Stay home, ease traffic

Demographer says tax can’t cover infrastructure

RENOWNED demographer Bernard Salt has a simple solution to the city’s traffic woes. Work in your own backyard.

Speaking on Brisbane ABC Radio’s Mornings program yesterday, Mr Salt said Brisbane was on the brink of becoming a major international centre with booming satellite regions, with its population expected to swell to three million in the next 15 years.

He said the Gold and Sun- shine Coasts were still “very dependent on the job generation capacity” of Brisbane.

“At the last Census, 25,000 people per day commuted from the Gold Coast into Brisbane,” he said.

“We’ll get new figures on this in October this year but this can’t continue. You cannot have one city dependent upon another city for its jobs.

“I don’t think the next generation of workers, the millen- nial generation, will be as patient as Baby Boomers and sit in traffic for an hour and a half each way every day.

“They’ll say no. There’s a better way to organise this, we’ll work at home. And it is, when you think about it, a better way to organise society.”

He said “were you there at nine o’clock, were you there at five o’clock” was a “very 20th Century” notion of how you work.

“In the 21st Century it’s about what did you deliver and what is it’s quality. How you deliver it is up to you,” he said.

Mr Salt said people would need to work in their local area rather than sit on a train for hours to “get to town”.

“I actually argue that you can’t have an area of 200km from Noosa to Coolangatta with three million or even six million people,” he said.

“You can’t get enough tax out of that population to deliver the freeways and motorways system and railway system to get everyone around.

“We’re trying hard but we’re going to be chasing our tail on this in three generations’ time.

“It’s an extraordinarily broad canvas and the only way to make this work is to make each of these satellites selfsustaining.”

Mr Salt said both the Gold and Sunshine Coasts needed to reduce the need for intercity commuting.

“The way in which we need to evolve this whole region is to have greater job generating capacity within the Gold Coast and within the Sunshine Coast so that you don’t need to commute down the Bruce Highway or up the Pacific Highway into the best jobs in this region in Brisbane,” he said.

Mr Salt said as the economy moved towards “knowledge work”, people would not travel as far to work.