THE GRATTAN INSTITUTE’S LATEST REPORT, PRODUCTIVE CITIES, IS RICH IN STRONG CONCEPTUAL ARGUMENTS, BUT ITS FAILURE TO ADDRESS SOME OF THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PERTH AND AUSTRALIA’S OTHER THREE LARGEST CITIES MAKES IT A SOMEWHAT SLANTED REPRESENTATION OF WHY PEOPLE LIVE WHERE THEY DO
“If the structure of a city severely restricts access to jobs or education then it can hold back productivity and constrain the ability of individual residents to improve their lives”, states The Grattan Institute’s Jane-Frances Kelly.
This concept underpins the think tank’s latest publication Productive Cities: Opportunity in a changing economy and the seemingly inevitable direction that Australia’s four major cities are heading in. Perth allegedly shares the same symptoms of polarisation with Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. According to Kelly, Perth residents are currently geographically polarised by income and education. But is this really the situation we face?
A number of Perth’s most expensive suburbs are located within close proximity of the CBD and or within a reasonable distance from the coast or the river, not dissimilar to most other cities in Australia. However, there are a great number of factors that influence where people live and it appears that Perth has been bundled in with Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane as a city that has closed the CBD and inner city suburbs to anyone who doesn’t have a university degree.
“High income residents with tertiary qualifications cluster in suburbs close to the city while those with vocational or trade qualifications are more likely to live around the city fringes”, states the report. Productive Cities assumes that it is the desire of all Perth residents to live within touching distance of the CBD, but this obviously isn’t the case.
The report outlines clusters of residents with trade and vocational qualifications living in and around the large industrial areas of Kwinana, Rockingham and Kewdale. However, the reason this occurs is not necessarily that people with trade or vocational qualifications cannot afford to live closer to the heart of the city but rather that their own place of work is located in these industrial hubs, so they have fewer reasons to live close to the city. With transport costs currently accounting for 16 per cent of the average Australian household budget, why wouldn’t you want to live closer to where you work?
Another immeasurable factor that is absent from this study includes the simple point of personal preference, which is highlighted by the fact that a number of Perth’s outer areas have a high percentage of individuals who have attained a university degree. Within the areas of Mundaring (34kms from the CBD) and Kalamunda (28kms from the CBD) there are approximately the same percentage of university graduates as those found in Bayswater (8kms form the CBD) and Bassendean (12kms from the CBD). So it’s obvious that while some university educated residents’ value proximity to the CBD, it‘s not the overriding factor that decides where they live. Amenity, proximity to family and friends, lifestyle, among others, are all important factors.
The Grattan Institute has used available data on income, housing and travel times to compare the apparent geographic polarisation of residents within Australia’s four largest capital cities. And whileProductive Cities is rich in strong conceptual arguments, its failure to address some of the differences between Perth and Australia’s other three largest cities makes it a somewhat slanted representation of why people live where they do.