Local government is admired for being ‘close to the people’. Respect from communities extends naturally to those institutions that claim to represent or serve them, as many local governments do. The centralised mass media blitz means citizens are better informed about issues and actors on the national stage than those local and so it is that the third tier of government in this country is unregarded. It may be that the public’s expectations of local governments have not been high, as well as not being particularly well informed. In which case this wide-ranging study coming as it does from an experienced practitioner, Frank Hornby, promises much, especially as he claims to offer us an historical and a national account.

Guided as he is by the pioneer historian of local government in New South Wales, Frank Larcombe, Hornby identifies the failure of early initiatives. In rudimentary urban and rural settings landholders were reluctant to accept responsibility for local amenities in the absence of support from the central government. Modern local government as the Australian colonies received it derived from reform initiatives undertaken to serve the pressing needs of sanitation, energy and transport in the new industrial cities of Britain. The taxed ratepayer, municipal borrowings, the town clerk and the salaried expert were the new faces and features of Britain’s reformed corporations in places like Manchester and Birmingham. So they might have been in Australia and truly influential had colonial corporations been allowed to keep pace with the growth of cities and towns and not savaged by colonial central governments who, paradoxically and, in turn, were themselves captured by localism – by ‘local members’. Colonial and State governments in Australia controlled municipalities and kept them down by fiat of legislative control, leaving them numerous and relatively powerless. On occasion they have denied their democracy. It remains no accident that the most recent attempt to have local government recognised in the Constitution failed dismally.

Hornby brings us quickly to the twentieth century. Too quickly in this reviewers view and notwithstanding a rich store of archival and research material in all the colonies and states, which he ignores in favour of but a few often ancient secondary sources and numerous reports. He misses much that is relevant in the colonial and State settings. The debates over the franchise, the growth of municipal assets and services, crises of infrastructure, of transport and public health, the splendour of ceremonies, town halls and cultural entertainments, the complex character of councillors and aldermen and mayors, reform initiatives like the town planning and the greater city movements, social evils, old and new world exchanges, women and charity work – these hold little interest for him. Overview accounts of local government history in major colonies such as Queensland and Victoria are simply inadequate. Before we know it the book is less than a quarter gone and we are in contemporary times and the author’s comfort territory. He is interested in the peer association of local governments as an interest group, even as a player in Australian national politics. This perhaps explains his ready inclination to read putative national figures (Sir Henry Parkes, but only Parkes) and national events (Federation) into his story. By and large though individuals do not much trouble this narrative, not even major administrators or long serving councillors or for that matter innovative ministers of local government who might have had some vision for the sector. This is local government seen from above through a crude national and peer prism of national politics.

We do get some signposts. The Whitlam government’s far-sighted Australian Assistance Plan (AAP), for example, that sought to establish direct links (and funding for) local communities. It was resisted, predictably by State governments and more surprisingly by many municipal bodies. The author gives an account of events and institutional bodies he himself participated in, like the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA), a body writ large in this story. His account of local government’s involvement with Indigenous people, ‘new settlers’ (migrants) and themed issues, ‘affordable housing’ and arts and culture, are seen through the prism of conference deliberations and submitted reports rather than any deeper or systematic research. The final section four promisingly subtitled ‘Local Government and National Politics’ is similarly constrained. All of which encourages the reader to wonder whether a memoir rather than a supposedly objective and researched ‘history’ would have been a better vehicle for the contents of this book. This is a pity, as there is a need for a wide-ranging and historically well-informed study of this unregarded third tier of government in Australia.

This book review was originally published in Australian Historical Studies

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So much in thrall are we with imaging technology’s spectacular and converging internet, television and the cinema applications that we are sometimes forgetful of its history. Media history, let alone media pre-history, gets scant attention these days. This is a pity because Mimi Colligan’s Canvas Documentaries is fascinating on pre-cinematic forms and popular culture in Australia and New Zealand.

Quite understandably, we prefer a history of ‘firsts’, great beginnings and successes. We think of the birth of photography and the cinema as defining moments (and so they were) but many teachers of media, film and communications would do well to explore this book that explores the world of commercial image making and presentation in the nineteenth century through the diorama and the panorama (moving, still and modelled) and that interesting but almost forgotten construction, the cyclorama. Colligan takes her cue from pioneering studies such as Richard Altick’s The Shows of London tracing these entertainments (and their people) to the antipodes, where, not surprisingly, wealth was to be had and they plied a busy trade, although the record of bankruptcies and downfalls suggests a hazardous livelihood as well. The terrain is not so little known amongst historians, which is where Dr Colligan began. Many will be aware of her 1987 Monash university doctoral thesis ‘Canvas and Wax’ for its ground-breaking explorations of nineteenth century popular culture. Canvas Documentaries is a long awaited embracing in book form of this terrain with much gleaned in the interim in Australia and overseas libraries by one of the best researchers in the business.

This is not just a story of picture men on the move from the old world to the new but a well-documented study in art history and popular culture, one in which the images go backwards and forth. Many early representations of Australia were, after all, intended for these forms. Canvas Documentaries offers contextualisation for many of the images of Australian history. A panoramic view of Sydney was on show at Barker’s Panorama in the Strand, London, as early as 1824. Sketches by August Earle provided the basis for a similar display on Hobart in 1831. London was then the world’s market for such entertainments but colonial centres soon boasted populations and potential audiences for the same and in the forty year period of moving panorama popularity in Australia (which ranged from the mid 1840s to the late 1880s) Colligan observes three main categories of subject: scenes of the colonies themselves, scenes of England and the Continent, and scenes of historical and contemporary battles, with religious scenes included as a minor category.

‘Static pictures’ represented on stage in the form of theatre ‘scenes’ quite early provided bread and butter work for artists. Successful practitioners were always striving after effects that would enthral and enliven. Colligan tells us about these scene painters and gives us important insights into practical, and then highly commercial, applications of artistic technique. Her journeymen scene painters, some trained and some self-taught, some famous some less so, moved with illusionism’s appeal through panoramas, dioramas, and cycloramas – a useful ‘picture show terminology’ is offered to the definitionally-challenged reader in the early pages. The terms may be unfamiliar to some but they shouldn’t be, for their legacy in visual technique is significant and call to mind the latest attempts at virtual reality and video games involving applications of lasers and holography – there is, after all, nothing new under the sun. The panorama, too, as Colligan notes, had its origins way back in the quest for realism in art in techniques deriving from the Renaissance, but which, as visual attractions, offered spectacles to the masses. And so Victorian ideologues told, just possibly, a form of rational amusement – commercial entrepreneurs of such entertainments could always justify their enterprise in such terms.

The fun fairs, pleasure gardens and theatres led the way but most impressive and dedicated at the end of the period was the Cyclorama (from the Greek cycl, round; and rama, view: round view). The term was used in the United States and Australia to distinguish 360-degree panoramas from moving panoramas. These were purpose-build constructions into which the public entered (for a fee, of course) to marvel in promenading comfort at scenes of the Eureka Stockade or the Battle of Waterloo. For some reason battles seem to have offered the cyclorama’s main fare, its forte perhaps being the realistic presentation of landscapes. The story is balanced across the Tasman and Bass Strait, even if Melbourne gets the lion’s share of attention. It was, after all, the get rich quick metropolis. It had the well-to-do and the masses; also, entrepreneurs like George Coppin whose gold rush period Cremorne Gardens in Richmond were elaborate pleasure gardens on the London model. Among its illusionistic extravaganzas was an erupting Vesuvius. Like Cremorne, Melbourne’s cycloramas have not survived. But the State Library of Victoria still has John Hennings 360 degree backdrop painting of pre-gold rush Melbourne from the Cyclorama display of Early Melbourne shown at the Exhibition Building in 1892. The cyclorama buildings, alas, have not survived, although the remnant and altered structures managed to prick the interest of the heritage-minded, Colligan among them. A rebuilt cyclorama ought to be a viable project for heritage media enthusiasts. After all, steam buffs keep their technology alive.

These displays and the peregrinatons of their authors, meticulously recorded and documented by Colligan, tell us much about cultural transmission and production in Australia in the nineteenth century and Canvas Documentaries should encourage further studies. Arcana as the topic may seem to some, we are not dealing with marginal experience. As Colligan reminds us, in those times of ‘simple technology and daunting geographical distances such images attracted mass audiences’, or at least they were mass audiences by the standards of the day. Possibly also, these images and entertainments were as forging of contemporary identity and cultural understandings as any period novel or collection of gallery paintings so ardently worshipped by scholars today, and probably a good deal more so.

This review originally appeared in the Journal of Australian Studies issue 78 (2003), pp. 163-165.

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Chardonnay was grown in Southern Victoria in the nineteenth century, although the
differences in nomenclature and the loss of the vine stock now make
make it difficult for people to say so with absolute certainty. I
wrote about the Castle Hill Vineyard (Yan Yean) having what appeared
to be Chardonnay in the form of Pineau Blanc in Better Than Pommard: a history of wine in Victoria (1994) pp.8-9.

The wonders of Trove (the National Library’s Digital newspaper finding aid) now make this an easy matter to resolve and to pursue. We can now say with confidence, I believe, that Chardonnay was grown and made into good wine (possibly great wine) in those districts you mention (Geelong and Yarra Valley) and elsewhere in Victoria in the C19th. We just have to look up the newspapers and put two and two together. Of course you do need to understand the prevalence of synonyms that existed for varieties then. But Pineau Blanc is easily identified as Chardonnay in a number of sources. For example The Argus 1 December 1858 p1 suppl. “The Vine II” contains a big discussion of grape varieties:

No.14 Pineau Blanc  “One of the most celebrated wine grapes of the
North of France, and extensively cultivated in the best vineyards of
Burgundy and Champagne.” No mistake about this.

Argus 15 March 1860 p1 suppl. On the choice of vines.

“The pineau blanc is one of the most celebrated wine grapes of the
North of France, and is extensively cultivated in the best vineyards
of Burgundy and Champagne, bunches very small, berries small, very
sweet and sugary produces little, but of excellent quality. This sort
is suited to the colder districts of the Colony.” I think this is what we are after.

Pineau Blanc and Hermitage grapes were grown at Louis Dumont’s
vineyard, Punt Road South Yarra.
(Argus 8 Jan 1863 p.5)

Pineau Blanc was grown at the Milpah Vineyard (it adjoined the Prince
Albert Vineyard) of Abram Tribolet on the Colac Road (Waurn Ponds) Argus 9 Feb
1864 p.6.

As early as 1850 at the Victoria Horticultural Society Exhibition
Messrs. Breguet and Amiet entered a wine made from “Pineau green and
noir” Argus 31 Oct 1850, p.2.

At a Vinegrowers Competitive Dinner, which arose from a friendly dispute between
Mr Dardell and Mr Breguet as to which of them possessed the
best white wine. “Mr Pettavel of Victoria Vineyard sent in a white
wine from the pineau blanc.” Argus 28 Jan 1862 p.6.

Prince Albert Vineyard Principal White varieties: “pineau blanc,
verdeilho, gouais, chasselas, sweetwater, wantage and a few of the
roussillons but the latter ripen late and are not used for
winemaking.” Argus 29 Jan 1864, p.5.

“A Victorian Vineyard” (The Yering Vineyard) Argus 15 May 1863 p. 5
records eighteen acres planted with “pinot noir, or black cluster”
One acre is planted to “Pinot Blanc”.

In about 1875 Hubert de Castella wanted to recast his enterprise to
make Champagne. He would not have done this without access to
Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. I don’t have the exact references to this
to hand here at the office but believe it to be so. I could provide
chapter and verse on this in due course.

and then there is a final conclusive point for you from the Yeringberg vineyard in the Yarra Valley from the Argus 3 January 1872. This article also clearly identifies the White Hermitage of the Yarra Valley as Marsanne, a point about which I have been
challenged on elsewhere by Ted Henzell.

“Under the shade of a friendly tree wine was served and high encomiums
passed on the verdeilho, pineau blanc, white hermitage, and chasselas
samples submitted. The health of Mr de Pury having been drunk with
three times three, various gentlemen indulged the company with songs,
etc.”

In Victoria in the C19th Pineau Blanc was Chardonnay. I think that we can say that it was widely grown and made into wine in Southern Victoria especially in the nineteenth century and notably so in the Geelong and Upper Yarra Valley districts.

with best wishes and continuing admiration,

David Dunstan

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He was always the achievement rather than anything he did. Popular, well-dressed and smiling, always ready to greet a visiting dignitary, talk up the city or promote some new promotional initiative, people liked him. Melburnians were pleased a Chinese immigrant community figurehead and prominent hospitality businessman should occupy the office. John So was a good image. He was not so good at politics or civic leadership. Politics involves solving problems, engaging with different groups and issues and laying down a vision for the future. Politics is work. Being a public figure means being accountable. John So was not available to discuss the city’s budget handed down last August or to enter into debate on Melbourne’s traffic and public transport problems. He was certainly let off lightly by the media. One wonders if he knew much at all about the issues involved. Many people thought he was good at promoting the city. But his way involved lots of media advisors and advertising expense because he was not actually much good at talking. But like the tongue-tied former Labor Premier, Steve Bracks, the public liked him for it and saw him as genuine.

John So’s amiable front over eight years saw the Council and the State government acquiescing in the central and inner city high-rise property boom that has done so much to transform the inner city and make a new class of builder developer capitalists rich. At the same time saddling many a baby boomer with dubious property investment debts but about which the long term benefits are still uncertain. What we do now know is that the city’s much vaunted liveability is under threat due to lack of creative city planning, increased traffic congestion and a grossly overburdened public transport system. You could hardly blame the City Council. Most of the powers to shape or direct city affairs have been taken from it. But we could have seen more innovation or even a raising of issues from a central public body that at the beginning of So’s reign in 2001 was blessed with an abundant surplus, a capable bureaucracy and the capacity to lead Greater Melbourne’s thirty-odd other municipalities forward. The Council’s showpiece, the environmentally friendly and innovative building Council House 2 is nothing more than that: a showpiece that stands in marked contrast to the legion of environmentally unfriendly structures that have sprung up in and around the city.

In the long lost golden days of the 1950s and 60s Melbourne’s Lord Mayors all seemed rich and influential city businessmen who wanted to “give something back” to the community. They were well connected to conservative politics and represented the “ big end of town” in property, retailing and finance especially. Among the best known and most effective was Sir Maurice Nathan who was Lord Mayor for two terms in 1961-63. As a councilor Nathan chaired the committee that got Melbourne ready for the 1956 Olympic Games. He argued for an international jetport at Tullamarine and the Melbourne underground railway loop (both of which we got). He cleverly defused political passions when, following a change of heart, he persuaded the Council to drop a controversial by-law banning the distribution of leaflets at the time of the anti-Vietnam war protests in the 1960s. Nathan was an energetic and talented businessman of the type that despite all the efforts successive Liberal and Labor administration have made to sweeten the path for them no longer covet the top job at Swanston Street.

John So appeared to fit the mould as a conservative self-made businessman prepared to serve the community, seemingly at his own expense. Maybe these city plutocrats lost interest when knighthoods ceased to be an automatic return for being Lord Mayor sometime in the 1960s. But the royal road to the Council robes really came unstuck in the 1970s and 80s when sordid politics entered the Council Chamber once ruled absolutely by the Civic Group. This was the behind the scenes political party that each year decided which well-heeled member’s turn it was to be Lord Mayor. Action by residents groups in the 1970s especially in wards based on North Melbourne and Carlton especially saw a new breed of councillor that challenged the civic plutocrats and Melbourne’s untrammeled developer ethos and produced the city’s first avowedly conservationist and women Lord Mayors in the 1980s. Conservative State government administrations watched on in dismay.

In one of its least impressive and last acts the Hamer Liberal government sacked the Council in 1979. It had served continuously since 1842. The Cain Labor government reinstated “democracy” in 1983 but the voters were unimpressed when ALP back room boys tried unsuccessfully to stack the Council with party hacks. The Cain Labor government introduced the Commonwealth electoral roll as the basis for voting, effectively disenfranchising many absentee property owners. Conservative property interests vowed revenge and got it when the Kennett government returned to power in 1993.The territory of the council was reduced, the Council again sacked and the electoral franchise fiddled with endlessly to make the MCC safe for business and absentee property owning interests. Council assets were sold off and its departments down-sized. Whole functions were contracted out.

Inner city residential areas like North Carlton (where the streets are named after former city councilors) were hived off to other municipalities like the City of Yarra. Those of the emerging Docklands area were denied a vote altogether, until this election. The expensive and cumbersome system of postal voting was introduced along with a Senate-like field of candidates (but areduced number of councilors) across the entire council area. Wards were done away with progressively making it impossible for resident activist councilors to get elected on a cheap campaign. The Labor Party when it gained office in 1999 kept the changes and introduced the separate election of Lord Mayor. Formerly, the Lord Mayor was chosen by the Council. Governing by a slender margin from 1999 Labor wanted as few opponents as possible and was happy to go along with the conservative agenda on inner-city politics. The job of the Council in new-think corporate governance of the 1990s was defined as “steering not rowing”.

Only slowly have residents like some in North Melbourne and Flemington been brought back into the voting fold. They may make a difference at this election along with increased numbers of residents in central city apartments, if they vote. Commuters who spend most of their working lives in the CBD and care about it but live in the suburbs are denied a vote. Yet even as the State Government gutted the MCC and rendered it ineffective with the perpetual threat of dismissal now and again it made waves. Greens and maverick conservative councilors were not happy with John So blowing the City’s $300 million plus budget on junkets, self-promotion and development projects of dubious worth to the ratepayers like the new business serving World Trade Centre.
But John So remained popular with Spring Street. Importantly, he never questioned State Government policy (or the lack of it in urban affairs) or raised disturbing issues for the citizens. Yet he infuriated Council colleagues with his non-attendance at committees and lackof interest in administration and urban affairs. The development of new planning policies and a vision for Melbourne was something for others.
Maybe that’s what the citizens and certainly the government wanted. Local Labor Federal member Lindsay Tanner and State member Bronwyn Pike are on record at the time of the last elections in 2004 as saying the Council it must be doing a good job if you don’t hear much about it. But with metropolitan planning and transport emerging as battleground issues for the forthcoming State election in 2010 the MCC elections could be a test of influence for the Green opposition, even given the extent to which the cards are stacked against them with the electoral system and the franchise.
With candidates still weighing their options and preference deals the focus is still on John So. If he leaves any legacy or example it is perhaps one of smiling inactivity and spin as issues of conservation, environmental challenge, financial accountability and public amenity that would have hit the headlines in previous years were swept under the carpet or simply aside. In the coming weeks Melburnians may consider whether the Lord Mayor’s position is just a ribbon cutting role? Or, does the incumbent need to have something to say about the future of our city, about public transport, about the arts and heritage, about the environment and planning for the future and the health and well-being of the city? Perhaps in the coming weeks we shall hear something from the candidates. Perhaps we will discover whether we are entering into a new post-John So era for the City Council with an articulate and engaged Lord Mayor or whether it is business as usual.

©David Dunstan

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By David Dunstan

Metropolitan problems need metropolitan solutions, or so we are told by Roger Poole of the Committee for Melbourne (Age 7 March, 2008). He bemoans the absence of comprehensive planning for Melbourne and calls for a single planning authority.

We had one – the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works. It was done away with in the 1980s and 90s by successive efforts of the Cain and Kirner Labor and Kennett Liberal administrations.

The Board was not loved. Former Premier Henry Bolte called it ‘unwieldy’ and ‘a political forum’. Sir Henry didn’t want any political forum he couldn’t control. But the Board was a Melbourne instuition for nearly a century. It managed Melbourne’s planning and infrastructure requirements: water supply and sewerage, main drains, city planning, major parks and it would have done more if the government had let it.

The MMBW grew with Melbourne. It acquired power and money, so the Cain government discovered in the 1980s. Its ‘hollow logs’ of reserves were cleaned out, its commissioners abolished and its powers and assets (our assets) were privatised and the plethora of water companies we have today is the result.

The MMBW was the product of Melbourne’s crisis of public health in the nineteenth century. The city was wallowing in its own filth with the non-removal of human waste. Typhoid, diphtheria and preventable diseases were the result. Chronic mismanagement of the water supply system, a growing knowledge of the cause of sanitary problems and failure to build a complementary underground sewerage system forced the government’s hand.

Reluctantly, in 1891, the colonial government created the MMBW as a statutory authority on the model of London’s Board of Works to take charge of the water supply and create a proper and complementary sewerage system.

These days the city’s shit moves silently underground but we have the road toll and noisy motor traffic clogged on our roads.

It was thought the MMBW would not last long. But it gathered power by default. Townplanning powers it acquired only slowly. The recommendation of the Metropolitan Townplanning commission that produced its final report in 1929 mainly lapsed because there was no metropolitan authority to implement them. The Board finally became the metropolitan town planning authority in 1949. It produced the city’s first plan in 1954. There was no other authority to take this on. The State Government wouldn’t.

The city’s ramshackle and ineffectual system of local councils remained. But the councils nominated MMBW commissioners and so a representative link with local government and ‘democracy’ was maintained.

It was thought that Melbourne would get a Greater Melbourne Council along the lines of the greater London council (the London County Council) and a greater city government like Brisbane got in 1924. That didn’t happen despite many attempts to create an elected GMC, the last in 1951 when a bill failed in the Legislative Council by one vote.

The idea of a metropolitan authority still surfaces from time to time and it is interesting to see the idea of a metropolitan planning authority being given a push by the unelected Committee for Melbourne. The Committee is a ‘private not-for-profit member network of Melbourne leaders’ intent on encouraging ‘a competitive and innovative business culture and enhancing Melbourne’s liveability.’

But Melbourne is no longer a discrete metropolitan unit. Suburbia now stretches from Mornington and Pakenham in the east to Whittlesea in the north and Point Cook and Melton in the west, a vast distance.

Planning is the responsibility of the state Minister for Planning with responsibility devolved through to the local councils. But the councils being local, cannot do the bigger jobs.

Frequently they are a vehicle for resident and community opposition to development but developers can appeal to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) which has recourse to the planning minister’s pro-development scheme and guidelines. Developers have always got and continue to get a very good run at VCAT.

We could expect more of local government. Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett’s Local Government Commission reformed Melbourne’s local councils and amalgamated many in the 1990s. He didn’t go far enough to create proper sub-regional grouping that could take on powers of infrastructure provision and planning overall.

Incredibly, the largest and most central of them all, the Melbourne City Council was gutted. Instead of enlarging it to enable it to give a lead on planning issues it was made smaller and even more ineffectual.

A huge effort was put into reforming the City of Melbourne franchise making its electoral provisions quite different from those of any other metropolitan council. Now why would they do that? This was to neutralise the Council as a political force so as to better serve property development interests resentful of inner city residents having any say over development in Melbourne’s lucrative golden mile and inner region.

So, don’t be surprised that today Melbourne’s Lord Mayor today is a glad-handing pro-Tourism promoter who has nothing to say on urban issues of any consequence.

There are murky forces at work. Jeff Kennett was tagged and vilified for being too Melbourne centric. Of course he contributed to his own defeat but Labor under Steve Bracks’ and John Brumby’s leadership cleverly organised anti-metropolitan sentiment which led to his surprise defeat in 1999.

Labor has been careful not to undo the pro-big property interest stance of its predecessors. But it has taken the city for granted these past nine years, assuming that it can absorb the growth to 4.5 million people that will make it Australia’s biggest city by 2020. But the neglect of its infrastructure cannot be allowed to continue. Labor can no longer ignore the congestion on its roads and the appalling state of the public transport system.

It must be worried though about a revived Liberal-National coalition opposition pitching to rural and provincial interests.

Labor’s obsession with fiscal rectitude and a balanced budget, with a tight rein kept on public spending or borrowing has seen opportunities wasted. Neglect and resentment of ‘the urban’ has had equally negative effects on infrastructure planning and diminished public policy.

Labor’s phobia and fear within its closed corridors is still ‘the guilty party’ tag imposed so mercilessly by the Kennett Liberals for their financial ineptitude in the years of Joan Kirner’s premiership.

And so our infrastructure is run-down. Our ninety year old railway system is a joke. We may have newfangled European designed trams but they clogged in streets full of cars. Our metropolis has become a megalopolis overnight. There has been no forward commitment to infrastructure or to diminishing or restricting urban sprawl, as has happened with European cities. This is something that might have been done by a Board of Works or a Greater Melbourne Council…. had one existed.

But we are all to blame. The market, economic growth and get-rich-quick real estate games have been a powerful lure. We have purchased more cars, watched our property values grow and taken Melbourne’s services for granted.

But do we need the growth? What about Melbourne’s much vaunted liveability? The world’s most liveable cities are small and efficient ones like Stockholm, not sprawling ones like Melbourne. And they have forward infrastructure provision and planning. Almost any European city and many an Asian one has a better public transport system than Melbourne.

Good public transport in the form a much-needed modern railway system is light years away, beyond the life of this government. That is why it will do very little to create one.

We see that economic growth has its negative consequences in the twenty-first century as it had in the nineteenth as we grasp at quick-fix solutions to problems of housing affordability.

There are none. We need initiatives and strategies to restrict, plan and provide for a liveable city and we need to stick to them.

The Government should bring its infrastructure departments together and commit to long-term planning and stated goals wanted by the community. But the hard decisions to restrict car use, to create new railway systems and to pay for them may be just too hard.

Action by the federal government in concert with reformed local authorities controlled by the citizens may be required. An independent and apolitical power like the Reserve Bank may be needed to take the hard long-term investment and taxing decisions to fix our cities.

Melbourne’s citizens will have a small chance to record their displeasure with council elections in November. But there is no metropolitan planning authority in sight.

©David Dunstan 2008

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