Dave Riley, Brisbane
What was once simply known as Brisbane has morphed over the past 20 years into a new entity: South East Queensland. SEQ, as it is generally referred to, doesn't just straddle the Brisbane River at its mouth, but stretches from Noosa in the north to beyond the Tweed River south into New South Wales.
With the recent approval of the Casuarina estate development by the Tweed Shire Council, SEQ, like running treacle, seems determined to fuse with the northern NSW coastal town Byron Bay within the next 10 years.
This slither of urban sprawl — generally less than 20 and often less than five kilometres wide — is sold and resold, primarily on its relationship to the Pacific Ocean. Places like Noosa can still ring up sales of $2.5 million for single beachfront real estate blocks.
SEQ developers promote their realty on the basis of its proximity to the Brisbane CBD. As a result, state elections are often fought in these districts over road transit and commuting issues. The Tugun bypass, which is being built to shepherd traffic along the Tweed Heads/Gold Coast corridor, featured on the Gold Coast in the recent state election. But the same roadworks facilitate the further spill south of SEQ.
The only barriers to open-slather settlement are the pockets of national parks and state forests. The property marketeers, however, convert this annoyance into a green merchandising advantage. In SEQ, even yesterday's swamp, despite mosquitoes and sand flies, is today's "wetlands living", waterways or canal estate.
In the race to keep up with the surging urban fringe, Wayne Goss' state Labor government, elected in 1989, based its structural reform package on the pretence that the SEQ situation required drastic measures. Labor cut more than 4000 jobs from Queensland Rail. It also corporatised the rail system, splitting it into separate business groups, ready for privatisation. It tried to bully the Brisbane City Council to privatise its bus fleet for the sake of a promised integrated SEQ transport plan.
But Goss Labor lost office over its determination to build a new highway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. The community backlash against the project, which the government insisted on routing through the most significant koala habitat in Australia, was decisive in the 1995 poll.
Since then, plans for new highways through built-up areas have been treated as suicide notes in SEQ and there have been attempts instead to service the fringe with public transport initiatives like the new Brisbane-Gold Coast rail link. But as the Brisbane Institute has found, less than 2% of all trips on the Gold Coast and less than 1% on the Sunshine Coast are by public transport.
The situation improves closer in. The combination of an extensive urban rail system and the Brisbane City Council's bus network means that about 5% of all trips in Brisbane are by public transport. Brisbane's public transport is used by those who can get to it easily. Unfortunately, new land development follows freeways rather than public transport routes in SEQ.
However, it appeared for a time in the that automobile dependence in SEQ was being challenged by a new found environmental awareness among some local stake holders.
This was especially true of Brisbane itself. When the ALP won back the City Council in 1991, it launched a major greening initiative. Over the past decade the language of local politics has shifted to "greenspeak", as garbage recycling, less polluting buses, bicycle paths, mass tree plantings, and any number of green space purchases have changed the urban geography and leisure practices of the local population.
Labor mayor Jim Soorly boasted to the ALP state conference soon after his investiture that Labor, at least in Brisbane, had usurped the green agenda for its own ends.
This new found environmental credo engineered a new relationship between rate payers and the city's assets. The council-owned bus network was overhauled and through bus upgrades and new routes patronage increased by some 16% (in contrast, urban rail passenger numbers fell by 10% over the same period). This took place amidst a massive corporatisation of council services: garbage collection was privatised; water metering was introduced; user-pays principles were enshrined; and council purchases of open land were funded by a compulsory levy on all ratepayers.
However, by the beginning of this century the council's green strategy showed evidence of running out of puff. While the council promised bus routes within 500 metres of all residents, no commitments were made about frequency of service. As bus timetables were engineered more to alleviate peak-hour transit than service communities at other times, the council changed tack and announced that the main axis of transport planning in Brisbane would henceforth be about keeping traffic out of the CBD.
Without much protest, the council built its first major stand-alone road project — the Inner City Bypass — by following a route around the northern perimeter of the city via the railway yards. Imbued with its ready success, the ALP administration sent red cards to every householder in Brisbane announcing simply: "The answer to easing city congestion is BORING." This so-called answer is a $2.1 billion north-south tunnel under the Brisbane River.
In the recent council election, people who live here had the choice of voting for the ALP's one-tunnel strategy under the Brisbane River, or the option of a three-tunnel approach promoted by the Liberal Party. Now with a Liberal mayor and an ALP-dominated council, what holes are dug where should make for interesting theatre.
The politics of this project are currently being rehearsed up river at the University of Queensland. Here the council proposed to build what the ALP called a "green bridge". With a price tag of $150 million, the two-lane bridge has supposedly earned its colouring because it is designed for council buses, pedestrians and bicycles only.
As the RACQ — the state's peak motoring body — has asked, "If cars aren't allowed on the bridge, why build it?". Indeed, since this bridge is being geared to take only 65 buses per day from the north side of the river, the project is an expensive roundabout which could very easily be converted to general road use.
But the "green bridge" is also an exercise in limiting the options and diverting the argument towards supporting more large engineering projects as a solution to traffic problems in SEQ. In the face of worsening traffic congestion it appears that more road, bridge, and tunnel projects will henceforth be the only "answers" allowed.
[Dave Riley is a member of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 7, 2004.
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