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Your views: on population growth calls and more

Today, readers comment on improving infrastructure to service a busier Adelaide, and election preferences.

Mar 02, 2022, updated Mar 02, 2022
Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily

Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily

Commenting on the opinion piece: Ignore population-growth advocates who can’t asnwer this obvious question

David Washington is absolutely right to call out the need for Adelaide’s public transport system to be substantially upgraded to cater for our growth. But I suggest that there is a more fundamental problem.

If Adelaide is to continue to carry the biggest part of any population growth – let alone the completely unsubstantiated 2 million proposed by the Committee for Adelaide – we have to challenge the current mantra which is to extend incrementally north and south and into the Hills.

Greater Adelaide is close to 100km north to south and all still centred on the CBD. It is an impossible ask for people to travel up to 50km to CBD facilities. We need to establish new CBDs north and south and the current CBD has to accept that its days of providing a hub for all Adelaide activities are long gone, hastened by post-pandemic conditions.

We need to decentralise to new city centres, each based on a strong tertiary institution, major medical facilities and a range of cultural activities such as museums, art galleries, sports stadia and theatres. These need to be supported by strong range of housing including affordable and social housing options and local centres of major job creation.

Suitable locations would be Elizabeth and Noarlunga, and while we are about it we need to create three areas of regional local government to support and give legitimacy to these new centres. – David Plumridge

David Washington calls out the intellectual sloth of the business lobby. The lobby always urges population growth – it creates bigger markets and a supplied workforce at no cost to themselves. This is another version of the endless pleading for lower taxes, lower wages and higher business subsidies.

Unfortunately, this sort of nonsense gets tacit support from government. In the transport area, for example, witness the vastly over-engineered North-South Corridor. This can only be based on high population growth and no improvement to public transport. It will carve a trench through the western side of the city without, as Washington points out, any connection to the main freight route. Yet.

Somehow, it is ok to spend $10 billion on one project without an overall transport plan, or for that matter a business case. If there was a real transport plan for Adelaide, public transport would be a central part of it. Instead we get ever bigger intersections and trenches. – Gregg Ryan

Population growth is not just about transport. The fact is that there is no correlation between population growth and per capita GDP growth. Sure, population growth increases GDP, but if it is not increasing per capita GDP, most people are not benefiting (except for developers, Bunnings, and sellers of white goods).

And there are huge infrastructure costs that are not paid by the additional people – i.e. more hospital beds, school places, increased water supply, waste water treatment, electricity supply etc. etc. Those things need to be in place before the additional people arrive, lest everyone suffer crowding and service degradation. And so the hapless existing residents need to pay for them upfront, which never happens. – Michael Lardelli

David Washington equates public transport with growth of SA’s population. Compared to other bigger cities our transportation system is adequate only, but it doesn’t have any impact upon people’s desire to move to SA and Adelaide.

Availability of work is the only real issue and one that no political party has an answer to. If there is work the people will come. If not they won’t. Artificial job creation by the federal government through defence contracts and the space initiative do create those opportunities but they are limited in scope and size.

There are virtually no head offices or major corporations based in SA. Their owners and executives live around Sydney Harbour and in Toorak etc in Melbourne, where their children go to school, their relatives and friends live and where the major marketplaces for their products and labour supply for their businesses is at their front door. Getting them to relocate to SA is virtually impossible.

Giving interstate firms major contracts on the belief that they will set up more than a project office has been proven to be defective thinking. Remember EDS and Motorola? And the profits flow interstate anyway.

Encouraging overseas immigrants to move to SA has been a cornerstone of SA Government planning. However the evidence is there that the majority of new migrants eventually leave SA for better/more job opportunities interstate. Until someone comes up with a way to encourage them to move their businesses to SA then all these pie in the sky dreams of building SA’s population are just that, dreams and election propaganda.

Supporting SA start-ups (until bought out by interstate firms) and awarding contracts to SA based companies are better strategies to kick start population growth. – Peter Macdonald

Commenting on the story: Greens preference Duluk above Libs as Pallaras looms as kingmaker

We are supposedly using the Westminster system, which is first past the post. Why do we use the costly preferences system?

If a candidate is not your first preference, why should someone else get your vote if your choice isn’t the highest polling candidate? – Bill Hecker 

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