Sustaining growth

West Moreton is a model of South East Queensland.

Population in West Moreton is growing rapidly and we expect around another 50,000 people by 2010.

Many of them will be from Victoria or NSW and will be in their fifties or will be families with young children - all high end users of medical services.

But Queensland doctor numbers are already low by national standards and are about to get much worse. For example, by 2010, about a third of all current general practitioners in West Moreton will have retired. No one is taking their place to care for the existing population, let alone newcomers. Nurses are equally scarce as are specialists and allied healthcare providers.

Chronic disease, ageing and unconstrained population growth means demand increasingly outstrips a dwindling supply of carers.

In the public sector, there is an increasing edge of hysteria to the self-congratulations of a state government that won’t admit, can’t admit that they can’t adequately staff the public hospital system - despite the clear evidence to the contrary. Government boasts about numbers recruited over the past 12 months while not mentioning those who have resigned in the same period. And now hospitals are being told that it seems all those extra billions of dollars in the budget have gone and hospitals need to rein in their spending.

Will things get better? Probably not. The real problem, of course, common to all Australia, is that we have an ageing society where the supply of young people is less than we need for all the professions and trades in Australia. Engineers, teachers, public servants, carpenters and electricians. They’re all short of people and the young people just aren’t there to train. Things aren’t going to improve quickly, if ever.

So, unless people start bringing their doctors and nurses with them to South East Queensland, they will find it harder and harder to get good health care.

But if soft infrastructure of South East Queensland, such as the health workforce is bad, so is the hard infrastructure.

The Ipswich Motorway, the main route in and out of West Moreton is thought to be the worst and most dangerous major road in Australia. Local politicians seem unable to resolve the issue.

With no new dams built in South East Queensland since the 1980s, water restrictions in West Moreton have gone to bucket watering only. If the next wet season isn’t a very wet one, people will simply have to watch their already stressed gardens and mature trees die.

Power network maintenance, skimped for years so electricity companies could pay the government bigger dividends, is only slowly being brought up to somewhat more reliable but is still inadequate for the population growth.

Public transport is poor in most outer metropolitan areas and expensive private toll tunnels are seen as the only viable option to free up increasingly grid-locked peak hours in the city.

All infrastructure in South East Queensland is totally inadequate. And because people are seeing the inadequacies, both state and local governments are now telling Queenslanders they will have to pay much higher taxes, rates and water charges in future. That’s to make up for all that lost time when those same governments bragged about how Queensland was the “low tax” state. Now, the claim to have “kept increases to a minimum” is the new virtue.

Are politicians going to try to slow down growth in any way until we fix any of these problems? The answer is 'No'.

State and local government are addicted to the extra revenue they get from a growing population. And many politicians and local government councillors are addicted to the campaign funding they get from “civic-minded” developers - legislation to constrain growth is unmentionable.

So, come to South East Queensland.

You won’t have enough water. You may well not have electricity if there’s a severe storm. You may get run into by one of the hundreds of speeding semi-trailers sharing inadequate urban roads with you each day. You probably won’t get to see a doctor when you’re sick. And you may find that taxes and rates go up way beyond inflation in coming years.

But the sunshine is lovely.