One of my new roles is as strategic advisor to the Committee for Sydney (CFS) which seeks to play a similar role for Sydney that London First has played for London. We have in membership some of the most important and most strategically-minded private and public sector organisations active in the business and public life of the City .Our aim is to identify the key policies or interventions Sydney requires to maintain or improve Sydney’s global city status – and seek to have these policies adopted or interventions implemented by the key decision-makers.
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As a resident of the former and a native of the latter, and passionate about both, I’m wondering how both are doing at the moment. One thing that coming from one and living in the other does for you is give you a sense of perspective. That leads to this immediate judgment: however anxious New South Welshman are currently about the future on average they are well on their way to being twice as wealthy as the average South Walian. Their GDP per head is already 1.60 times that of Old South Wales and on current trends they will be twice as wealthy by 2025. This wasn’t always the case. But then the two have been going in opposite directions since the 1920s.
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I’ve had a busy month working on matters digital in Australia. I’ve just completed a digital strategy for RDA Mid North Coast. We think it’s the first regional digital strategy in Australia. I have attached a link.
I’ve also just completed a report on digital inclusion sponsored by Huawei. It’s partly a record of the Digital Inclusion I chaired in Canberra in late August and partly an action plan for digital inclusion interventions. Have a look at them.
I am now leading the Arup team working on Moreland Council’s digital strategy. That’s in Melbourne and is a first wave test site for the roll out of the National Broadband Network. A really interesting place where more than 50% of the population were born outside Australia.
I’d be interested in your views on the strategy work I’ve been doing. I think the NBN can have substantial impacts, not least on the design and delivery of public services, if the public sector can get its act together. I see a big need role for local government to take a leadership role in developing strategies and taking action to ensure that local communities can exploit the opportunities. Local government can also lead the way by digitising its own services, by involving citizens in online conversations and relationships and by ensuring that there is a significant local effort around digital inclusion. A commitment to open data and open government is a must in this process.
I’m a rubbish consultant by the way, because I give away all my best ideas free here…
There is a review underway into the planning system for Sydney. I wrote a submission for it for the Committee for Sydney whose strategic advisor I am delighted to report I now am. The Committee was formed by a number of the most strategically minded companies, Not for Profits and Councils in Sydney who combine a deep engagement with the City with a passion for seeing it succeed. As Australia’s only global city, it’s vital it does. Planning is pretty central to the fate of cities so the Committee was bound to take a view on planning reform for New South Wales and given the weighty nature of its membership, it’s likely to be an influential view. The punchline? The planning system is broken: do fix it. Don’t tinker.
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South Australia is producing some great stuff on the future of public policy and on how to transform cities. It is providing a model on how a place can punch above its weight in strategic discussions of international significance while also effecting change in its own back yard . Have a look at the work being produced from the ‘Thinkers in Residence’ programme in Adelaide and by the Integrated Design Commission. My former colleague and always friend John McTernan is the current Thinker in Residence ,though as a top level advisor to Blair I thought of him as a contract killer kind of intellectual. He knew where the bodies were buried because he put them there. I’m a big fan and think that the role of violence in bringing about public change is hugely under-estimated. And yes, I’m kidding,more or less.
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Every year at around this time it has become a tradition for the Williams family and the local Community Council in Llantrisant ,Wales, to honour my late father’s musical career through the Ifor Williams Awards . These are like a Valleys version of the X Factor but for young people with actual musical ability.
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This is based on a piece I wrote for English Heritage before I left the UK at the end of 2010. It still has resonance , in the UK and Australia I think where housing design and location challenges are also considerable. I draw attention to the bits in brackets pointing out the failings of CLG then and now – and how the same people responsible for messing up then have messed up over planning today . Does no-one senior get whacked for failure in that place?
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Australia is beginning to feel the heat from the resources boom. Jobs are now being lost in the export-led manufacturing economy because ,driven ever upwards by the demand for and speculation around, its coal,iron copper,gold ,gas , uranium ,you name it , the dollar exchange rate has reached dizzy levels. It’s now at 1.05 to the US dollar when the historic average is just over 70 cents , and 1.55 to sterling when less than 3 years ago it was at 2.50 to the pound. This is a seismic shift in a short period. If only federal government economic policy had moved as quickly – and in the right direction.
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I haven’t said this in recent years and possibly ever:two cheers for Tony Blair.Come to think of it, possibly one and a half.His comments on the recent riots made some sense to me but were also typically self serving. Essentially, he thinks that blaming the riots on a general moral malaise is wrong and indeed leads to bad policy. Rather he blames a minority of disaffected youth who live lives ‘outside the social mainstream’. The best policy therefore is to target that minority with policy interventions – running from better policing through to welfare penalties on the harder side and parenting lessons on the softer side.
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It took a Riot. This was the name of possibly the best-entitled cabinet paper ever submitted to a government. It was drawn up by Michael Heseltine after the Toxteth and Brixton riots of the early 80s. It advocated not a policing response to an earlier version of the breakdown of law and order in UK cities but a political and economic response.
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