Small town life-styles

When did decentralisation become a dirty word?

It was probably after the dismissal of the Whitlam Government with its Department of Urban and Regional Development. The Labor Party under Hawke and Keating scrambled to distance itself from even the hint of “socialistic” government intervention, and the Liberals, of course, have never accepted the idea because it smells of Big Government.

So for the last 20 years, we’ve witnessed the degradation of our overloaded big-city services. We’ve seen rising costs in extending and maintaining roads, public transport, schools and hospitals in the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne and services wound back in country towns.

Extraordinary responses to crises like desalination projects to lift water reserves and growing difficulties in moving to the safe reuse of now huge quantities of sewage waste water going out to sea, show how unsustainable our city systems have become.

But no one dares mention decentralisation as a possible solution.

The New South Wales Government, for example, still plans to build 40,000 new homes every year, with each housing two adults and a couple of children. They will all need road transport to get to their new schools, or to the shops, and even to a distant railway or bus station.

Yet any intelligent person can see that decentralisation is not just a “possible” solution - it is the “only” long-term solution to the sprawling problems of Sydney and Melbourne.

As the 17th century economist David Ricardo pointed out in another context, unrestrained expansion leads to marginal inefficiencies and diminishing returns: each additional house adds excessively to the burden on city infrastructure, and costs of supplying these services rise exponentially when the sprawl exceeds its natural limits.

We can’t sit around another 20 years in the hope that hotter weather and higher rainfall will fill our dams, or that technological progress will create some new type of commuter vehicle able to double the capacity of our roads or halve the capital cost of railways.

Australia has the world’s most urbanised population in a land-mass the size of the United States, yet we have never developed the small town life-style that American films so often celebrate. They broke their territory into 50 different states which then developed capitals alongside inland waterways and on their trans-continental railways.

However Australia’s early transport was almost entirely by sea and settlement patterns were directed from Britain. As a consequence, our politicians remained focused on the retention of their colonial empires which were ridiculously large by any standards, and each developed only one capital city planted firmly on the coast. This mentality now seems to be ingrained in our national political psyche.

America is dotted by numerous small towns and almost-cities. Each has a high school and possibly a college or university, and they are usually big enough to provide reasonable sporting and entertainment venues. They often have one or more large industrial employers to retard the urban drift of the young.

Only a few of Australia’s inland centres like Armidale and Wagga Wagga come even close to this level of viability, and those with substantial industrial development are generally associated with mining. Such towns have a habit of collapsing catastrophically, and their reputation certainly doesn’t encourage personal investment in housing, education or modern business enterprises: one reason it is so hard to attract doctors and other professions to the country.

What’s more, the systematic degradation of our railways in favour of road transport, and the privatisation of train transport guarantee that rail’s emphasis now is entirely on servicing the mining industry and inter-capital transport. With privatisation, governments lost the ability to enlist rail in support of regional development programs without massive direct subsidies; Telstra is much the same.

Decentralisation can take many forms. At the most local end of the scale it should make households more self-sufficient in, for instance, retention on site of stormwater for garden and toilet use, saving valuable reticulated drinking water.

But the greatest gains are to be made in the active promotion of regional centres: by improving their educational and recreational facilities and efficient road, rail, air and communications infrastructure.

Australia will only escape the bonds of history if we make massive long term infrastructure investments to pick up the slack of generations. Direct subsidies and tax breaks will also be essential.

Politically, decentralisation suffers the same problems as global warming. The cost of implementing essential measures must be paid up front, but the obvious benefits only accrue down the track. Doubtless the promoter will be ridiculed by an opportunistic opposition for wasting time and money on harebrained schemes.

Another obstacle is fear of failure. But governments don’t necessarily need to “pick winners” (an idea that invokes the Thatcherite bogeyman). They do however need to become active participants in the process over many years.

So effective decentralisation requires high-level and long-term co-operative planning between state and federal governments, and this will only happen if the two major parties set up co-operative processes and agree to keep partisan politics out of the debate.