Canberra should be industrialised and made into a typical Australian city, according to former Liberal Minister Fred Chaney. Mr Chaney said, “”It is a disaster for Australia for Canberra to be a model city because it made its bureaucracy out of touch with Australian reality. He was speaking in Perth at one of a series of seminars held by the National Capital Planning Authority to find out what Australians wanted from their capital. However, the Public Service Commissioner, Denis Ives, responded yesterday by saying that the public sector was less than half the Canberra workforce and when you took away the ACT public-sector _ which was very much a service deliverer _ a quite low percentage were Federal public servants and even lower percentage were involved in policy.
Canberra had developed into a light-industrial and service provider for the region. Mr Chaney rejected the view cited by NCPA chair Evan Walker from NCPA surveys that Australians did not want Canberra to be a microcosm of Australia. “”I think it poses an enormous problem that we have a bureaucracy which is largely living in city which is so atypical of Australia,” he said at the NCPA seminar last week.
“”One of the reasons the bureaucracy is so out of touch with Australian reality is because it does not live in a microcosm of Australia. It lives in a town with higher per capita incomes. I find many of the attitudes totally unrealistic and indeed wrong.” He gave an example. As Minister for Social Security he had said at a Canberra meeting that the primary obligation for care and nurture of children was with parents. He had been booed and hissed. Yet he had been merely quoting from the first page of the United Nations declaration of the rights of child. “”I just found in so many areas total dissociation from Australian reality,” Mr Chaney said.
“”It is not because people are bad but because they are simply living if a different environment, with different income, different employment, different public spending, different employment mix and different superannuation. It is tragic. It is wrong.” The best national-interest contribution to be made by Australians outside Canberra would be to insist that Canberra should be as typical of Australia as possible. “”I would industrialise it,” he said. “”I would make sure it is not a place where most of the population works for the public service. I would want public servants to live cheek by jowl with other Australians.” He gave the example of a public servant who had worked in Norfolk who had told him it had been a difficult task “”because I had to face people affected by my decisions”.
Mr Chaney said that as Minister for Social Security in Canberra he had worked with among the best, brightest, decent most intelligent Australians he had ever worked with. But when he had suggested senior people should visit counters of Social Security office elsewhere in Australia “”I was told I was being quaint. The chairman of The Canberra Times and owner of Western Australian regional television network Golden West, Kerry Stokes, said he could well imagine those people not wanting to venture out. “”But that says said more about management than people,” he said. “”If in private enterprise I was responsible and my people didn’t want to visit the customers I’d be out of business.
Mr Ives said it was a very rare senior public servant who did not travel regularly for interchanges with industry and clients. In Canberra, they also mixed with the same sort of service and industry providers found in other Australian cities. Canberra was a centre for lawyers, accountants, medical, financial and education services and a light-industrial centre. Other senior bureaucrats pointed out that it was the politicians, sent from the rest of Australia who laid down policy and they presumably mixed with a represented the wishes of Australians. If not there was something wrong with our representative system of government. With representative government there should be no cause to lay governmental problems at the feet of public servants. Mr Chaney said it was important to get a good setting for Canberra.
He liked the use of non-native trees in the suburbs and ceremonial areas framed by the native vegetation on the hills. The city had transport problems and lacked social centres for meaningful non-domestic activity. “”There is room for improvement,” he said. “”That should be done by Canberrans. But, please God, let’s turn it into an Australian city.” Mr Stokes declared himself a friend of Canberra and welcomed the fact that Canberra planners had “”ventured outside the castle walls” to get ideas that might shape capital”. Former senator Peter Walsh said the 1978 decision to build a new Parliament House was a bad one using a “”dodgy” costing of $180 million. It ended up costing $1.5 billion in 1990 dollars. The new Parliament was not needed.