I cant believe it!! Is the air so bad in Down Under?Why?
I never heard any one mention here.
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'Fog!" the kids shout excitedly as we round the bend above
Bronte. "Look at the fog!"
"That's not fog," the adult voice lobs from the front seat
like the wrath of God. "See the dirty brown of it? That's
pollution."
It put a pall on the conversation, I can tell you. But that
pall was nothing compared with the one that lay across the ocean
like a great brown cat asleep on its sequined cushion. It was 7pm
Tuesday. A stinker of a day. Before dawn, the Bureau of Meteorology
had warned Sydneysiders to avoid outdoor exercise for fear of
breathing difficulties. In Sydney.
Not Beijing. Not Seoul. Sydney.
The pollution was expected to peak at 7pm. But at Bronte,
within that thick brown blanket, the water was clear and cool, the
seven o'clock crowds frolicked oblivious and we with them, almost
like there was no tomorrow.
Parking was at a premium because, except for the locals and
the leisured few who can wait on the bus system, every one of the
sweltering thousands drove there. Hence the smog.
This will be remembered as one of the great ironies of
modern planning, that the system we call suburbia, whose main
promise was sunshine and fresh air for all, ended up destroying
those things for everyone. Even now, people - thinking people who
should know better (and do, in fact, but somehow choose not to) -
defend suburbia on the basis of how nice it is to wake up with
birds and trees outside the window.
And it is nice. There's no denying it. I like. You like it.
We all like it. And that's the point, really. Because just as one
binge is fine but every weekend means you're an alkie, or one house
among the gum trees is fine, but millions? Millions of suburban
houses means millions of cars, millions of smog-belching passenger
kilometres and millions of kids with chronic asthma and
bronchitis.
And sure, these warnings happen a few times every summer.
We're blase because it's invisible and the sea breezes, we think,
blow it away. Off to someone else's atoll, ready for the sparkling
new South Pacific day.
In fact, what happens is that the muck drifts around the
Sydney basin for days or weeks, hemmed in by the higher ground and
frequent temperature inversions. Each day, from about mid-morning,
the land breezes waft it out to sea and there it sits, just
offshore, until the afternoon sea breezes send it back, settling it
over all of us but most densely on Sydney's south and
west.
The upshot? Lung cancer hot spots that correlate strongly
with pollution densities and CSIRO figures that show more than
twice as many Australians die from air pollution as on the
roads.
Clearly, something must be done. Equally clearly, though, when
it comes to planning, the states, bless them, are one car short of
a traffic jam.
So Rudd made Infrastructure Australia. This is something Labor
governments do. Every 15 years or so they have a go. Whitlam did it
with Tom Uren's gorgeously acronymed but largely ineffectual DURD
(Department of Urban and Regional Development). Keating did it with
Brian Howe's Building Better Cities, which produced Pyrmont, East
Perth and the more worrying Honeysuckle redevelopment in
Newcastle.
But Infrastructure Australia, sadly, is no power grab. In the
child's play of Pulling the Planning Powers Off Governments, the
feds are much kinder to the states, albeit with less reason, than
the states are to local councils.
Infrastructure Australia - don't you hate how they're still
doing that ugly '80s-type nomenclature that makes government
departments look like they're trying to look privatised? - was
invented last year by the same Commonwealth Act that established
COAG, the Council of Australian Governments. It has no planning
powers, but is designed strictly to advise the Infrastructure
Minister, Anthony Albanese, and COAG.
And yet, Infrastructure Australia is seen as the planning hope
for our cities. This is partly because the states - NSW, especially
- seem so without hope in this regard. And partly because it has
always been thus. Even at state level, there are two separate
streams of activity, planning and infrastructure.
Planning, mostly run by women, does the words and pictures;
making and announcing plans (such as the Metro Strategy) that never
hit the ground. Public Works, by contrast, has no strategic
capacity, no cerebellum, but just builds things - roads, tunnels,
bridges and rail lines. This, you will be unsurprised to learn, is
generally a boy thing.
So our cities are shaped not by planners but by ad hoc resource
allocation decisions; a bridge to this marginal electorate, a
tunnel to that donor developer. And it is this quasi-planning power
that the feds hope to usurp.
More power to them. One metro line carries as many people as a
20-lane freeway. A clean, leafy, tower-flanked Parramatta Road
would be a vast improvement on the filthy drain we have now. Far
from destroying the pretty village-like pockets, a decent rail
system will preserve them by concentrating development where it is
most beneficial.
But the Sydney proposals - the $4 billion northern rail freight
corridor, the $4.8 billion CBD Metro and the $8.1 billion West
Metro under Parramatta Road - are three projects out of the 94 in
Infrastructure Australia's report, ranging from housing in the
Pilbara to a South Australia-Darwin fibre optic cable.
The prioritising process is next. We should offer oblations to
the apple-cheeked Ruddbot or the future of our emerald city looks
grubby indeed.
http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/woodsmoke/index.htm
http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/AQMS/aqi.htm
have u done your home work before u decide where u are going
to settle?U are fail to be a Head of household if u have
not!!
