The GC challenge: how to grow but maintain what’s important

I remember a man standing up at a Gold Coast Light Rail Stage 1 community meeting about a decade ago. He yelled it was “blow-ins like me who were stuffing up the Gold Coast”, before going on to say “population growth should be stopped”. When I asked him how long he’d lived on the Gold Coast, he described himself as a “long-term resident”, arriving in 1982.

I mentioned I too was a long-term resident, born at Southport Hospital in 1960 – when just 50,000 people lived here and Broadbeach had an estimated population of 980 people.

If I followed his view of the world, of course, he would not have been allowed to arrive.

And my daughter would have been denied the chance to raise her young family at Palm Beach today. In my lifetime the city has experienced incredible growth. According to the last Census, 640,778 people now call the Gold Coast home.

And factors like traffic congestion, parking, housing affordability and availability are regularly debated.

But if we had done what that man, and many other people have suggested over the years, the major impact would have been higher house prices – something we have seen in neighbouring Byron Bay for example.

And the Gold Coast lifestyle we all love would be beyond the reach of just about everyone.

In the words of my daughter, locking her generation out is: “irresponsible and unfair”. And I agree.

So, the challenge becomes: ‘how do we grow but maintain what’s important to us?’.

Good planning is key, and central to that is keeping the city moving to ensure infrastructure of different types, including valuable precincts like HOTA and Metricon Stadium, can be accessed by residents and visitors.

The macro planning settings for the city are probably right. It is how they are implemented which is up for debate, particularly given the need to retrofit facilities into our stretched out and popular city.

Minimising the impacts of this will come at a cost. But it is something government, and ultimately the community, needs to be prepared to pay for to preserve what we love about the Gold Coast.