Canberra has a conformity conundrum.
Why do so many people think that Canberra has to be the same as everywhere else?
Many Federal politicians say Canberra is not the real world. Former Opposition Leader John Hewson threatened to move the Treasury to Sydney – to the real world. But the Treasury working out of unreal Canberra in the 11 years since has done an unreal job of managing Australian prosperity.
Churlish MPs bemoan Canberra’s neatness, cleanliness, excellent roads and parklands. It should be more like real Australia, they argue. It should have more squalor and mess, is the implication.
Yet while at once saying Canberra is too different they argue that it is bland, without life and contains too much suburban conformity.
Roger K Lewis, professor of architecture at the University Maryland, has fallen for the conformity conundrum. He says Canberra has too much parkland; it needs more buildings, more density and more people. In other words, it should be like Washington and other cities. Yet he damns Canberra’s conformity. Its buildings are inoffensively bland (except for the museum), he says. Well, Sydney’s buildings are inoffensively bland except for a bridge and an opera house.
Lewis says, “Washington established two centuries ago, has evolved into a relatively urbane, moderately dense, demographically diverse metropolis where government still the dominant activity shares its territory with other industries. Canberra, a century younger is still a one-company town. . . . Canberra is not a city containing parks, but rather one great park encompassing widely dispersed bits of city.”
Well, precisely. Canberra was established to be a “one-company” town. And it was planned by Burley Griffin and the National Capital Development Commission in a way that would avoid cityscape as far as the eye could see.
Perhaps it is time for the people of Canberra to get a bit more bolshie about their city.
I used to decry the use of the word “Canberra” as metonymy for “Federal Government”. No more. You can’t stop it anyway. Let’s acknowledge that the main industry of Canberra is federal administration and we do it very well, thank you very much.
Put it in historic context. The administrators of the British Empire drew a lot of arbitrary lines on the map of the world. Nearly all of those lines have resulted in blood and bitterness. Australia has overcome those lines better than anywhere else in the world and the creation of Canberra was a large part of that.
Former Treasury head John Stone and columnist Paddy McGuinness have argued that Canberra is a waste of money. Either the capital should be in Sydney or all but the Parliamentary Triangle should be part of NSW.
But these views show only one side of the ledger: the saving on not having a Canberra. They do not show the costs of not having a Canberra. The petty power hunger of the leaders of the six colonies, later the states, has always meant that we are stuck with this legacy of the British Empire. But we have made the best of it. Without a federation, each state would have had to provide its own army and currency, for example. The customs barriers would have held back the economic development of each colony.
Without Canberra there would have been no federation with all its benefits. Without federation, the states would ultimately have been fully independent and most likely been poorly and/or corruptly administered. Imagine a Bjelke-Petersen, Playford, Bolte, Lang, Askin or Theodore as head of an independent country.
With Canberra, we get the benefits of federation and Australia has had a remarkably efficient and corruption-free Federal Government and Public Service housed in Canberra.
The mission statement for Canberra was:
+ To avoid a destructive squabble among the six colonies as to where the capital should be.
+ To provide a place from which the federation of Australia could be governed.
+ To house the public servants who do that governing in an environment where they and their families could live with reasonable amenity with such things as health, education and transport.
+ To house major national institutions, again to avoid duplication and squabbling among the states.
Mission accomplished.
Lewis and others want higher density. They say Canberra is too spread out. In fact Canberra is five small cities or towns, not one. Some people might work in the town in which they live: Tuggeranong, Woden-Weston, Belconnen, Gungahlin or Old Canberra. Others might take the opportunity to work in one of the cities close by. Driving there is fairly easy because you drive through undeveloped bushland, like driving from Wangaratta to Benalla.
Indeed, now might be the wrong time to go for higher density.
In these randomly violent times, high density attracts terrorists. In these times of environmental fragility, we should remember that it is harder to do solar passive buildings at high density. Skyscrapers are becoming energy-consuming dinosaurs. Also, more people are working from home and might want a lower-density environment with its space to breathe.
True, Canberra relies on the car. But cars are efficient way of getting about in a low-density environment. People usually need to go to many destinations on one trip. This can make public transport too difficult. Of course, cars are an environmental nightmare in Los Angeles or Washington, but Canberra is not Los Angeles or Washington.
Cars may not always be a polluting menace. When good solar or electric cars arrive, low-density Canberra might get the last laugh.
Canberra is different. The diversity should be encouraged not scorned — because if everyone does the same thing and its wrong you have had it – like a vulnerable monoculture.
Canberra does its main function of being a base for federal administration very well, but the popular imagination of it as totally dominated by it or as “a company town” is exaggerated. Some facts might help.
Only a third of Commonwealth public servants live in Canberra.
They comprise a little over a quarter of Canberra’s workforce (excluding uniform defence).
The Public Service of NSW is more than twice the size of the Commonwealth Public Service (excluding uniform defence). NSW has 284,000 fulltime equivalents; the Commonwealth just 123,000. Victoria has nearly 200,000. Their Public Services are about 11 per cent of their total workforce, probably higher in the respective capitals. Queensland’s Public Service is almost as big as the Commonwealth’s.
Canberra is less of a company town than Mount Isa or Bundaberg.
Canberra is no longer town of a bloated bureaucracy full of fat cats, if it ever was. It is a fairly lean machine. Bloated bureaucracies are as easily found in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Even so, Canberra, like many cities has a dominant industry. Ours is a fairly efficient one. Without it the whole country would go to anarchy and economic ruin. So we may as well be proud of it. And we should not be apologetic about Canberra being a park that contains a city. We should be proud of it.