Table of Contents
Australia has long been, and remains, an essentially urban nation. Presently, nearly two out of every three Australians resides in one of the large urban regions that centre on our state capitals, and there is no sign that this proportion is diminishing. Most Australians prefer to live in the major metropolitan regions, which continue to offer the greatest opportunities for economic, social and cultural satisfaction.
‘Seachange’ and ‘treechange’ migrations are of great national significance because they are occurring in areas that appear ill equipped, in a variety of ways, to accommodate major population increases (Burnley and Murphy 2003). They are also raising demands for social and physical infrastructure which may not be viable or sensible to provide in these areas for a variety of reasons. These reasons include the difficulty of providing major new infrastructure networks in environmentally sensitive regions.
Ex-urban migration also partly signals that not all is well in our cities, or at least some of them, and that growth pressures in combination with urban mismanagement are literally driving some households away. Nonetheless, cities and large settlements still occupy the centre fields of Australian life.
The Australian geographer, Clive Forster, reminds us:
It is in city environments that most of us make our homes, seek employment, enjoy recreation, interact with neighbours and friends, and get education, health care and other services. Our cities determine how we live (2004:xvi).
For much of our European history, however, the material significance of Australia’s cities has tended to be ignored or understated in public discussions. Public denial of our continuing deep commitment to city living is nothing new. Anti-centricurbanism is a heart murmur that the nation was born with. In 1897, the NSW Government Statistician, T.A. Coghlan, lamented ‘the abnormal aggregation of the population into their capital cities’, viewing this as ‘most unfortunate element in the progress of the colonies’.[2]
The refusal to recognise our seemingly innate urbanity, and the pleasure and productivity that we have derived from our cities, is one national trait worth abandoning. It weakens us because it keeps us in constant denial about the true state of our settlement patterns. Disavowal of Australia’s deeply urban character reduces our willingness and capacity to understand the shifts that are always transforming our cities. It doubtless helps to explain why the ‘seachange’ phenomenon has been rhetorically overplayed in political and social discussion, without much reference to the continuing overwhelming demographic significance of the cities.
The long term working of our federal system has also tended to overlook the political and policy significance of cities and urban regions. There has been very little, and only episodic, explicit attention given to the cities by Commonwealth Governments (Orchard 1995; Parkin 1982). This record of neglect has been justified and reinforced by political leaders, scholars and jurists who have asserted that the national government has no authority and no power to intervene in urban affairs (Troy 1978).
There has not tended to be an equally theoretical counter-position which has asserted that the Commonwealth does, in fact, have the power and/or the duty to act on urban matters. Even the supporters of a national urban policy agenda have tended to acknowledge, if implicitly, that the authors of the constitution did not appear to anticipate a Commonwealth interest in the cities (Troy 1985: 265).
There have, however, been several important instances where political advances have simply gone around the Maginot Line of constitutional objection to claim urban policy for the Commonwealth. The most notable of these were the urban and housing development initiatives of the Whitlam Government (1972-5)[3] and the Hawke-Keating Governments’ Building Better Cities program (1991-6).
Nearly two decades ago, the urban scholar Patrick Troy (1978) made the distinction between theoretical and practical federalist positions when examining the history of Commonwealth intervention in the cities. The pragmatic position is that the Commonwealth can do what it likes in the field of urban policy if it is prepared to mobilise the many fiscal and policy levers at its disposal. The theoretical federalist imagines a constitutional impediment to national urban policy. Troy noted that:
… the argument that the commonwealth lacks the constitutional power to become involved in urban and regional development, while legally correct, is an argument which has only been used when it has been politically convenient. The ‘constitution’ has been the last refuge of the rationalist (1978:7).