March, 2012

The issue of local government amalgamation is back on the table following a call by the Chair of the Bank of Melbourne, Elizabeth Proust, to slash the number of councils in Melbourne from 31 to one. This isn’t an issue that’s specific to Melbourne. Metropolitan Sydney is administered by an astonishing 38 councils with a [...]

The Grattan Institute released a new report, Social Cities, under its Cities Program this week. The report addresses “worrying signs that isolation and loneliness are increasing in Australia”. The data shows, it says, “that people’s friendships and neighbourhood connections have diminished over the past two decades”. Notwithstanding the title, the report only addresses city design. [...]

A new study has found 63% of school children in Australia are taken to school for all or part of the journey by car. This contrasts with just 16% who travelled by car in 1970 (although the figures aren’t strictly comparable as the latter also includes university students). The study, Active travel to school, was [...]

Bernard Salt had a fascinating but ultimately somewhat flawed article in The Australian last Saturday, Welcome to the Metropolis, which looks “at how Melbourne is narrowing the gap with Sydney in the contest to become the nation’s top city”. It’s gated, but well worth reading – I recommend doing what I did and taking out [...]

I don’t know why the proposed Gehry-designed Dr Chau Chak Wing building at UTS looks like a microwaved chocolate castle, but it certainly does “bizarre” to a T. It’s unusual, unconventional, strange, odd, extraordinary……it’s everything you’d expect to get when you buy Gehry. I’ve been an admirer of Frank Gehry ever since I first saw [...]

The Courier Mail reported the death of a son and his elderly mother in their Brisbane home earlier this month under the headline “Left to die a lonely death in the suburbs”. Their bodies were not discovered for at least a week. The paper said that “at some point before Mark Thomas died in his [...]

Crikey readers who live in the outer suburbs should sit up and take notice – according to this Fairfax editorial, urban sprawl is making you sick. Moreover, it is “imposing a massive cost on taxpayers, in the form of chronic health and social problems in the new suburbs”. The main villain is car dependency, which [...]

Melburnians cycle for transport twice as much as Sydneysiders and are taking to cycling at three times the rate of their northern neighbours. Moreover, Melburnians are more likely to use bicycles as a means of transport, whereas for Sydneysiders they’re mainly a weekend recreation. At a time when many suspect the NSW Premier wants to [...]

What’s John Howard’s 2001 decision to abolish automatic indexation of the petrol excise costing the nation? According to ABC journalist Annabel Crabb, the then-PM’s “state of electoral existential panic” more than ten years ago is now costing the Federal budget a massive $5 billion per year. That’s a huge amount. It’s more than Gonski says [...]