So many levers, why don’t we use them?

In the pursuit of suburban and regional renewal, have we fallen into the trap of thinking this is a responsibility for local governments? Have we become too reliant on local government powers to provide incentives to attract and stimulate development – things like density bonuses, rates relief, infrastructure charges relief – without lifting our thinking to wider opportunities to support targeted geographic areas? Are we relying on too few of the levers actually at our disposal?

Local government development incentives can be highly effective, as Brisbane City Council showed when it targeted the limited supply of 5 star hotel rooms across the city some years back, along with student housing and seniors housing. Each sector was offered specific incentives designed to bring forward proposals for adding to supply in that sector, in support of city-wide economic development objectives. It worked, although it wasn’t intended to support specific geographic areas within the city.

On a wider geographic level, these can become more problematic: some local governments lack the resources to provide sufficient stimulus options to make much difference to a project’s viability. And some location-specific initiatives within one local government boundary might offer region-wide benefits, but neighbouring local governments are unlikely to chip in out of a sense of noblesse oblige. There are many other valid reasons why the task of economic attraction shouldn’t be delegated entirely to local governments.

Let’s take a hypothetical example of an outer suburban or regional business district which has seen better days. Picture plenty of ‘For lease’ and ‘For sale’ signs – some of the signs old enough to warrant a heritage listing in their own right. Regional plans may identify it as a centre of wider employment potential but without strategic policy support beyond the reach of local government those sentiments are unlikely to be realised. Somehow the ‘planning’ and the ‘doing’ never quite align. Our business district continues to promise potential but nothing much changes.

If asked what’s needed to turn that around, I suspect many of us would think the first order priorities are physical – infrastructure and placemaking upgrades being top of the pops. These things are unquestionably important in business attraction and centre renewal but, for the sake of argument, what other levers could be applied? What other things could we do to make a particular suburban or regional business district more appealing as a place to base jobs?

For starters, we often overlook the impact of utilities providers on the costs of both doing business and developing new assets. Many years back, these were public utilities and some – such as water and sewerage – were local government owned. Today many utilities providers work to a set of objectives which do not include business attraction or incentivising development. Nor do they respond to the economic development wishes of their former owners. But their cost structures for new or upgraded infrastructure can add significantly to local project costs and hence detract from the ability of getting our hypothetical run-down centre up to speed. A new project in our renewal centre will be competing with other existing centres where services are already in-ground, and not as fully priced into the location costs; which puts us at an immediate cost disadvantage. If we are serious about making outer suburban and regional centres competitive, is it valid that we leave utilities off the team?

Another lever we usually don’t engage in incentivising regional or suburban renewal is the tax lever. Payroll tax for example is levied at the same rate whether you are major accounting or law firm in a CBD tower, or a mid-size business in a suburban or regional location. Same payroll value, different locations, same tax bill. (Payroll tax in Queensland kicks in at $1.3million per annum in wages and is 4.75% for up to $6.5m per annum and 4.95% for over $6.5m per annum. The Queensland Government introduced a regional discount in 2019 - of 1%. It's a start but unlikely to to be deal maker. It also doesn't apply to outer suburban or regional areas within South East Queensland). If our aim was to make our run down outer suburban centre or regional centre more attractive to a cross section of businesses, is there any valid reason we couldn’t offer payroll tax exemptions based on place of business? (Sure, there’s a risk that some will set up “post box” locations to exploit initiatives like this – there always are. But consider that the opportunity cost of the lost revenue is relatively small if confined to specific locations, plus the specific geographic location ought to make validity checks relatively easy? This could actually be an easier tax measure to police than many already on the statute books).

And if a “horses for courses” approach with payroll tax to favour specific places of work is a potential lever, why not a similar approach to things like land taxes, depreciation rates or the big one – income and company taxes?

Let’s imagine our run down regional or outer suburban centre given the collective support of Federal, State and Local Governments, along with utility providers. Bring your business here and pay a concessional rate of company tax, your workers will receive extra income tax rebates based on location, your payroll taxes are zero, you are offered accelerated depreciation on built assets and fixed equipment, land tax is half what you would pay elsewhere, while energy, water and other utilities are less than what you’d pay in a major centre. Plus the housing for your workers is plentiful and affordable. I’m writing the economic development pitch already!

It’s only a crazy idea because we’ve never really been fair dinkum about supporting the efforts of suburban or regional business districts wanting to refresh their appeal. We have tended to assume that the inner cities are where it’s at and directed the bulk of our infrastructure investment there for that reason. We’ve also benchmarked and tuned our statewide and nationwide tax and regulatory settings to the economic environments of major centres. Little wonder that they have thrived while many suburban and regional centres have struggled.

It isn’t enough to be able to offer cheap land as the prime location incentive for regional or outer suburban areas – a tactic we often see resorted to. It’s cheap for a reason, and land cost itself is rarely the deciding factor. The cost of building in an outer suburban or regional area is either no different or (often) more expensive than building in a major centre – so you are effectively at a disadvantage from the outset. If the tax and regulatory framework is also designed on a ‘one size fits all’ basis, whether you are regionally or city based, then the odds start to become well and truly stacked against you.

We might stand a chance if we factored in the very high costs of inner urban infrastructure needed to support a highly centralised economy. For example, mass transit projects designed to ferry people to inner city workplaces are eye-wateringly expensive, but those costs are borne by taxpayers, usually without much dissent. Providing a similar ‘leg up’ to regional or outer suburban centres, in the name of a more resilient and dispersed economy that shares benefits more widely across the country, shouldn’t prove as problematic as it seems.

Nothing in this is new of course. The notion of a ‘Northern enterprise zone’ to develop the economy across the north of Australia gets a regular airing, but rarely any traction. It’s an idea that has now been floated so many times that it almost invites ridicule when it gets aired again. But surely the idea can be no less ridiculous than the notion that the tax rates and other government costs ought to be the same for businesses located in the CBDs of major cities - where they are surrounded by taxpayer funded amenity - as it is for outer suburban or regional business centres?

We need to begin to think more broadly about ways to support a more geographically diversified economy. Continued concentration of our economic fortunes into a handful of cities is a strategy fraught with risk, as we are watching play out now in Melbourne thanks to Covid-19. Geographic diversification is no longer an economic or planning pipe dream – it’s a matter of national economic security.

A new geography of urban wealth?

US based urbanist Richard Florida - once described as an “intellectual Rockstar” – shot to fame with his 2002 book The Creative Class. He was on a global speaking tour that took in many Australian cities, arguing that the secrets to economic development lay in attracting legions of creatively motivated progressives working in new economy professions. This was best done by enhancing inner urban “hipsterness” measured by a “bohemian index” with investments in public space, recreation, culture, and various other “urban chic” accoutrements. Many city leaders rushed for the Florida gospel, applying its preaching in the hope of out-hipping competing urban centres for precious jobs in the new economy. 

But Florida has since re-canted, admitting that the focus on inner urban “cool” may have worked for the wealthy and privileged but at the same time created city wide disadvantage. His latest book The New Urban Crisis suggests an alarming wealth divide is opening up between inner urban and suburban landscapes.

“Across nearly every metro area, middle-class neighborhoods are disappearing. Our cities and suburbs are being replaced by a patchwork metropolis, in which small areas of privilege are surrounded by vast swaths of poverty and disadvantage.  The rise of a winner-take-all-urbanism, with a small group of winners and a much larger span of losers, signals a profound crisis of today’s urbanized knowledge economy that threatens our economic future and way of life,” he now says. Talk about a change of heart.

While much of this may be true for major cities in the USA (where hipster havens like San Francisco or New York are losing millennials to lower cost of living centres in flyover country) is it also true for Australian cities? Are we seeing a concentration of wealth in inner urban suburbs while suburban areas languish? Certainly, the infrastructure and policy focus in most Australian cities has, for the past 15 years, been very much on enhanced inner urban amenity. But has this been enough to draw more high-income residents to the inner city and cause professionals to abandon the suburbs?

The evidence is revealing. Here’s a quick wrap of the picture across Australia’s capitals as of the 2016 Census.

Brisbane.

The household income difference between inner urban residents of Brisbane and those of the wider metro area have widened in the 2006-2016 period. Over that ten years, inner city residents (roughly within a 5 kilometre radius) have gone from enjoying incomes that were on average 13% higher than the wider metro average to now 23% more than the metro average. In dollar terms, inner Brisbane households earn on average $357 a week more than the metro average for the city.

However, the traditional patchwork quilt of high and low income suburbs remains a dominant feature. The suburb you live in still tends to define your household wealth status – be it high or low. Brisbane’s western suburbs (Fig Tree Pocket, Pinjarra Hills, Brookfield etc) are still among the highest income earners. South eastern suburbs (Carindale, Wakerley, Rochedale) are fast catching up. There are inner suburbs on the high income list (Bardon, Paddington, Bulimba etc) but there are others (like Kelvin Grove or Herston) which are well below the city wide average.

So while it is true the inner city is gentrifying, the preference among many high income households still appears to be for traditional suburban neighborhoods, many in middle to outer urban areas.

Sydney

Sydney is different. In 2006, household incomes in the Sydney city and inner south region were roughly the same as the wider metro average. By 2016 they were only 8% more. The North Sydney-Mossman inner city region actually went from being 56% more than the metro average to 37% more by 2016, while the Eastern suburbs north region stayed roughly the same – from 37% more to 38% more ten years later.

In dollar terms however, the differences are more stark: the average North Sydney-Mossman household in 2016 was pulling in $642 a week more than the metro average; and it was $667 a week more in the Eastern suburbs North.

So inner city residents of Sydney earn a lot more than the metro average in both dollar and percentage terms but it’s been that way for some time – hardly any surprise. This is entirely consistent with Sydney’s long term role as financial and business centre for Australia, which has arguably been the case for some decades now. Research would need to look back to the 1990s or earlier to find a turning point where inner urban income disparity began to widen significantly from the metro wide average – if indeed it did (or has it been so since the 1960s?)

However, proximity to the core does not preclude a number of middle and outer suburbs from joining the high income household list. Rouse Hill to the north west or Port Hacking to the south are two of several examples. In Sydney’s case, proximity to the core appears to have a significant relationship to high income households, but this has probably been the case since long before Florida published his first book.

Melbourne.

The household income gap in inner Melbourne compared with the greater Melbourne average widened from 5% more in 2006 to 10% more in 2016. The difference was greater in the Melbourne inner east area (14% more in 2016) but this was unchanged since 2006 (when it was 15%). In dollar terms, inner Melbourne households earn $155 more than the metro wide average and this rises to $213 a week more for the smaller Melbourne inner east area.

Overall, despite a widely reported acceleration of urban density programs in inner Melbourne over the past decade, this appears to have little impact on widening income disparity. In fact, it is possible to argue that Melbourne is more equitable in terms of inner urban versus wider metro household incomes than any other capital.

Melbourne also continues to exhibit a preference among high income households for a large number of middle and outer suburban areas. Any suggestion that high income professionals in Melbourne have abandoned the burbs for the inner city is not supported by the evidence.

Adelaide.

Households in Adelaide’s inner city (essentially its CBD) earned roughly 1% less than the metro average for the city in 2016 – which was down from 11% more in 2006. However, inner urban pockets such as Burnside inner (36% more in 2016) or Prospect-Walkerville (27% more in 2016) showed more disparity - but these differences seem for the most part unchanged since 2006 (when Burnside inner was 32% higher than the metro average and Prospect-Walkerville 19%).

So suburbs immediately adjoining the inner urban core of Adelaide appear to show more income differential compared with the metro average than the core itself, and these differences – 36% more in the case of Burnside – are substantial. But like Sydney, it would seem that this has been the case for at least the period since 2006 and there is no strong evidence of a widening income gap between inner and broader metro Adelaide - where the Adelaide Hills and foothills continue to be the preferred (suburban) environment for higher income households.

Perth

The gap between inner city household incomes and the wider metro area in Perth are widening – rising from 13% more in inner Perth in 2006 to 24% more in 2016. In dollar terms, inner city Perth households are now earning on average $386 a week more than the metro average for the city. At the time of the Census (August 2016) Perth was in the midst of a downturn in economic fortunes linked to the slowing resources sector.

You could speculate whether this had greater financial impact on inner urban or middle and outer urban households but without further study, this remains a topic of conjecture. For now at least, it remains the beachside suburbs north of the city that are home to the higher income households, much as it has long been.

So, what’s this all mean?

First, the Australian evidence runs contrary to suggestions that higher income professionals are abandoning the suburbs for “cooler, inner urban hipster” markets. Indeed, middle and suburban locations are where you are just as likely to find pockets of high income earning households (with the possible exception of Sydney where wealth does some more concentrated). The same, of course also applies to low income households but the point being that proximity to the core is not yet a key determinant for most cities – at least on the evidence. Larger homes and leafier environs remain for many a more powerful lure than higher density inner urban environments. There is evidence this may be changing and the gap widening, but the pace of change is not what some boosters have suggested. The suburbs have certainly not fallen from favour and remain very much desirable in the eyes of the higher income households that many inner urban markets covet.

It’s also fair to suggest that the income and wealth disparity Florida is now alerted to in cities like San Francisco and New York is of a scale that we are yet to see in Australian cities (again with the possible exception of Sydney). The enhancement of urban cores in many Australian city centres as so far mostly been insufficient to lure legions of high income creative class workers into those cores as places to live. Some will argue by pointing to anecdotal evidence (much of it owed to gushy headlines manufactured by eager boosters) but on the whole, Australian cities have avoided the problems that Florida now warns about.

For the time being at least.

Footnote: The maps used in this story came from a handy online tool published by The Guardian. You can have your own fun via this link.

Are our Universities holding back our education export potential?

Education is one of the fastest growing industries in Australia, soon to reach number four spot as an employer – ahead of the traditional retail employment machine. Not only this, but education is a spectacular export earner – now worth more than $20 billion to the Australian economy, and most of this is in higher (ie tertiary) education. Education is now worth more in exports than even tourism, and is ranked only behind coal and iron ore as an industry that earns the foreign exchange dollars needed to keep us economically afloat.

This is potentially only the beginning. Our close economic relationship with trading partners like China, India, Indonesia and other rapidly expanding Asian economies, along with the US and Europe, should logically mean the potential of our education exports has barely scratched the surface.

Many of our Universities are already highly geared to the full fee paying international student market. This is a good thing, as the evidence is that it is full fee paying foreign students that are in effect subsidising the costs of tertiary education for Aussie kids (and mature aged students). Universities need to maintain a balance between foreign and domestic student numbers and also need to maintain their academic standards: it’s not simply a case of rapid expansion to meet international demand or this could throw things out of kilter. Many Universities are also at capacity due to physical constraints on their campus or have already expanded by adding additional campuses. 

Some, like RMIT (Melbourne) have seized the opportunity to explore the international demand by opening overseas campuses. Since the year 2000, RMIT has had a presence in Vietnam and has now grown that to a 7,000 strong student body in two campuses – one (the main one) in Ho Chi Minh City and a smaller campus in Hanoi. 

I learned this visiting Vietnam a couple of years ago and it struck me as a terrific idea. RMIT is not the only Australian University to expand overseas. For example, Townsville’s JCU has - since 2003 –had a campus in Singapore. “Bringing programs direct from Australia and resident senior academic staff from JCU to ensure academic quality, students studying at JCU Singapore can be assured of the same enriching university education as our students in Queensland Australia” it says on its website. 

Many local government areas in Australia are keen to explore development of the tertiary education sector as an employment generator and as a ‘clean’, knowledge based industry. Which is also a terrific idea. Moreton Bay Regional Council to Brisbane’s north recently announced a deal to secure a new campus of Sunshine Coast University on a former paper mill industrial site, in what was widely (and rightly) regarded as quite a coup. 

But in investigating this further it also became clear that many Australian Universities just didn’t want further campus expansion: they have enough sites already. So there are regions with impeccable sites and a supportive policy infrastructure which are unlikely to get a shiny new campus of an Australian University, no matter how compelling the case. “That’s OK,” I thought to myself, “let’s just do what RMIT did but in reverse: let’s bring some international Universities here with a new campus.” 

This could mean bringing campus expansion of some leading international names with an already big appetite for education in Australia. Imagine a University of Fudan (Shanghai) or Hong Kong Polytechnic, or a University of Delhi (with an astonishing 400,000 strong student body) or Universitas Terbuka (Jakarta – and with an even bigger student body of 650,000) having a campus here? Students, teachers and researchers from overseas would be exposed to western culture and language, and Australian students would also have the opportunity to study at an overseas University without having to leave the country. Our export potential could go exponential.  We create more high value jobs in a fast growing, clean industry, we grow our export dollars and we cement valuable trading and cultural relationships within the region and elsewhere. 

But alas, this is Australia; if only it were that simple. I soon learned that this was largely an unrealistic dream. Without the full support and cooperation of our existing Universities, this can’t happen. Universities are governed (mostly) by State Legislation and are, in effect, granted a license to operate. The existing Universities would first need to agree to allow foreign competition into “their” market before anything could happen and they are – in the main – largely opposed to allowing that competition in, even though they themselves might be expanding overseas. There are only a couple of exceptions as I understand it, and both are in Adelaide - Carnegie Mellon University and University College London.

Why is it that Australian students and their International compatriots have such limited exposure to International University campuses on Australian soil? Is it just fundamentally unrealistic or is it a strategic blocking force from our own Public Administrators and Higher Education providers? The expansion of Australian Universities off shore is well supported strategy while the limited number of offshore Universities in Australia is an underwhelming frustration. 

Some developers and investment attraction agencies I have spoken with concede their interest to attract international education providers to our shores. As international investment continues to deliver the core funding for future developments it is quite logical that their home based education providers will see the opportunities missed if they don’t leverage their home based capital to support their global expansion. 

There may well be legitimate concerns by our tertiary institutions: erosion of existing fee incomes through foreign competition could jeopardise standards; foreign Universities may mean less foreign student incomes for existing Universities – pushing up fees for domestic students. No doubt there are countless more “reasons why not” – arguments which, at the end of the day, are largely designed to protect a regulated industry from further competition, even if the potential economic value to the country is limited because of it.

But would it really do that much harm? Consider the huge number of Universities in the USA for example: the competition there doesn’t seem to affect the position of the leading institutions which continue to build strong global brands with small student numbers. MIT has 11,500 students. Harvard some 22,000. Though small and despite swimming in the same sea as legions of others, they remain brands of global repute. There is no reason our own institutions should fear competition if their standards of excellence in research and teaching were such that competition was not a threat but an opportunity to elevate their reputations further. 

Australia is at the end of the day a small country with desirable education qualities in a region of mega nations with a matching appetite for the education opportunities we could potentially offer. Is shutting the door to international institutions in this way really to our best advantage?

Footnote:

For more on the value of education exports see:

http://monitor.icef.com/2016/11/australias-education-exports-surpass-aus20-billion/

Also this handy but dated RBA report: 
https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2008/jun/pdf/bu-0608-2.pdf

Is investment attraction an economic distraction?

In Australia we invest a good deal of taxpayers money and public sector energy into what is known as “investment attraction.”  Designed to secure new economic opportunities for particular regions, investment attraction strategies frequently resort to a menu of features designed – it is hoped – to catch the attention of businesses looking for places to invest or expand or open new facilities.

All too often, these become cliches and are stretched to incredulity. Take this effort from the hapless South Australians (with my comments in parentheses):

“South Australia offers a range of cost advantages that no other state in Australia can match, improving your company’s bottom line. (So why are so many businesses there reportedly struggling?) … Private sector labour costs in South Australia are 10 per cent below the Australian average making our state a great place to expand your workforce. (With so many unemployed, you’d hope so) The Adelaide market continues to be one of the most cost-competitive CBD markets nationally when it comes to setting up business and leasing office space. (Because so much of it is vacant, and has been for a long time) South Australia has a range of office space and industrial land available in, or close to, the CBD at rates lower than other mainland Australian states. (They’re worth less for a reason) With a well-planned supply of affordable industrial land, linked to strategic infrastructure and transport corridors the cost of doing business here is highly competitive. (Until you try turn on a power point)”

“South Australia’s central location provides the ideal gateway into Australia and out to Asian markets and beyond through our modern air, sea and rail freight channels. (Central to what? The Southern Ocean?) Our international airport is only six kilometres from the CBD (so is Bogota’s, so what? New York’s JFK is around 25 klm from Manhattan, do they feel threatened by Adelaide because of this?) … Flights to Sydney and Melbourne also depart, on average, every 20 minutes during operating hours. (So you can escape at short notice?).”

Apologies to my South Australian friends for picking on them for this example, but the point is that any potential business looking at investment locations in Australia would likely find these heroic claims equally amusing. Being in denial is not a strategy. Propaganda is not a strategy.

South Australia has some very real, deep seated and widely publicised economic problems that stretch back for decades. Overcoming these cannot be easy. Denying they exist at all is far from achieving anything.

It’s worth noting that they – like many other regions trying to attract new investment - have resorted to the oldest investment attraction trick in the book: the bribe. They’ve set up an Economic Investment Fund and a Future Jobs Fund, which are aimed at “investment projects (that) deliver significant strategic and economic benefits for the state.”

The bribe attracts all sorts of interest, often for the wrong reasons. It can be counter productive – costing taxpayers more in upfront cash grants and foregone taxes than the benefits to the region. Elon Musk of Tesla fame is a big believer in the bribe. He played off several US states vying for the privilege of being home to his Tesla Gigafactory, finally settling on a remote site in the Nevada Desert in exchange for a reported USD$1.3 billion in up-front cash, free land and forgiven future taxes. It turns out that’s just a part of the nearly USD$5 billion in total grants and tax relief his business has managed to talk out of the hands of US taxpayers. (See my article on the Gigafactory story).  Is it any coincidence that Musk is now praising the wisdom of the SA Government, promising to work together on energy ‘solutions’?

The bribe isn’t confined to South Australia. It is immensely popular Australia wide. Competing and even neighbouring regions often get locked into bidding wars in the name of “investment attraction.” Also known as ‘the pork barrel’ the bribe is used with great political effect, and can easily run into billions of taxpayer dollars with little or no business case justification. It helps explain why, for example, Australian taxpayers are spending $50 billion on building new submarines in South Australia rather than buying them ready to go for much less. If you’re a fan of the TV series ‘Utopia’ you’ll be familiar with how ‘nation building’ and the bribe are rarely separated by much. It’s practically essential viewing to understand how this country works today.

The sad part of all the effort and money directed at “investment attraction” is that so little attention is paid to investment retention. Identifying the problems faced by existing industries and business, and ensuring we don’t make things worse for them, might be a step in the right direction. Lumbering innovative businesses in a rebounding manufacturing sector with excessive electricity costs while talking up “innovation agendas” or being in hot pursuit of technology “start-ups” is just one example of neglecting the needs of existing business while efforts are focused on attracting new ones. South Australians might find this a depressing but familiar story but they can take some comfort in knowing it’s a problem that is Australia wide.

Too often, tackling the problems faced by existing businesses are glossed over in favour of the much more glamourous role of chasing shiny new investment bling. For every new business opportunity secured, how many others receive little support or are allowed to fail?

How the future of work will reshape our cities

The growth industries and professions of the future will shape our cities in very different ways to the industries and professions that shaped our cities in the past. There are profound implications for urban planning and property, if we’re ready for them

The biggest growth industry for coming years and for the foreseeable future, the official forecasts all seem to agree on, will be in health care and social assistance. This includes professions from surgeons to GPs to nurses to child care or aged care, various therapies and counsellors, dental, and even laundry workers, cleaners and administrative support roles. Already our biggest single industry, it employs more than 1.5 million Australians. It grew by over 20% in the five years to 2015 and that rate of growth is unlikely to change going forward. Nearly half of everyone in this industry has a bachelor’s degree or some higher education qualification so they’re not all hospital cleaners – many will be skilled professionals.

This will be followed by the professional, scientific and technical services industry and very close behind that, the education and training industry. Construction, manufacturing (yes, still growing despite all attempts to kill it off) and accommodation and food services round up the top six biggest growth industries of the future.

This is important because the nature of growth industries of the future - and more particularly where they will be located - is going to reshape our cities in a very different way to the industries that grew with and shaped our cities in the past. This was highlighted in a recent report on employment in the growing region of South East Queensland, prepared by Macroplan for The Suburban Alliance.

The health care and social assistance industry is predicted by government authorities to grow more than any other industry in the years to 2041, producing around 220,000 extra jobs. But this industry has very different spatial needs to, say, the legal industry which has the highest inner city concentration of any occupation in the region. In health and social assistance, 200,000 of those 220,000 jobs will likely be in suburban business districts or otherwise scattered across suburbia. The biggest growth industry has little need or preference for clustering in the inner city.

Consider the implications for transport networks, property development and urban planning. What will it mean in terms of additional medical centres, hospitals, professional and consulting suites, new aged care and child care, and all the peripheral jobs that hang off these occupations? Where will they go? Will we see existing shopping centres morph from a largely retail focused offer to embrace a wider range of mixed uses? And if not in existing centres, what planning changes will be needed to accommodate this growth in new centres?

Our urban model, reflecting a 100 years of employment centralization, is changing to one of employment dispersal. Jobs are not moving from the city centre to the suburbs but the industries which fuel growth are changing, and with them, the patterns of employment location.

Even in the professional, scientific and technical services industry – one you would presume is largely centralized - much of that future growth (based on current spatial preferences) will occur outside the inner city. Take for example the generically titled occupation of “professional.” There were 284,300 of these in the South-East Queensland region but only 24% of them in the inner city. A further quarter were in a number of defined suburban business districts and the balance – half – elsewhere in suburbia. This is our second biggest growth industry and those patterns of employment distribution are unlikely to change meaning of the 146,000 new jobs in this industry to be created to 2041, the clear majority will likely be suburban based.

The third biggest growth industry (education) also shows little evidence of centralization – only 7% of educators are inner city workers the rest are suburban. Even of those professionals who describe their occupation as “Chief executives, general managers or legislators” delivers a surprise: there are only 21% of them in the inner city. And for clerical and administrative workers, it’s a similar picture: only 22% are inner city workers. The rest are suburbia based.

Engineers appear to have a preference for central locations with 42% of the 16,639 engineers of South East Queensland in the inner city as do the lawyers with 65% of them in the entire region to be found in the inner city. But there are only (fortunately?) just over 9,000 lawyers in the entire region so unless there’s to be an unpredicted explosion of work in the legal profession in the future it’s hard to see this occupation fueling demand for space and transport in the inner city of the future.

Fifty years ago, cities were full of clerical and administrative, managerial and professional workers, shuffling in to centralized offices in their cars or on trams, trains or buses to clock on at 9am and clock off at 5pm. The suburbs were centres of manufacturing and heavy industry, and retailing, wholesaling and transit related industries. That pattern is still there but in another fifty years’ time, our cities will have different industries generating the bulk of jobs and many of those jobs will need to be based in suburban centres to be closer to their markets or regional transport arteries.

And what are the implications for our city centres? Will they continue to evolve to embrace yet more entertainment, recreational and culture based hubs for the regions they serve, rather than largely just places of work? And how will different cities behave, given the economic drivers can be so substantially different?

There’s much more to be explored in this because the implications are profound. Sadly, much of our thinking around urban planning seems firmly rooted in traditional models which owe more to a sentimental rear vision view of urban development rather than a forward looking one.

Footnote: If you or your organization is interested in exploring what this means in more detail, or for specific regions, please just drop me an email. I’d be very interested to discuss this with you. I’ve got a useful presentation which runs through all this in a bit more detail which I’d be happy to share. You can download the entire report prepared for The Suburban Alliance here.

Energy and industry

Predictions of the demise of manufacturing in Australia as the economy slowly becomes more service oriented are increasingly widespread. The reason – we are told – has mostly been an uncompetitive labour cost structure. We just can’t make stuff as cheap and as quickly as they can in China, Vietnam or India. 

But there are two problems with this. First, manufacturing is far from dead and remains our fifth largest employer: more than double the entire financial, insurance and property sector. The second is that it may no longer be labour costs but something else that could threaten the viability of our manufacturing sector. 

That something is energy and the cost of it. Only 20 years ago or so, Australia enjoyed some of the cheapest energy costs in the developed world. Now they are among some of the highest and most worrying is that they are predicted to continue to escalate well beyond inflation. Some hawks are even suggesting prices may double within the decade.

Responding to this is going to mean much more than turning off a few domestic lights at night or switching to energy save mode in the office. A bit like the city kid who hasn’t seen a cow and doesn’t know this is where milk comes from, we city slickers can easily get detached from the bigger reality - and in terms of energy consumption in Australia, the reality is that domestic and commercial are not the major consumers.

Manufacturing – our fifth largest industry – consumes nearly a quarter of energy in the country: more than double the entire residential sector and more than the entire residential and commercial sectors combined. This graph from the Office of the Chief Economist spells it out:

Transport is the largest consumer of energy (chiefly fuel) while in manufacturing it is chiefly electricity. What produces electricity is mainly coal, although renewables are fast on the rise (subsidised as they are for the time being). The graph below courtesy Origin Energy data shows generation by energy source:

So here’s the problem. In public policy and media discussion, much of the debate over energy costs seems to revolve around domestic and perhaps also commercial considerations. The cost of cooling or heating the home, the cost of appliances, even the cost of leaving the TV on at the wall occupy our minds and our thinking and much of the policy debate in the daily media. The answers, we are told, rest in renewables and as a nation we seem happy to embrace them: roof top solar for example was adopted quickly (many of us due no doubt to a mix of environmental responsibility plus a desire to break free from the power companies). We seem content with policies which cast coal fired power as the enemy and renewables as our saviour, without much question on the wider economic impacts beyond “will I still be able to have the lights on and fridge running?”

Where is the national debate about how rapidly rising electricity costs may cripple our fifth largest employer in manufacturing? There are countless stories of significant innovation in manufacturing where even our high labour costs haven’t been the death blow we’ve been told. Away from the trendy inner city coffee shops, energy costs – more specifically the cost of electricity – are becoming a bigger and bigger concern for these businesses and enterprises involved in manufacturing.  It would be criminal in a public policy sense if our national energy policy was more finely tuned to the sensitivities of the inner urban greenie doing their bit for sustainability by growing some zucchini plants in a broccoli box on their balcony, while the industries that power one in four jobs are left out of the debate.

I am not full of hope. The recent Federal Budget announcement of an inland freight line from Melbourne to Brisbane (hoo-ray by the way!) met with a suggestion from The Green’s Sara Hanson-Young that the steel used should be Australian, and preferably from Whyalla. “"If you care about the steel industry, then make sure Government money is being spent on Australian steel and give those steelworkers in Whyalla actually something to smile about,” she said.

Well yes. Except for one thing. Making steel is massively energy hungry. To do so, you not only need loads and loads of reliable energy, but the cost of energy is critical. Increase that cost and making steel becomes uneconomic. Massively so. Plus, Whyalla is in South Australia. Their experiments with renewables and reliability to date have hardly been stellar. What do the likes of Sara Hanson-Young have in mind? A solar powered steel smelter?

The energy source that once powered energy hungry industries like steel manufacturing is coal. And coal is very much on the nose, especially with The Greens but also the wider community too. The logical connection between the cost of replacing coal with renewables and the cost and viability impact that will have not just on steel but right across the manufacturing spectrum, seems to rate little thought.

If we are to make this energy transition, we need to have a sensible debate about the impacts on industry and how they can handle that transition without suffering needless economic hardship. Otherwise, yet more might look at closing their Australian operations and head for more cost friendly markets. Letting that happen without at least trying to prevent it would be economically reckless in every sense of the word. 

The pain with trains lies mainly in the brains (or lack of them)

Unless you’ve been on holidays in some remote place over Christmas you’d have noticed that trains have been making the news a lot lately in south east Queensland. Mainly it’s because of the lack of them running, which it seems in turn is because there are not enough people to drive them. Much of which was triggered by the opening on one extra line of just 12 kilometres in length, which has been talked about for close to 130 years and which has been in detailed planning or under construction for the past decade. Kind of snuck up on them all I guess.

Having so many scheduled services pulled at no notice has given the hapless Queensland Rail every appearance of being utterly unable to organise a round of drinks at a brewery. Steeped in olde worlde tradition, it’s not hard to imagine the departmental mandarins enjoying a regular cup of tea at work delivered by a tea lady, her trolley complete with lace doilies as it rattles along the corridors of rail power. 

It’s not just management which gives the sense of something scripted around Reg Varney in “On the buses” (a British sitcom of the early 1970s) but the Rail Tram and Bus Union too seems rooted in a bygone era. According to the Union’s website “The RTBU was formed 1 March 1993 through the historic amalgamation of three railway unions and one tram and bus union... These unions have a strong tradition dating back to the nineteenth century.” It seems that’s a tradition they are intent on keeping alive and well in the 21^st century.

There are always more accurate back stories than sensationalist headlines, and no doubt there have been many contributing factors behind the latest embarrassments. Some of these date back many years, some date back only a few years, and others just a few months. Not all have been due to decisions of QR Management either. However, as generous as we taxpayers can be, it is hard to have confidence given the opening of the new $1.2 billion Redcliffe line seems to have been quite predictable, while there was no heads up that services could be impacted in the slightest way.

The Redcliffe line came in at $100 million per kilometre, which is hardly small change for the taxpayer. We are entitled to question how well our taxes are being spent.

With this in mind, it’s very hard to have much confidence in the proposed $5.4 billion cost proposed for the 10.2 kilometre cross river rail link. This one’s $530 million per kilometre – five times as costly as the new Redcliffe link (going underground a large part of the reason). But here’s the rub: we are being asked to trust the same crowd who seemingly can’t staff the trains we already have, and who insist that without this extra $5.4 billion of our money (that’s us, the taxpayers) that the whole network will choke and congestion costs will escalate.

The cross river rail is not a new proposal and dates back many years. Successive governments have been told the same story: that without an additional crossing, the network will reach capacity. The date for that capacity breaking point keeps getting extended and the project delayed. The fact that Brisbane has only one river crossing is a real issue. But what’s at stake here is a question of trust and given the latest series of debacles, can we trust that an extra $5.4 billion is going to be well spent and well managed?

If you look for details on the business case you can find a five page PR document which calls itself a ‘cost benefit analysis summary’ but which is preciously short on evidence and long on promise. Have a look for yourself. It’s not much given the sums of money we are being asked to part with. There’s an older business case by Deloitte in 2011 which assumed a 50% increase in public transport mode share from 2009 to 2031 (from 8% to 12%); a 23% increase in rail patronage by 2031 with cross river rail, and which attributed 39% of the project financial benefit to “perceived” public transport benefits. Would you call these heroic or conservative assumptions?

All of which prompted me to check on the actual numbers of people across Greater Brisbane – an area with a population of around 1.8 million – that actually use rail. Based on the last Census, the number of people who used rail – either in whole or in conjunction with some other form of transport – was 65,212. Not a big number. That’s 65,212 out of the 925,385 employed persons in the region of 1.8 million people. The number correlates with QR’s ‘Passenger Load Survey’ (the most recent one of which was in 2009). It showed that the network carried 65,752 people in the morning peak and 57,286 people in the afternoon peak.  Which however you cut it is a small number and less than 5% of the population.

What’s more, the rail network is mainly designed around servicing inner city employment. There are around 180,000 jobs in total in the inner city – one in ten jobs of the broader metro region. Nine out of ten of us work in suburban areas which are largely not serviced by train. The same QR survey shows that, of 65,231 total boardings and alightings in the AM peak, 33,738 (52% of the network total) were at Central Station. Roma Street came next with 9,319 followed by Fortitude Valley (4,757), Bowen Hills (2,116), South Bank (2,790) and South Brisbane (1,751). Put these together and you have 84% of passenger movements across the network being at these six inner city stations.

But we are told by the rail experts that unless we spend another $5.4 billion on a transit service that moves less than 5% of the population - almost all of whom are travelling to six inner city stations to access the 10% of metro jobs that are in the inner city – then we are facing a transport meltdown.

I know it’s not fair to divide the proposed $5.4 billion for the Cross River Rail by the 65,000 users (but if you did, the answer would be $83,000 per user) or to add the $1.2 billion cost of the Redcliffe Line (which would bring the answer to over $100,000 per user) because these investments have network wide implications that benefit both public and private transport, as well as freight. It would be equally unfair to divide the project cost by just the additional number of people projected to be carried as a result of the extra investment, because that’s the sort of number crunching business people do; it’s not meant for transport businesses. It would also be wrong to point out that these are just the capital costs and that each trip – per person per direction on a CityRail train – is subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of $10, or $20 for a round trip.

I am not suggesting an additional river crossing is not a good idea. But based on recent performance, and given the very large sums involved – all of which is taxpayer money not privately funded – then you’d hope for a bit more detail than what’s in a five page PR document for a project promoted by a government agency which seems incapable of managing the existing network.

Maybe management of the project and the network should be given to someone else? How about the aviation sector? Our airports were privatised in the late 1990s, as was our airline Qantas. Both the airline and the airports are now vastly more modern and efficient, and serve the travelling public far better than when they were basically government organisations. Plus they aren’t going cap in hand to the taxpayer on a regular basis to keep them afloat. (The privatisation of airports and Qantas, by the way, were originally decisions of the Keating Labor Government). Aviation is a type of public transport and freight business, as is rail. So why not drag some aviation experience into the rail sector?

Queensland Fail (aka QR) and the government’s insistence that we need to spend a further $5.4 billion on a network managed by the same people behind the recent debacles is just not confidence inspiring. It leaves you with the sinking feeling that they’ve based their business case and management model on an episode of the ABC’s satirical ‘Utopia’ – a “multi award-winning satirical comedy about a group of people charged with building this nation – one white elephant at a time.” 

Manufacturing: "not dead yet"

There’s a famous scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail where dead bodies from the plague are being heaped onto a cart. One body, about to dumped on the cart, protests that “I’m not dead yet.”’ “I’m getting better… I might go for a walk” he protests, until the collector of dead bodies clubs him on the head and gets on with his business. The way we dismiss the future of our manufacturing sector reminds me a lot of that scene. 

Manufacturing, we are told, is largely finished in this country as the art of making things is lost to low labour cost countries against which we simply cannot compete. Disciples of the ‘new’ economy would have you believe that all the jobs worth having are now in high value professional services, which are mostly located in our inner cities. 

Only last year, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called for an “ideas boom” for Australia to replace the mining boom and provide growth, prosperity and jobs. A national “Knowledge Nation” summit was held to support the Federal Government’s “National Innovation and Science Agenda” and a host of ‘rock stars’ of ‘the innovation economy’ were announced as part of “Knowledge Nation 100” – the “visionaries, intellects, founders and game changers” destined to drive our future prosperity. 

Our urbanisation agenda aligns with this future vision of work and industry, by planning for centralised economies and highly educated inner urban workforces of the professionally qualified, clustered around urban cores. The preferred urban form to make this happen, we are told, are cities like London or New York or San Francisco or Singapore – centres of global commerce, technology and finance. 

In all this, it seems there is now little room for industries like manufacturing. 

But despite the widespread predictions of manufacturing’s demise, the sector is still surprisingly resilient. The graph below plots employment by selected industry for over 30 years. (Click graph to enlarge). 

The gradual demise of manufacturing is undeniable, although it has far from collapsed and still employs some 800,000 plus Australians. By contrast, the much celebrated rise of the information, media and communication (ITC) sector looks a bit lame by comparison. There are still four times as many people employed by manufacturing as the ITC sector. 

Big growth has occurred in white collar professionals in the professional, scientific and technical sector, as well as education. Nothing however can match the growth of the health care and professional assistance sector (which includes a very high proportion of part time jobs). 

Even by 2020 (graph below), according to the Federal Department of Employment, manufacturing will still be our seventh largest employer, responsible for over 800,000 pay checks nationally. That’s more than four times the number of people directly employed in mining, to put that into context. The much-hyped tourism industry, for further context, is predicted by Tourism Research Australia to employ 656,000 people by 2030 – which is 150,000 fewer and ten years later than manufacturing is predicted to employ by 2020.

What’s the point of this? Simply that the rush to embrace new industries centred around the services sector which offers high incomes linked to technological or particular professional skills can distract attention from less glamourous sectors which continue to chug away, with limited public policy support and even official disinterest. Manufacturing has been one of those. A ‘smoke stack’ industry now generationally removed from the lives of urban elites, it has been largely written off as uncompetitive and with little future. Yet it is one of our largest employers and one which offers longer term full time jobs, as opposed to shorter term part time roles (as you might find in for example tourism, or health care and social assistance). 

It could be that public policy attention (and the industry support that accompanies it) reflects the political favourites of the day. If that is the case, the manufacturing sector might need to revisit its public advocacy and somehow demonstrate to policy makers that Australia’s economic engine cannot just rely on publicly funded ‘bed pan’ industries or high glamour tourism jobs where low wages and part time status are the norm. These industries may indeed absorb large numbers of people who would otherwise be unemployed and they have a tremendously valid role to play in our economy. But it’s always a question of balance and what seems to have been a dismissal of manufacturing’s potential or its future by a cross section of policy leaders and commentators while ‘innovation’ and almost anything to do with technology are heaped with praise is a telling sign that the economic debate needs some rebalancing. 

Note: The “information media and telecommunications industry” includes businesses involved in newspaper, magazine, book, and directory publishing; software publishing; motion picture and sound recording publishing and distribution; radio and television broadcasting; internet publishing and broadcasting; telecommunication services, internet service providers & web search portals; data processing, web hosting and electronic information storage services; and library and other information services.

“I’m not dead yet” scene - Monty Python and The Holy Grail: Youtube clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdf5EXo6I68

Dialogue:

Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead!
[A large man appears with a (seemingly) dead man over his shoulder]
Large Man: Here's one.
Dead Collector: Nine pence.
"Dead" Man: I'm not dead.
Dead Collector: What?
Large Man: Nothing. [hands the collector his money] There's your nine pence.
"Dead" Man: I'm not dead!
Dead Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Large Man: Yes he is.
"Dead" Man: I'm not.
Dead Collector: He isn't.
Large Man: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
"Dead" Man: I'm getting better.
Large Man: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Dead Collector: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
"Dead" Man: I don't want to go on the cart.
Large Man:' Oh, don't be such a baby.
Dead Collector: I can't take him.
"Dead" Man: I feel fine.
Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, do me a favor.
Dead Collector: I can't.
Large Man: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
Dead Collector: I promised I'd be at the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.
Large Man: Well, when's your next round?
Dead Collector: Thursday.
"Dead" Man: I think I'll go for a walk.
Large Man: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
"Dead" Man: I feel happy. I feel happy.
[The collecter paces for an idea, then whacks the body with his club, solving the problem]
Large Man: Ah, thank you very much.
Dead Collector: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
Large Man: Right.

Affordable housing in plentiful supply

Australia’s ongoing (some would say interminable) debate about housing affordability was given fresh impetus last month when Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison weighed in with calls for liberated land supply and planning reform by state and local authorities. Scott’s call closely followed a less edifying observation by demographer Bernard Salt that young people simply needed to change their breakfast preferences to afford a house. 

Predictably, discussion swirled around the excessive cost of housing in the inner city markets of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, the declining rate of first home buyers entering the market, the rise of a renting class and the push for higher density apartments of limited size as a means of gaining a foothold in the market. It’s a familiar conversation and one that’s been repeated for a long time now. The same arguments were being thrashed around in the lead up to the 2007 Federal Election: release more land, reduce up front development levies, and free up a notoriously dysfunctional planning system. At the time, I was National Executive Director of the Residential Development Council, and to make the point, we famously sent every Member of Parliament a rubber banana, likening housing to the price of bananas (which when in short supply, rise in price).  The debate got a lot of traction and both then Prime Minister Howard and Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd made a number of statements on the issue.

Fast forward ten years and nothing has happened on the policy front. What’s worse, the level of market analysis in the debate hasn’t improved. One of the realities which ought to get serious attention is that Australia has plenty of affordable housing. It’s just not where the jobs are.

That might sound simplistic but if we continue to push for greater concentrations of employment in the inner city areas of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane we will only make the affordability problem worse. And this is what we are doing. Prime Minister Turnbull’s ‘Smart Cities’ plan has been much celebrated by the inner urban cognoscenti but in reality it is mainly an inner cities plan. Infrastructure priorities by State and Local Governments continue to lavish inner city regions with transport and social infrastructure in a vain but futile attempt to keep up with the pressures of further economic centralisation.

More economic centralisation is the last thing we need. It will create an infrastructure challenge we simply cannot afford and will never win. It will add to competitive pressure for housing near city centres and lead to social and economic inequity as wealth splits into the sort of ‘haves and have nots’ more typically associated with the British aristocracy in the 19^th Century.

Yet in all the debate about housing affordability and urban planning, there is a consistent implication that centralisation is the objective. Governments at all levels (with the partial exception of NSW’s Mike Baird) have centralised their considerable departmental operations in central city locations.  Business is encouraged to do the same – via a planning regime which promotes centralization in high density employment zones. Costly transport investment is focused on servicing the needs of a centralized workforce.  Housing increasingly focusses on limited land opportunities as close as you can get to centralized employment areas which often means dwellings that are both idiotically small for a country the size and population of Australia and prohibitively expensive.

Where in all this is the realization that the affordability problem is confined mainly to the inner and middle ring areas of mainly three cities. (Perth is sorting itself out via the deflation of its housing market bubble, as is Darwin. Adelaide firsts need an economy before seriously worrying about affordability and the same largely goes for Hobart).  There are dozens of larger regional towns and cities where affordability is not a problem. Jobs are.

In an era when digital technology has all but obliterated the tyranny of distance, why continue to live with this tyranny? Why don’t we have a genuine strategy to encourage employment growth and opportunities in regional cities and towns? In the US, this has been happening for years. It’s not the New York’s or San Francisco’s but the middle cities like Austin (Texas), Salt Lake City (Utah) or Denver (Colorado) that are the fastest growing economies. Here in Australia however we seem hell bent on ever greater populations and densities in a small handful of cities while we allow regional centres – many with more than adequate infrastructure, good climates, and plentiful and affordable land for housing – to languish.

Australia does have a housing affordability problem but that problem is largely confined to three or maybe four cities, and then mainly to the inner and middle areas of those cities – because that’s where we insist on putting the jobs. Rather than fretting over this dimension of the problem, perhaps instead our debate could turn to expanding and distributing the economic and employment footprint into outer urban and regional centres, where housing is affordable and land plentiful. What’s needed is a slightly larger share of the economic pie. Not only could this alleviate the affordability problem but it would reduce the impossible infrastructure burden associated with even greater concentration of economic activity in a select handful of inner urban areas.  

Footnote: the property featured in the above image is a current listing, in Orange, NSW. The median house price in Orange is $340,000 so this is representative. Orange has a population of around 50,000 within a region of around 100,000 and has quality educational and health infrastructure plus it's a very scenic city and region. (A video is here if you're curious). 

Just consider the difference between being able to earn $100,000 in the Sydney metro region but paying close to $1million for a house and enduring an irksome commute every day, to having the same income, a house for $340,000 and little congestion in Orange. All that's really missing is the job, which is overly simplistic I know, but all that extra money not going into a mortgage that feeds bank profits would find its way into either household savings or productive non-housing investment in the economy.