Decentralization

If you are a regular reader of political journalism in Australia, it would be clear that the race to the 2010 Victorian state election has been on for about, oh, the last four years or so.  Weekly, fortnightly and monthly opinion polls track the progress of the political party that currently holds government.

I've always felt that opinion polling would be better if it were put to other uses in non-election years, as it has clearly poisoned the process of formulating and implementing policy.  Imagine if Henry Bolte had heeded public opinion when he started building the housing commission towers in the 1960s: Melbourne would still be a provincial backwater, afraid of doing anything bold.  Suburbs such as Fitzroy, South Melbourne, South Yarra, North Melbourne, Kensington, Footscray and so on would have retained nineteenth-century housing stock that would now be worth a considerable fortune, but that would have come at the price of iniquitous social conditions for those who could not afford to live close to the city.  The policy fortunes of Melbourne as a major urban centre were long held hostage by farmers, and Bolte (himself a farmer!) was the first to face up to the fact that Melbourne needed to be treated as a city, not just the capital.

So it is interesting to read about plans to decentralize state public service offices out of Melbourne.  There are also plans to improve infrastructure in regional cities, such as Geelong, the Latrobe Valley, Bendigo and Ballarat.  Media coverage has responded to this as a combination of good policy delivered at a time when it looks like a massive attack of pork-barreling.  The next opinion poll will probably deliver a result along the lines of "too much, too late" from country voters, and something panicky from urban people.  The Age had a good feature report on the regional centres policy today, but it hasn't appeared on their website yet.

I grew up in country Victoria before my family moved to Melbourne in 1992.  A lot of the complexities of my life are bound up in having had my early years in a small country town where little happened: one had to travel to Benella, Shepparton or Melbourne to visit an art gallery, attend a concert, or participate in enrichment activities.  I spent a lot of my childhood in cars and buses, certainly more hours than I really cared to spend at the time.  This is the lens through which I look at the policy announcements of this week.

One of the big differences that has always struck me when traveling interstate is the density of cultural life in the regional cities of New South Wales and Queensland.  I have always been impressed with the conservatorium system that operates in NSW, where there are several very excellent schools of music dotted throughout the state, some of which extend to offering degree-level studies.  By contrast, anyone seeking higher education in music must move to Melbourne if they are to pursue it in Victoria.  Leaving aside the general feeling of torpor that prevails in all levels of music education in Victoria, it would be encouraging if any of the universities with regional campuses would consider starting up music departments along the lines of what I've seen in NSW.  So my first observation is that this policy should be counted as successful if the higher density of population brings wider opportunities for cultural life, particularly in music.

One of the pleasures of travelling in the UK is that one doesn't have to go to London to catch a train from one side of the country to the other (to get from Bendigo to Shepparton, you would likely have to take a passenger service into Southern Cross Station to make the onward connection).  If you are not driving, you can choose to travel by train or by coach; services are generally punctual, and where delays occur, information is offered promptly and without any of the corporate double-speak that one hears here.  The present government's major contribution to regional rail transport has been a mixed bag, changing fully-duplicated train lines back to single-track, so far failing to come up with a better solution to how to move regional services smoothly through the metropolitan network, and generally giving the impression of not being much interested in public transport through a lack of investment in rolling stock to keep up with patronage growth.  Victoria was the first Australian colony to build a mainline service (to Mildura, no less).  Yes, you can catch a bus to just about anywhere in the regions, but it's the lack of a rail option that provides the clincher for a lot of travelers -- on a train, one is free to get up and walk about in a way that is not practical on a bus.

It has always struck me as the height of silliness that those cities that once boasted tram networks that serviced their whole urban areas -- Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo -- no longer have good coverage.  Geelong's tram network was entirely dissolved, apparently at the behest of the Ford company.  Bendigo maintains a tourist service, while Ballarat has been exploring the possibility of ressurecting their tram network.  These three centres are big cities.  It would be great to see them develop a level of public transport comparable to Melbourne's tram network.  Such things used to be a sign of civic pride and prosperity: why should it be any different now?

So I think the other area where I would count the latest policy to be successful would be if it improves transport links, particularly by developing options for passengers to take the train or a bus.  For internal transport within large regional centres, tramways would be a desirable development.

In a nutshell, I think decentralization of population growth is a good thing.  Opinion polling will probably give a mixed view, but good policy has never been achieved by asking questions about the status quo.  This is a good policy -- even if it looks like a naked grab for votes by an aging government now led by Victoria's answer to Gordon Brown -- but only as long as the advantages of population growth in regional cities is matched by genuine investment in cultural and transport infrastructure.