raulduke wrote:- Release the height restriction for Adelaide's skyline
- Build a bloody freeway that goes somewhere
- Improve the look and feel of our trains
- Marinas - Hillarys Boat Harbour in Perth and Fremantle are excellent examples of places people can go on the weekend
- The parklands - come on, they are rundown soccer ovals - time for some new ideas
- Streetscapes - terrible in Adelaide, no landscaping
Its about amenity and perception - Adelaide needs to be viewed as a forward thinking city with the look and feel to boot, at the moment the perception is its drab, unappealing and ultraconservative when it comes to development. Development builds the economy, provides jobs, and gives us a sense of pride - and it can be done sustainably, we have some great examples at the moment of green buildings in the cbd.
I can understand your frustration with the rate of development in Adelaide, but its a function of the economic growth in the city and not the other way around. Governments, more than anyone, need to be profitable enterprises - and if you build all this infrastructure with nobody around to use it you just put the government into debt for big fat white elephants.
Infrastructure does not obey the maxim 'if you build it they will come'. You just blow the budget.
If you want to improve the lot of Adelaide, you need to make it cheaper for people to live here compared to other places in Australia, and you need to make it more profitable for businesses to do business here. At the moment we have a price advantage over many other states, but its not high enough to really make an impact. For instance, during most of the 90's our houses were about 30 per cent cheaper than Melbourne, but now its about on par. That's why Melbourne is growing at such a rate; because you can live in Australia's second largest city for peanuts. To compete with that Adelaide needs much cheaper housing than Melbourne (to compensate people for a smaller city).
My recommendations:
- Ensure the planning law changes go ahead, and ensure there is stacks of available land for development near infrastrcuture. More available land means cheaper land to develop. That should include land on the fringes.
- Work hard to remove as many restrictions or conditions on development in the CBD, to provide investors with the confidence to build, and enable higher densities in urban developments (thereby increasing possible profits for developers).
- Reduce as much red tape as possible on small and medium sized businesses working in Adelaide. I don't mean making one-stop-shops for dealing with government, I mean removing government as much as possible and making it easier to start and operate a business in Adelaide than anywhere else in Australia.
- Convince as many skilled immigrants to move to Adelaide as possible. Go to South Africa, India, Pakistan and China and convince as many english speaking entrepeneurs to move here and start businesses here.
- Work hard to reduce government interference in the provision of infrastructure to serve a growing population. As a government without much cash, you want to create a situation where private companies can build, own and operate infrastructure to serve us with as little government help as possible. That might mean tollways.
- And I'd vociferously agree with the parklands issue. Most of the parklands are ugly and partly inhabited by homeless people. Is it possible to get a water recycling system of creeks (maybe diverting stormwater)through the parklands that could keep them green during both winter and summer? During summer I don't want to use them (they turn into rock hard fields of bare earth), and at night I don't want to walk through them. We need lights along the walkways to make people (particularly women) feel safer, and we need something at either end of the walkways to encourage their use as a thoroughfare. I think we should make development on the outer side of the parklands (such as greenhill road and dequetteville terrace) a priority, to try to reduce the large, sometimes hostile gap between the city and its surrounds.