a lot of work to do to start satisfying our communities and to re-create that cohesion that makes cities worth living in, because it is the human interaction that makes a place worth living in. We see our government, particularly our state government, investing a lot of money in Parramatta at the moment on laneways and alleyways so that people can physically move through their cities. But there's very little attention at all from any level of government on re-establishing the flows of information and the relationship infrastructure that makes our cities worth living in.

But there are answers that our community can work on. When I'm out there, people are talking to me about the things that they want changed. They want their city to work on biodiversity. They want to be better at renewables. They want to be better at transport. They want to work on biodiversity. They want more affordable, secure housing. They want to build the local economy. All of these are the sorts of things that people talk to me about. There are things that we can do as a community right now, because many of the answers that we're looking for are actually out there right now. So if you care about those things—people in my community, I'm talking to you directly now: if you care about biodiversity, local food, housing, jobs for young people, or any of the things that you talk to me about, I'm asking you to email me so that we can start putting together people who share the same concerns.

There are answers out there, and there are answers around the world. We are not the only community in a city that's trying to work out how to be good at being a city now that the structures that cities were based on originally—which are those economies of scale—have disappeared. There are cities all over the world that are trying to work out what you do about public transport, how to re-create a five-minute city so you don't spend an hour and a half travelling to work, how you reconnect to people, how you support young families, and how you bring young people into the city economy. People all over the world are working on those things. It's time, really, for us to get together and share our—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

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I want to talk directly to my community now about what we can do to solve some of the challenges that face us as a city. When I'm out talking to my community I find that they're ahead, sometimes a decade ahead, of government in terms of what they want. They want action on recycling, waste reduction, biodiversity, heat sink remediation, transport solutions, housing—all the sorts of things they're not getting leadership on from the government. Business isn't stepping up to solve those issues either, essentially because business and customers can't see each other. I want to run through a few things that I think we can do something about. For people out there in my community who want to participate in this, who want to get stuck into seeing what we can do over the next couple of years, please send me an email, and we'll see if we can get together in the new year.

I want to start with waste reduction and recycling. If I'm in a room and I talk about community composting, usually two or three people will say they want to do it, and yet we don't do it in Parramatta. While we have a 10c recycling scheme, bottles are not being collected in the CBD. Most businesses are telling me that they're putting their PE2 bottles and glass bottles into general waste, and they're going into landfill. We know there's much more we can do. We've tended to privatise our waste collection, so the money goes into big trucks and tip fees when it actually should be going into jobs and smaller-scale locally based recycling.

So we've got a lot to do there. We also have the issue of biodiversity. Again, I know many people in my community who would love to see us play our role in the preservation of Australia's biodiversity. Strangely enough, our cities were built in some of the most fertile places in the world. They were built around good water sources, and in their day they were probably some of our most biodiverse communities. Yet we've let them degrade. You can't have the sugar glider colony up in North Parramatta unless you have insects that fly through, and they come from our gardens. We used to have native cherries in the Cumberland Plain, and no-one's been able to figure out how to propagate one recently, because they grow parasitically between two different kinds of eucalypts. If someone out there can figure out how to do it, we would love to see those come back. From what I can see, Parramatta City Council doesn't have a footpath plantings policy. So we've got a lot of work to do as a community if we really want to start building our biodiversity again and re-establishing the wonderful plant and animal life of the Cumberland Plain.

And heat sink remediation is something we know we have to do. In Western Sydney we suffer incredibly hot days, much hotter than the rest of Sydney, and we really must do something about it. There are two Western Sydney streets that are one kilometre apart, but last summer Galloway Street in North Parramatta experienced five days of temperatures above 40 degrees while Daking Street, which is a short walk further north, had 13 days above 40 degrees. In fact, Daking is the hottest street in the City of Parramatta, and the difference is trees. About 30 per cent of Galloway Street is covered by trees, while Daking Street has only 10 per cent cover. So trees can make a difference, as can the colour of surfaces and a whole range of other things that we know we can do because the science is out there on this.

So, if anyone wants to be involved in any of those things—waste reduction, recycling, biodiversity, heat sink remediation or even greater sharing in the sharing economy of second-hand, reused and fighting for the right to repair, as our Bower is in Parramatta—please send us an email and we'll see if we can get together in the early year and see what we can do.

I also want to talk to my community about transport. We're in the geographic centre of Sydney, but many of us spend one to two hours a day travelling to and from work. At Wentworthville station, when I'm standing there, people tell me they leave home to get to the station before seven o'clock, because if you arrive at the station after seven you can't get a parking space. So they drive two or three kilometres to the station and park, leave their kids and go to the city at least an hour earlier than they otherwise would. We also have people now leaving home an hour earlier than they used to. I know a person who was telling me that they used to be able to leave home at 7.15 to get into the city in time for work and now they have to leave home at 6.15. And we already have traffic jams on and off the freeway at 6.30 in the morning because people are starting to travel earlier in order to avoid the traffic because peak hour is now lasting several hours instead of the short time it used to, decades ago. This means people aren't spending time with their families. It means they're going into the city and going to the gym there, rather than using the local gym where they know local people, and they're not getting home in time to have dinner with their families.

So not only are individuals losing precious time and spending it doing something that is useless to anybody but also people are losing that capacity to mix, associate and form connections before and after work with their friends and their neighbours or with their family. It's a very serious matter. But, again, you can already see the answers starting to emerge. If you really start looking around you can see the beginnings of the answers. So how about—just as an idea—we see if we can find groups of people who have common problems. Let's see if we can find even 20 people who live in that medium-density area on Parramatta Road who go to Wentworthville station before 7 am and have a second car only because they drive to the station. That's the only reason they have one; otherwise, they wouldn't. There'd be somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000 in savings if they didn't have that car in order to go to the station. Let's see if we can get groups of people to sit down and see if we can work out other answers.

You can already see Uber beginning to start work on booking group cars. You can actually see those solutions beginning to emerge. Anybody from my Sri Lankan and Indian community who comes from a remote village will tell you they've been doing it with school taxis for years. They've had groups of parents who get together and book taxis or 12-seater buses between them. You can see groups of people further west who have hired buses between them, and the bus comes and picks them up in the morning and takes them into the city in the bus lane. We have bus on demand up in some of the new areas of Rouse Hill. There are also electric bikes. There are answers to this—a whole range of answers, if you start looking at small groups of people to find answers. So let's see what we can come up with. I spoke to someone in the transport industry about this, recently, and they said, 'But you can't scale it.' I'm going to make this point: not everything scales up. A lot of the solutions that communities have actually scale out. Hairdressers didn't scale up; they scaled out.

There are a lot of things that we do in our communities—services that are provided within our communities by small business and microbusinesses, in some cases—that did not scale into big companies, because they're based on human relationships and human relationships have a natural size. So let's see what we can do here. Let's see if we can create some little jobs for people. Let's see if we can create a bit of work for people who would welcome the opportunity to do a couple of hours every morning, five days a week, and take away cost and inconvenience for a range of people. Let's see what we can come up with. On that matter, let's see if we can find ways to work from home. Let's see if we can get some gigabit speeds. I know a couple of businesses that have paid a lot of money to get it. Let's see if we can create some spaces where people can do their work, two days a week or one day a week, without going into town. Let's reduce the number of people who need to do it. Let's just get on with it and see what we can work out.

Similarly, I'd like to talk about affordable and secure housing. The median property price over the last year ran at about $1 million for a house in Parramatta and $600,000 for units. It's out of range for the vast majority of people in Parramatta. And it's certainly beyond the capacity of anyone graduating from university now with a debt. It's completely out of range. But, again, around the world, there are a lot of different models—land trusts, cooperative housing, movable housing, all sorts of options—out there. We have at the University of Western Sydney a woman called Louise—Dr Louise—who's one of the world's experts in this. So we have the knowledge about how to do it in our community. It's not necessarily looking for something that will work for everyone, that will solve a housing crisis or an issue for a million people, but seeing if we can solve it for some. Let's see how many ways we can look at this. How many ways are there to put housing together so that it is affordable?

I'll point out that there was a cooperative housing project in Annandale recently. It was about 65 units. They sold 10 on the commercial market for about $600,000 each, but the co-op owners got them for $110,000 a unit. It's a one-bedroom funky unit in Annandale, the city fringe, for $110,000. It is actually doable. There are countries in the world where co-op housing is up to 60 per cent of housing. Let's see what we can work out. Again, if any of the people in my community are interested in that, send me an email. Let's get a group of us together and see what we can come up with.

There's also a lot of work to be done in developing industries in Western Sydney. I'm quite fascinated myself with the whole idea of 'agribis'. We know that the big agricultural companies now are seriously looking at vertical farms in our cities. We have, by the way, in most cities, about 13 parking spaces for each car. We know that as we start moving towards shared cars and driverless cars we won't be using those car parks, nor will we necessarily be using those high-rise office buildings, because the nature of work will change. So we know that big agribis is looking seriously at how they move into cities to avoid some of their freight costs.

I live in a place with the most diverse community in the country. My Kenyan community thinks we're nutty because we've just discovered kale whereas they've grown it for millennia. They can't believe what we do with it, but they've been eating it for millennia. We have African heirloom vegetables that are grown in our backyards. We have a market for methi, baby fenugreek, which you can buy in shops everywhere. We have an incredible range of Asian vegetables as well.

We shouldn't be waiting for big agribis to come in and decide they're going to move their large farms into Parramatta. We should start developing our own. Already, some of the big hydroponics companies that manufacture hydroponic equipment are starting to understand that smaller units in cities, close to where the market is, are better for fresh greens, for example. Anyone who knows what fresh greens are like if you grow them yourself will know that they last two or three weeks in the fridge, but if you buy them at a big supermarket you are lucky to get a day. So there are real advantages. If you are interested in this, I urge you to get in touch and we will get stuck into it in the new year.

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