Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Mr Mamdani, THIS is What Makes a City Thrive" with Eamon Waterford

Transcript

"Mr Mamdani, THIS is What Makes a City Thrive" with Eamon Waterford · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:02
  G'day humans!
• 0:04
  Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  Here's an uncomfortable question for you.
• 0:09
  Why do some cities thrive and others just kind of suck?
• 0:17
  How much control does a mayor have over such things?
• 0:20
  And can Mr Mamdani change New York for the better or for the worse?
• 0:24
  What is it that makes New York special that Tokyo does or doesn't have, that Paris does or doesn't have, that Los Angeles does or doesn't have?
• 0:32
  City planners really need to hit a bullseye on a range of different things.
• 0:37
  How dense are the buildings going to be?
• 0:41
  Is it going to be high density or low density?
• 0:42
  If you go for low density so that people can live in suburbs, then you don't have walkability.
• 0:46
  So how do you balance the walkability against the fact that people want to live in big houses?
• 0:51
  What's the balance on law and order?
• 0:52
  You don't want to be too brutal, but on the other hand, you don't want people urinating on the subway.
• 0:57
  How do you balance red tape, the need for councils to be prudent in what they approve versus the need for the city to be able to get on with doing its thing?
• 1:05
  What about congestion pricing and traffic?
• 1:08
  All of this stuff is being tweaked in the offices of city planners and academics and property developers.
• 1:15
  One person who analyses all of it, and in some respects oversees much of it in Sydney, is Eamon Waterford.
• 1:22
  He's a world expert on what cities get right.
• 1:25
  He's the chief executive of a think tank, which is called the Committee for Sydney.
• 1:29
  And they basically represent all the big players in the city's economy, not just property developers, but local councils and banks and architects and consultants and law firms and universities.
• 1:41
  And so he studies how cities all over the world can evolve into the best version of themselves.
• 1:46
  If you want to live in the best version of your city, then listen up.
• 1:50
  I hope you enjoy him.
• 1:51
  The one, the only, Eamon Waterford.
• 2:00
  I mean, one of the interesting things I think when I think about cities is like the density
• 2:04
  versus, you know, high density versus low density cities are almost a completely different thing.
• 2:08
  It's funny that we call both of them cities.
• 2:10
  Yeah.
• 2:11
  In the sense that, you know, you live in
• 2:13
  New York City or, you know, in Tokyo versus living in the suburbs of Dallas.
• 2:20
  right totally different experience totally um what are the different like there's been
• 2:25
  the reason i this comes this occurs to me is because a lot of my friends who live in
• 2:29
  big urbanized cities have moved to big suburban cities since covid interesting a lot of new
• 2:34
  yorkers have moved to florida yeah and austin yeah and i'm not sure if that's just taxation
• 2:41
  and regulation or it's probably a bit of it but it's probably not all of it right i think um
• 2:47
  You know, because the other thing, of course, is we call a million person city a city and we call Mumbai a city and that has 25 million people.
• 2:53
  Yeah.
• 2:53
  And they have fundamentally different experiences.
• 2:56
  I think most people's experiences of cities are not the whole city.
• 3:00
  The neighborhood they live in, probably the neighborhood they work in and the bits and pieces in between, you know, the third spaces that they go to.
• 3:07
  So, like, a city experience is totally atomized to everybody's individual experiences.
• 3:12
  You know, the place that you live in forms your kind of understanding of the broader city, but it is not the broader city.
• 3:19
  It is just that place.
• 3:20
  Presumably that phenomenon is greater in spread out low density cities than it is in high density cities.
• 3:26
  Because I sort of feel like if you live in Manhattan or in a borough of Brooklyn, you basically live in the same city.
• 3:34
  It's one of the things I loved about living in New York.
• 3:36
  It felt like a bunch of cities all layered on top of each other physically so that the rich and the poor and the weird, the sane and the insane are all walking the same.
• 3:45
  Yeah, exactly.
• 3:46
  Normally, you would have to drive.
• 3:47
  In Los Angeles, you would have to get in your car for half an hour to go from Koreatown to Malibu or, you know, more than half an hour.
• 3:55
  In New York, they're on top of each other.
• 3:56
  They're on top of each other.
• 3:57
  And I think that is genuinely one of the things that makes good cities great is the fact that you don't get to choose your own adventure.
• 4:04
  You have to experience all of them at once.
• 4:06
  That the value of density, the benefit of density is that, is that there's a collision of cultures, a collision of experiences and access to all of those different things that you don't get if you live in, you know, really far flung suburbia and you're kind of, you've got one choice and it's the same choice that all of your neighbors have.
• 4:22
  So I do think there's something to that.
• 4:23
  At the same time, I take your point.
• 4:25
  Lots of people are kind of choosing a different choice.
• 4:27
  Part of that is affordability.
• 4:28
  Density has become an incredibly unaffordable option that's only available to the very rich.
• 4:34
  Why?
• 4:34
  No.
• 4:35
  Because after the 80s, we realized that density rules, that it's awesome.
• 4:40
  But there
• 4:40
  was a really, really long period of time when density was slums.
• 4:43
  Inner city areas,
• 4:44
  whether it's Redfern in Sydney, whether it's Manhattan or Brooklyn in New York,
• 4:48
  were places that people thought were for poor people.
• 4:51
  And the rich people lived in the suburbs.
• 4:53
  And then we flipped that.
• 4:54
  We realized that actually being able to drive to work and having
• 4:57
  a two-car garage was not the be-all and end-all.
• 5:02
  And actually having experience and exposure to
• 5:04
  all those different things was what we were willing to pay for.
• 5:07
  Right.
• 5:07
  And yeah, sorry, finish that thought.
• 5:09
  Yeah.
• 5:09
  And so all of a sudden we had this total reversion where we'd seen cities spread out to
• 5:14
  suburbia because that's where wealthy people wanted to live.
• 5:17
  And then they fled back into
• 5:18
  the centres, dispersing and displacing poorer people to the suburbs.
• 5:23
  In many respects, actually,
• 5:24
  suburbs have become the places where the most entrenched poverty and disadvantage sits these
• 5:28
  days in cities, which is historically unusual, right?
• 5:33
  That's actually a relatively new phenomenon.
• 5:35
  How does that work?
• 5:36
  When we're talking about entrenched poverty, how are people affording
• 5:39
  to live in large homes, in suburbs?
• 5:43
  So their housing costs are lower.
• 5:45
  Everything else costs
• 5:46
  are higher.
• 5:47
  Their transport costs are higher.
• 5:49
  You look at some of the suburbs right on the
• 5:51
  fringes of Sydney, so say Campbelltown or Camden, the collective costs against the income of those
• 5:57
  people for housing and transport is higher than people who live in Potts Point, Mossman,
• 6:02
  the wealthiest suburbs of Sydney, because they spend so much traveling.
• 6:07
  We add to that with a large toll road system in Sydney, which makes it, it's not just petrol and
• 6:13
  the upkeep of the car, you also sometimes have to pay $15 to $20 a day in tolls.
• 6:18
  And you don't have a choice but to drive because one of the downsides to low density is it never justifies, there's never the population density to justify good public transport alternatives.
• 6:26
  Yeah, right.
• 6:27
  So we don't get train lines.
• 6:28
  Maybe you get a bus route, but the bus is a bit slow.
• 6:31
  It's a bit meandering.
• 6:32
  It doesn't get you where you need to go quickly.
• 6:34
  Car is always going to be a better choice in those sorts of suburbs.
• 6:37
  But when you're talking about poor people in the suburbs, you're talking about lower working class people who are struggling to get by but are still just making do.
• 6:47
  You're not talking about the poverty that existed in the 1980s in urban areas where in the Bronx you had homeless people lighting fires in trash cans just to warm themselves because they couldn't even afford to heat.
• 6:58
  They didn't have a home to heat.
• 6:59
  Yeah.
• 7:00
  For Anglo cities, for your New Yorks, your American, your Canadian, your British and Australian cities, no, we're not.
• 7:06
  Indeed, we're not talking about people warming themselves on trash cans.
• 7:09
  although I will say that a lot of the low-income housing the social housing has been shoved into
• 7:15
  pretty crappy suburbs on the fringes of our city um so which in our case get very very hot
• 7:20
  yeah Australia yeah very very hot very uncomfortable and you know often the housing's
• 7:25
  not well designed for that heat the other thing I think is worth dispelling is we have this concept
• 7:29
  of homelessness being an inner city issue and actually it's often not you know my very first
• 7:34
  job when I came out of uni was counting the number of people sleeping on the streets in the western
• 7:38
  suburbs of Sydney, so in your Penriths and your Blacktowns, basically sort of 30 to 40
• 7:43
  kilometers outside of the CBD.
• 7:45
  And there was an enormous number, 170 people that we counted in one night.
• 7:49
  And this was totally perplexing to the local mayors who thought, well, the homelessness
• 7:53
  is not an issue for us.
• 7:55
  It's all in the city.
• 7:56
  And partly it's because it's very visible in the city.
• 7:58
  A lot of the people who have connections in those suburban areas will travel into the
• 8:02
  city because I suppose the services are available to them.
• 8:04
  But they ultimately are living on the streets, in a car, under a bridge, in a tent, in those suburban areas.
• 8:12
  Right.
• 8:12
  And just staying on the differences, on the various differences between low-density and high-density parts of cities and the difference between cities that are predominantly high and low-density.
• 8:23
  What's also fascinating to me that I've heard about in your work is that it's a totally different experience in terms of your access to amenities, facilities, infrastructure, not just restaurants and cafes, but hospitals and schools if you're in a high-density area.
• 8:40
  Good shopping centers and doctors' surgeries and libraries and parks.
• 8:43
  So, I mean, the image that I have of a good city is you can walk outside and you can walk to your local high street where there are cafes.
• 8:52
  And, you know, I mean, this is so bougie of me.
• 8:54
  I know it sounds like a total white privilege thing.
• 8:56
  But, you know, you can go, well, it's not white privilege because I'm in a mostly minority white area.
• 9:02
  But, you know, a very bougie middle class thing that you can sort of walk to.
• 9:06
  Yeah, you can walk to everywhere and you can kind of, you have a sense of that, of the bustle of the place within shooting distance.
• 9:12
  And if I need to get a very, you know, I just needed to get a nuclear bone scan.
• 9:19
  Don't worry, folks, I'm fine.
• 9:20
  But I just needed to check something.
• 9:22
  It's a very, very, very rare and high-tech piece of equipment in which there might only be two or three in the entire country.
• 9:30
  And it's a 13-minute drive from my house.
• 9:33
  You know, if I lived in a much more spread out suburbanized city.
• 9:39
  Or in a city, yeah.
• 9:40
  Yeah.
• 9:41
  Then you're constantly having to think, you know, when I need to buy something complicated or when I need to, you know, what time is the movie session?
• 9:48
  Well, I don't need to care because there are literally 20 cinemas.
• 9:52
  When is the train coming?
• 9:53
  I just wandered down and know that a train will be along soon enough.
• 9:55
  Absolutely.
• 9:56
  And so that experience of city life, which I regard as being fundamentally linked to the experience of living in a city, is not.
• 10:05
  It's linked to an experience of living in a particular type of city in a particular part of that city, which is one that I have always chosen to live in.
• 10:15
  But tell me from the other side of the aisle, what life is like for those who live in the suburbs or suburbanized cities.
• 10:23
  I'll start by saying, you know, that might feel like bougie privilege, but that is actually the number one indicator of access to amenity.
• 10:29
  How many people can walk to a thing is almost always the defining feature of whether the thing exists.
• 10:36
  So you want good cafes.
• 10:38
  That is defined by can the cafe have enough people within walking distance to buy coffees in the morning to justify them setting up a business?
• 10:44
  Right.
• 10:44
  Because nobody drives just to go to a cafe.
• 10:47
  It turns out that actually we have this idea that people are driving to the shops.
• 10:50
  They're not driving to the shops as much as we think.
• 10:53
  Most people who spend money are walking or cycling or, you know, tiering their trips together.
• 10:57
  Maybe they're driving to the first place, but then they're wandering around.
• 10:59
  Exactly.
• 11:00
  They may be driving to the shopping district.
• 11:02
  Right.
• 11:02
  But once they're in the shopping district, they, yeah, or they park in the, you know, in the shopping center car park and then they leave the shopping center and go walking down the high street.
• 11:10
  And that, again, is something that flipped in the 80s, right?
• 11:12
  like in the 80s and indeed in America, they did a lot of this.
• 11:16
  We did big box retail.
• 11:17
  We built big
• 11:18
  Westfields.
• 11:19
  We built big shopping centers.
• 11:20
  And the benefit in Australia is we built them all on top
• 11:23
  of train stations.
• 11:24
  So when it turns out that actually people want to walk, it's good because
• 11:27
  an extra train station, but in America, they put them in the middle of nowhere on the, on the edge
• 11:31
  of a really large, you know, 12 lane freeway.
• 11:34
  So your only option was to drive to get to those
• 11:36
  shops.
• 11:36
  And it's actually destroyed the amenity of a bunch of those cities because there's nowhere to
• 11:40
  walk to to get to those sorts of shops but you asked about the the experience so just on that
• 11:46
  let me just dig into that a little bit don't people like people seem to like that in those
• 11:50
  parts of america i'm married to an american he comes from a part of the country which is very
• 11:55
  underpopulated new hampshire new england it's very spread out a lot of freeways a lot of big
• 11:59
  box stores that you know you go to the shopping center um in your car yeah and that sort of that
• 12:05
  That does suit them, right?
• 12:09
  People are able to get used to a lot of things.
• 12:12
  I genuinely think when there's stated preferences, but when you actually give people the option,
• 12:18
  they almost always choose the former.
• 12:20
  The dense, walkable, close to proximity of things.
• 12:24
  When they're given an affordable option, right?
• 12:26
  Actually, often what people are choosing there is something they can afford.
• 12:30
  It works for them because that works for their budget more so than it works for them.
• 12:34
  Given the option, would they choose it over being able to live in a denser area?
• 12:38
  And do the shopping center companies know this in the sense that they do tend to build,
• 12:42
  I think, near other places where people already are?
• 12:45
  Like for Americans who aren't aware, Westfield is an Australian company, actually.
• 12:49
  But you may know your Westfield shopping center in America.
• 12:51
  If you're in LA, like the big Century City shopping center that's near, I can't remember,
• 12:58
  like it's called Avenue of the Stars or something.
• 13:00
  I used to go there a lot.
• 13:01
  I don't know.
• 13:01
  But like, it's a, it's a huge Westfield shopping center.
• 13:05
  I remember walking, I remember driving past it thinking, I thought Westfield was Australian.
• 13:09
  Yeah.
• 13:09
  Yeah, it is.
• 13:10
  Global company, baby.
• 13:11
  Absolutely.
• 13:12
  And that's built in a place which is, you know, it is a crossroads of Los Angeles traffic and life.
• 13:19
  And so it is on your way.
• 13:21
  And here in Sydney, we have a lot of Westfields that are located, they're not located out in the middle of nowhere.
• 13:25
  They're located in Bondi Junction.
• 13:27
  They're located in East Gardens.
• 13:28
  They're located in Broadway.
• 13:29
  way they're located.
• 13:31
  So presumably they know that it's worth spending the extra money for
• 13:34
  the real estate in expensive places.
• 13:36
  The other thing we're starting to see in America particularly, and Westfield particularly in
• 13:40
  America, is starting to basically open their boxes.
• 13:44
  So what used to be a big shell with
• 13:46
  all the stuff internally air-conditioned, they're turning into high streets.
• 13:50
  So they're
• 13:50
  ripping the roof off, ripping the walls off, and turning them into old-fashioned kind of
• 13:54
  walkable boulevards with shops along the sides of them.
• 13:57
  That's kind of depressing and dystopian in a strange way, because it means that you're privatizing the public experience.
• 14:02
  Sure.
• 14:03
  I mean, but America privatizes it.
• 14:05
  You know, like they did not invent privatizing public spaces in America.
• 14:09
  That is a tried and tested model, my friend, in America.
• 14:13
  But it speaks to the idea that they've realized that consumers will spend more.
• 14:18
  That's ultimately what they're after.
• 14:19
  They want to make profit.
• 14:21
  But the consumers want that sort of thing.
• 14:22
  And given the option, they'll choose that thing.
• 14:24
  I think there is one interesting kind of counter to this.
• 14:28
  And we see this a lot in Australia, which is migrants who've moved to Australia, a lot of migrants moved to Australia.
• 14:33
  Sydney is one of the most multicultural cities in the world because more than half of the population is either a first or a second generation migrant, have come from cities that are very, very dense and either feel very comfortable in that density.
• 14:45
  So, um, a lot of Chinese migrants will preference apartment living, for example, or want to get as far the hell away as they possibly can from that.
• 14:52
  So you see a lot of Indian migrants, South Asian migrants who are choosing bigger houses a long way away from the city because they've tried that other thing.
• 15:01
  They didn't find it to be a particularly enjoyable experience and they want to try something else.
• 15:05
  Did you want to close the loop on suburbia before I take you on to the next thing?
• 15:10
  Yeah.
• 15:11
  So, I mean, there is something to the control that you have in suburbia.
• 15:15
  You get to make all of the decisions.
• 15:17
  All of your experiences and your social interactions happen within your house or someone else's house.
• 15:22
  So it's a privatized space.
• 15:23
  You get to pick when it happens.
• 15:25
  You get to pick what happens, what you're going to eat.
• 15:27
  You get to pick when you leave for work because you're driving.
• 15:30
  You get to hop in the car at the time that works for you.
• 15:32
  There's a lot of control that you get from suburbia.
• 15:35
  Now, it's constrained by the broader externalities.
• 15:37
  You get to pick when you leave home.
• 15:39
  You don't get to pick whether there's going to be traffic on the road, whereas if you get on a train, you know that there'll be no traffic.
• 15:45
  Well, it depends how well the train system runs.
• 15:48
  Sure.
• 15:48
  I mean, in New York, it was always a bit of a crapshoot about whether the A train is just going to stop between tunnels for 15 minutes because there's traffic ahead.
• 15:56
  And lots of buses get stuck in traffic as well.
• 15:58
  Fair point.
• 15:59
  But that control is valuable to some people.
• 16:01
  Like these are ultimately normative, you know, like personal judgment calls about these sorts of things.
• 16:07
  Yeah, right.
• 16:07
  My organization and a lot of the evidence and data that we've looked at suggests that density is better.
• 16:13
  But I would never suppose to tell someone that they're wrong for preferring suburbia.
• 16:17
  Well, I've heard you say that actually fewer people want houses than we think, at least in Australia, that we have this image that apartment living is a second best option and everybody wants the white picket fence and the quarter acre block.
• 16:29
  Yeah.
• 16:30
  But in actual fact, we have an undersupply of apartments and an oversupply of houses.
• 16:34
  And when you actually ask people what they want, many more Australians than we're aware of or than we assume would actually rather live in apartments than live in houses.
• 16:43
  Is that because they want a cheaper dwelling and they want to be able to spend the difference on other things?
• 16:50
  Or is it because even if they cost the same amount, they would still want to live in a highly urbanized apartment environment?
• 16:57
  Yeah.
• 16:58
  Affordability might be a bit of it, but I think most of it is about access and proximity to the good stuff that they want in life that lives outside of their home.
• 17:06
  So about 70% of the housing in Australia is freestanding homes and about 30% is apartments.
• 17:11
  I mean, terraces kind of muddy the waters a little bit, but let's say that's roughly the numbers.
• 17:16
  And when we ask people, when we do polling, they say it's about 50-50 in terms of what people want.
• 17:22
  50% of people want a house, 50% of people want an apartment, which means about 20% of the population.
• 17:27
  population are living in houses and they prefer to be living in apartments.
• 17:33
  And when we ask people,
• 17:34
  do they feel comfortable with, oh, well, maybe that's just a time of life thing.
• 17:37
  When you're
• 17:38
  young, you want to live in an apartment close to the hubbub.
• 17:40
  But when you have kids, you want to
• 17:41
  get the hell away from that stuff and you need more space.
• 17:44
  When we ask people, do you feel
• 17:45
  comfortable with the idea of raising kids in apartments?
• 17:48
  They say, yes, as long as there was
• 17:49
  sufficient bedrooms in the apartment, I would actually really think that's a comfortable idea.
• 17:53
  that is changing over time in australia you know we we we segment that polling by different
• 17:59
  generations going more pro apartment pro apartment boomers are like 13 of them think it's appropriate
• 18:04
  to raise a kid in a in an apartment you get down to gen z and it's like 60 but isn't that just
• 18:09
  because they've absorbed the financial reality of the fact that they're never going to own it's
• 18:13
  undoubtedly some some of that but it's also um because they've lived in apartments right like
• 18:18
  if you're a boomer you probably never lived in an apartment right point in your life yeah so they've
• 18:22
  I had the exposure to it and I was like, you know what?
• 18:24
  I could just see myself living in this.
• 18:26
  And you know what?
• 18:26
  I love being able to walk downstairs and get a coffee.
• 18:29
  Yeah.
• 18:29
  I mean, you can also walk downstairs and get a train in the instance of what Sydney has experimented with,
• 18:34
  where you put apartment blocks and shopping centers on top of new train stations.
• 18:40
  What is a good move and a bad move when you're thinking about where apartments should go and how they should be designed?
• 18:46
  Yeah.
• 18:46
  Well, on top of train stations is a great move.
• 18:47
  That's a good one.
• 18:49
  I mean, ideally you want them proximate within a five minute walking distance, maybe a 10 minute walking distance of a transport hub.
• 18:57
  And it's not just because transport's important, although it does unlock the rest of your city to you.
• 19:02
  It also tends to be the place where you've got the local high street.
• 19:05
  It tends to be the place where the, you know, the government services or whether it's a library or like a healthcare service or a school tend to kind of agglomerate.
• 19:13
  And so we tend to say you want it to be close to a transport stop just so people are able to walk to their daily needs, that they can, within a five or 10 minute walk, get the things they need that they need every day.
• 19:25
  You know, those things like a nuclear bone scan, maybe that's not, that doesn't need to be within a five minute walk.
• 19:30
  You don't put one of those on top of every train station.
• 19:32
  And you don't want one of those every day, right?
• 19:34
  No.
• 19:34
  But like for those daily things of like, do you have milk?
• 19:37
  Do you have eggs?
• 19:38
  Do you need to pick some stuff up for food?
• 19:40
  Do the kids need some, you know, notebooks for school?
• 19:43
  That sort of amenity.
• 19:45
  And is there a park you can go and play in?
• 19:47
  Is there a sports team that you can join playing down the road?
• 19:50
  These sorts of things are, you know, generally agreed to be part of a good life.
• 19:55
  And you want them to be close to where people live.
• 19:57
  So, I mean, part of the challenge is how much planning is going into it.
• 20:01
  I mean, not just from, in terms of the developer who's building the apartments, but in terms of the state government keeping across how many schools and hospitals you're going to need for the new apartments, you know, what you're going to do about the road system and about public transport, let alone the federal government, you know, liaising with state governments about immigration policy so that there are enough dwellings for new migrants to be able to live in.
• 20:24
  Yeah.
• 20:25
  How well do we, not just meaning Australia, but the Western world do on coordinating all of the different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that you need when you're dealing with a growing population?
• 20:35
  Yeah, pretty badly.
• 20:37
  Pretty badly.
• 20:38
  I mean, Singapore does it really well, right?
• 20:40
  Like the one country in the world that you'd say, oh my God, they do planning really well is Singapore because the federal government, the council, it's all the same thing.
• 20:47
  Yeah.
• 20:47
  And they kind of control everything, right?
• 20:49
  Right.
• 20:50
  Not only is it only a city, but it's an authoritarian city.
• 20:53
  It's an authoritarian city that's had the same government for 70 years.
• 20:56
  There are downsides to that, right?
• 20:58
  Like your ability to have uncomfortable conversations is significantly constrained in a highly planned society.
• 21:06
  So, you know, while I don't think we do it perfectly, I also think like we should be careful about getting too perfect at this sort of stuff.
• 21:13
  You need to be able to be flexible and kind of awkward in this space because things change and you want people to be able to make choices within that sort of that space, the gap between what's been planned and what happens in reality.
• 21:28
  What does Singapore do well?
• 21:29
  They do housing real well.
• 21:31
  You know, 80% of the population there lives in subsidized housing that's owned by the government.
• 21:36
  and while that means that 80% of people live in houses that look functionally identical,
• 21:40
  apartments that look functionally identical, they don't pay much.
• 21:45
  You know, people there
• 21:46
  are not spending significant amounts of their income on housing.
• 21:49
  They're able to spend it on
• 21:50
  other things.
• 21:51
  They do that really well.
• 21:53
  Are they renting or is there some kind of a buy to own?
• 21:55
  I mean, rent to own, rent to buy.
• 21:56
  Pretty small proportion of the population own.
• 21:59
  Yeah.
• 21:59
  Most people rent from the government.
• 22:01
  And it's not like a 99-year lease type situation
• 22:04
  where you're selling the right to rent to other individuals
• 22:09
  when you stop renting the government?
• 22:12
  No, the government's pretty strict on saying,
• 22:14
  I mean, they ban Airbnb, for example.
• 22:16
  They're pretty strict on saying like they will,
• 22:18
  you know, they'll get to the point
• 22:19
  where they'll be mixing each floor of an apartment block
• 22:22
  between different ethnicities
• 22:23
  to ensure there's social cohesion.
• 22:26
  You know, come hell or high water,
• 22:27
  we will have social cohesion.
• 22:28
  Yeah.
• 22:29
  So they're pretty restrictive and prescriptive
• 22:32
  about that sort of stuff.
• 22:34
  it's good in the sense that people don't pay very much money and if you're a cleaner living in that
• 22:38
  city you're able to afford to live in that city it's bad in terms of the fact that like that's
• 22:42
  the house you get you don't get a choice around it so like you know a balancing act on that i
• 22:46
  don't think i'd want to live in singapore i don't live in singapore i love sydney and that's the
• 22:50
  city i want to live in so i've made a you know a conscious choice that i don't want to sort of
• 22:55
  pick that frame but i can see some of the benefits and we should totally be learning from the options
• 23:00
  Yeah, my cousin lives in Singapore.
• 23:01
  I sometimes think it'd be pretty good.
• 23:03
  I mean, I go and visit her.
• 23:04
  It's a pretty good life over there.
• 23:05
  The benefit of it is also like when the government makes a decision to do something, they just
• 23:09
  get it done.
• 23:10
  Like, whereas here, you know, you wonder like, oh, why aren't we capturing the AI revolution
• 23:14
  in Australia?
• 23:15
  And partly it's because, well, it's really, really slow to get planning approvals to build
• 23:19
  the data centers that we need.
• 23:20
  And government is like, you know, probably years away from having a functional AI policy
• 23:25
  that, you know, like clearly states what we will do and won't do.
• 23:28
  We don't have years.
• 23:29
  Sorry?
• 23:29
  We don't have years in which, just a small note.
• 23:33
  Yeah.
• 23:33
  Totally.
• 23:34
  Any public policymakers or politicians watching, you don't have years to devise an AI policy.
• 23:40
  Or, you know, Uber, when it launched in Sydney, basically ran illegally for a year because
• 23:45
  it took the government that long to figure out what the hell was going on.
• 23:47
  Mind you, it did that everywhere.
• 23:48
  Yeah.
• 23:49
  That was their business model, right?
• 23:50
  Was to say, we'll just start.
• 23:52
  Apologize once, apologize after we're so entrenched that they can't get rid of us.
• 23:55
  And if we ask for permission, they'll never give it.
• 23:57
  Yeah.
• 23:57
  But if they realize that people love it, they'll let it happen.
• 24:00
  And I actually think there's something kind of nice in that.
• 24:02
  Like if you had designed the system to say, well, first we'll make a government decide
• 24:07
  what we get to access, we probably wouldn't have Uber in Sydney.
• 24:11
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• 24:16
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• 25:56
  And so, I mean, this comes down to sort of the crux of everything, which is how you get a risk-averse planning system to be nimble enough and adventurous enough to get the sort of abundance agenda up, right?
• 26:14
  Because there is this conflict between, I suppose, private industry, entrepreneurialism and vision and risk-taking and, you know, if I go bankrupt, then I go bankrupt.
• 26:26
  And the public sector's aversion to that.
• 26:29
  I mean, I think just getting a development application approved in Sydney is three times as long.
• 26:38
  It takes three times as long as in Melbourne, which probably takes three times as long as in, I don't know where, you know, Austin or somewhere.
• 26:44
  Somewhere in Singapore.
• 26:45
  Somewhere that, yeah.
• 26:46
  Well, in Singapore, you can't get a development application through because you don't own the land, right?
• 26:50
  But why is that?
• 26:52
  It's like, what is it about the culture of the way that people who allow things to happen is set?
• 26:58
  So there's a third player in this conversation because you've got like the development industry, you've got government, and then you've got community expectations.
• 27:05
  And that's why.
• 27:05
  Because we have had the other two groups, the developers and the government, be intensely corrupt in New South Wales over history.
• 27:13
  Yes.
• 27:13
  You know, like ICAC, which is the Independent Commission Against Corruption, was set up as a very, very hardcore anti-corruption body in New South Wales because we had very hardcore corruption.
• 27:26
  And just explain to non-New South Welsh people or even people, you know, like me who just can't quite remember, you hear all these corrupt names occasionally crop up in the news from, you know, the era in the 80s or 90s when, you know, premiers would literally, you know, the leader of the state would literally have to step down because of corruption allegations.
• 27:48
  What form does the corruption take?
• 27:49
  So there's like silly corruption.
• 27:52
  So we lost a premier in New South Wales because he got given a bottle of wine.
• 27:55
  and he said, oh, no, I've never met the bloke that gave me that wine.
• 27:59
  And then they found the handwritten note he'd written to that guy saying,
• 28:02
  hey, thanks so much for the wine.
• 28:04
  He lied.
• 28:05
  That was bad.
• 28:06
  But like, should you lose your job over that?
• 28:08
  I'm not sure.
• 28:09
  No, but wasn't, and just in case people think that's really weird,
• 28:12
  wasn't that regarded as being a tip of the iceberg of like,
• 28:16
  wasn't it a Chinese influence headler from the Communist Party or something
• 28:21
  who gave him the wine?
• 28:22
  There was a bunch of fuzziness around that.
• 28:23
  It was sort of like, this is the thing that we can get him.
• 28:25
  This is the thing that proves that all of his denials about his coziness with...
• 28:30
  Yeah.
• 28:31
  I don't think, I mean, I think that's interesting in that partly one of the things our anti-corruption
• 28:35
  body has done by being so robust is that it's kind of got to a point now where if you're
• 28:41
  accused of corruption, it's probably better as a politician to just resign and move on
• 28:45
  with your life.
• 28:45
  That like, there's not really any coming back from that.
• 28:48
  We can talk about Barry O'Farrell and the bottle of wine, but my sense is probably that
• 28:54
  wasn't that.
• 28:55
  Okay, so what was the substance of corruption?
• 28:57
  Yeah, so we had some really, really egregious corruption.
• 29:00
  We had ministers for energy planning, mining, water, who would basically have a share in a mining company, then go into government, into the cabinet room, and sign off without telling anybody.
• 29:14
  Say, hey, we should sign off on a mining license for this company that they'll make millions of dollars on.
• 29:19
  And everyone said, okay, we'll take your point.
• 29:21
  You're the mining minister.
• 29:22
  And it turned out that they were making millions and millions of dollars because they owned half of the company.
• 29:27
  And we had this period, Eddie Obeid, Ian MacDonald, people like that who were basically doing this at a kind of a systematic scale.
• 29:35
  You know, it wasn't just one line.
• 29:36
  These people were convicted, right?
• 29:37
  They were.
• 29:38
  Don't want to get sued for defamation.
• 29:40
  No, no, no, no.
• 29:42
  This is definitely things that happened.
• 29:44
  Or dodgy leases for government-owned cafes.
• 29:49
  The government owned the space.
• 29:50
  They leased it out to a cafe owner that it turned out had donated money.
• 29:54
  So genuine corruption.
• 29:56
  And so we, as a community in New South Wales, decided that that wasn't acceptable and we wanted to prevent that.
• 30:03
  So a lot of the development kind of, you know, red tape has really been built up around making sure that that doesn't happen, that there isn't ways to cut corners through money and envelopes handed to the right person.
• 30:18
  And, you know, I think like our development application system should not take three times longer than Melbourne.
• 30:24
  We're not building houses three times nicer than they are in Melbourne.
• 30:26
  It should be quicker.
• 30:28
  But there is a historical, you know, reason where.
• 30:30
  Right.
• 30:30
  But if I don't understand the connection between making sure that a mining minister doesn't own half of the company that he's giving a mining license to and me trying to put a back deck on my house.
• 30:43
  Yeah.
• 30:43
  Like there's no obvious risk of corruption.
• 30:45
  How many envelopes of cash did you hand over to your deck, mate?
• 30:48
  Well, I mean, I don't even know what levers I could pull in terms of that.
• 30:54
  Like, you know, what is the...
• 30:55
  I mean, one of the challenges is we've designed a planning system that's very much about the site by site, sort of, that like actually the really pressure point around when we'll decide whether you can do a thing or not is on your site.
• 31:07
  A much better system would be to say, let's decide what we want for the community at large.
• 31:12
  And we'll spend a lot of time being really clear about saying, this is how high we want the buildings around.
• 31:16
  This is how much stuff we want.
• 31:18
  This is where the park should go.
• 31:19
  And then as long as you're adhering to that broad plan, go for your life.
• 31:22
  Yeah, right.
• 31:23
  You know, we'll check that you're actually sticking to what we said you should do, but have a lot of work done at the strategic planning purpose when you're sort of saying this is what the next 10 years is going to look like in this suburb and have a lot less time spent on the individual development applications.
• 31:36
  That's such a good idea.
• 31:37
  Right.
• 31:37
  So an architect or a builder just has to look at the one-page document from the local council area.
• 31:42
  Probably a 10-page document.
• 31:44
  10-page document and say, these are the things that you can and can't do.
• 31:47
  Stay within these parameters.
• 31:48
  Yeah.
• 31:49
  as long as you are signing off and maybe you have an auditing layer or not, but at the very least,
• 31:55
  you would assume that if they're breaking out of that, then you're going to get a complaint
• 31:58
  from the neighbors anyway.
• 32:00
  And then the council can look into whether what you're doing is.
• 32:02
  And you need enough in there to really also talk about trade-offs to say, oh, you want to go higher?
• 32:07
  Well, this is what it'll take for you to go higher.
• 32:09
  We want to see some more affordable
• 32:10
  housing.
• 32:10
  We want to see you contribute to building a park in the area because you've
• 32:14
  done that strategic planning layer and saying, these are the things we aspire to have.
• 32:17
  You can
• 32:18
  then have those conversations about the trade-offs that kind of go beyond, I guess, the rules as they
• 32:23
  were set out initially.
• 32:24
  Yeah.
• 32:25
  And what about in terms of big developments, like not the person
• 32:27
  who wants to put a back deck on their porch, but you're talking about, okay, well, here's a part of
• 32:34
  the city that could do with a lot of development.
• 32:37
  I'm thinking about, say, Mascot 30 years ago.
• 32:42
  We could put a lot of apartments in here.
• 32:43
  So let's get some developers to do it.
• 32:46
  you end up getting a bunch of dodgy development contracts
• 32:49
  in addition to a few good ones.
• 32:51
  The apartments fall apart.
• 32:53
  There's no infrastructure added to the area, really.
• 32:57
  So you suddenly have a deluge of, you know,
• 33:02
  however many tens of thousands of new people in a neighbourhood
• 33:05
  putting a burden on local, you know, amenities,
• 33:08
  and then that has dysfunctional political implications
• 33:11
  because people start blaming, I don't know,
• 33:13
  migrants or whatever for the fact that it now takes an hour and a half in the emergency room
• 33:19
  to see a doctor instead of half an hour as it used to, when the problem actually isn't the migrants.
• 33:25
  The problem is that nobody was planning on how that neighborhood or that suburb is going to
• 33:29
  function with the influx of people.
• 33:31
  And that, I mean, part of the problem that happened in
• 33:34
  Mascot is we have way too many levels of government in Australia.
• 33:38
  We got the federal government,
• 33:39
  we got state government, we got local government, got 33 different local governments in Sydney.
• 33:43
  But that's the same in the United States, isn't it?
• 33:46
  It is, but we give a lot more power and fundraising capacity to that local government level.
• 33:51
  Oh, okay.
• 33:51
  So all that local amenity and infrastructure that MASCOT needed was the responsibility of the local council to deliver, and they had no ability to raise money to actually do those things.
• 34:01
  Right.
• 34:01
  And so one of the reasons why you see councils being really pro-development, because the one revenue source that they can access is developer contributions when the houses get built.
• 34:10
  But of course, that means that they don't get the money till afterwards often.
• 34:14
  What's a developer contribution?
• 34:15
  So if you're doing a development, the council will say, we'll grant you your development
• 34:19
  application, but you need to contribute to the local council X number of dollars per
• 34:23
  square meter of your development.
• 34:25
  That sounds like a bribe to the council, not to a person.
• 34:28
  Well, it's a tax.
• 34:30
  I mean, we could have a debate about whether tax is bribes.
• 34:33
  Well, as long as it follows a formula, then it's a tax.
• 34:36
  Yes, there's a very clearly, there's ideally a very clearly set out.
• 34:39
  Yeah, right.
• 34:40
  One of the challenges when you don't have enough of that strategic planning is developers say, hey, I'd really love to build in this area.
• 34:46
  The council's like, we don't quite know what we're going to need there in terms of infrastructure.
• 34:50
  Can we get back to you later?
• 34:51
  And the developer's like, okay, I'll get started, I guess.
• 34:54
  And then they get hit with a bill that's much higher than what they expected later.
• 34:57
  Yeah.
• 34:57
  That's where you get into kind of sovereign risk.
• 34:59
  I mean, also it should be stated that councils make a lot of their money from rates, which is a property tax.
• 35:06
  Yeah.
• 35:06
  Right.
• 35:07
  But it's a very low property tax in comparison to-
• 35:09
  Because when you say that American local municipalities don't have much fundraising power, they have very high property taxes, which are levied by local government in a lot of America.
• 35:21
  And so they do have, they would have to make a lot of money from property tax that they don't make here.
• 35:26
  They have a lot more fundraising capacity than we do in Australia.
• 35:29
  They can also raise new taxes, right?
• 35:30
  There's very clever models that municipalities can do around saying, hey, we're thinking about building, funding a train line to run through here.
• 35:37
  we can increase your property taxes by 30% and we'll build the train line.
• 35:42
  Go to the polls and vote on it.
• 35:44
  And if you guys democratically decide you want to do that, great.
• 35:47
  Can we not do that in Australia?
• 35:49
  We don't have the constitutional capacity to do that.
• 35:52
  The people that would raise the money are not the people that are allowed to ask people to raise the money.
• 35:57
  It's such a good idea.
• 35:58
  That's stupid, isn't it?
• 35:59
  You're asking people to say, hey, here's the trade-off.
• 36:01
  Train line and more tax or no train line and less tax.
• 36:04
  You pick.
• 36:05
  Like, you know, if you want it, you want it.
• 36:06
  If you don't, you won't complain when there's a trend line.
• 36:09
  Amazing.
• 36:10
  So when you have local government elections in Australia and people are promising various things, are they all only fighting over the same pool of money with no power to tax and spend?
• 36:21
  Yeah, we have, this is very parochial to New South Wales, but we have this thing called rate capping, which basically says that they can't increase the overall amount of money they raise from property taxes more than CPI.
• 36:32
  We call property tax rates, hence rate capping.
• 36:34
  Rates.
• 36:35
  Right.
• 36:35
  Okay.
• 36:36
  So yeah, they've got the same amount of money no matter who wins.
• 36:38
  Right.
• 36:39
  But nonetheless, the fact remains that the incentive for the local government is more
• 36:44
  dwellings because more dwellings means more property tax revenue.
• 36:48
  The upfront, the sugar hit from the development.
• 36:50
  And there's the sugar hit from the developer.
• 36:51
  Here's the kicker.
• 36:52
  What?
• 36:53
  The overall amount of money they can raise from rates doesn't change when their population changes.
• 36:58
  So if they get, like if you get mascot into your local area, you don't all of a sudden get to
• 37:02
  increase your rate space by all those extra people, you have to smear the amount of money
• 37:06
  across a larger number of people.
• 37:08
  So everybody's taxes go down, but the amount of money you have to fund more infrastructure
• 37:11
  for more people doesn't go up.
• 37:13
  Get out.
• 37:14
  It's kind of bonkers.
• 37:14
  That is absolutely insane.
• 37:16
  I can't believe I was today years old when I learned that.
• 37:19
  So not only are the rates fixed per capita, the rates are fixed per municipality, per
• 37:27
  local government area.
• 37:28
  I would have thought that if you pump more apartments, more people in, then you get to tax more people.
• 37:35
  And if you have more dwellings, you get to tax more dwellings and you get more revenue because presumably it costs more to run a municipality that has 100,000 people in it than that has 50,000 people in it.
• 37:46
  Yeah.
• 37:47
  Now you can, you have to go to the state government cap in hand to a pricing regulator and say, please, sir, look at all these extra people we've taken.
• 37:55
  Maybe please have some more money.
• 37:57
  But like, we don't treat local governments like their own, you know, mature grown up level of government that can go to the committee and say, we're raising your rates here and we're doing this sort of thing.
• 38:06
  They have to go and ask a different level of government for permission.
• 38:08
  Got it.
• 38:09
  Actually, local government technically doesn't exist in Australia.
• 38:12
  All it is, is just a-
• 38:13
  Well, somebody picks up my garbage bin.
• 38:14
  Yeah, but it's just an act of state parliament.
• 38:17
  I see.
• 38:17
  Like it's not in the constitution.
• 38:19
  Right, right.
• 38:19
  It could go away tomorrow.
• 38:21
  Okay, that's really interesting.
• 38:21
  Which I'm sure some people would be delighted by.
• 38:23
  I happen to think local governments often are really great,
• 38:26
  but they are really up against that.
• 38:28
  And I feel for them in terms of their inability to fund the stuff that,
• 38:31
  you know, the community demands.
• 38:32
  I would rather have stronger local governments and weaker state governments
• 38:36
  and just have a strong federal government and then local governments
• 38:40
  that are responsive to local needs because the states are sort of arbitrary.
• 38:44
  I mean, I don't think we really have an American style sense of state patriotism.
• 38:48
  You know, you ask, you go to the States and you're in a, uh, an airport lounge in, you
• 38:52
  know, I don't know, Chicago or something.
• 38:54
  And you're sitting down next to someone, you ask where they're from and they'll tell you
• 38:56
  the state.
• 38:57
  Yeah.
• 38:58
  You know, they'll say, I'm from Texas.
• 38:59
  Can you imagine if you met someone and you were like, I'm from South Australia, you'd
• 39:03
  be like, that, that makes absolutely no sense to me.
• 39:05
  Why are you identifying yourself that way?
• 39:06
  All right, mate.
• 39:07
  I'll leave you to it.
• 39:09
  Enjoy your beverage, sir.
• 39:10
  Yeah.
• 39:11
  I think the other weird thing about states in Australia is that basically all of them are one really big city and then a lot of other kind of like expanse.
• 39:19
  Yes.
• 39:19
  Well, that's the country.
• 39:21
  I mean, the whole country, we're one of the most urbanized rich countries in the world.
• 39:24
  Totally.
• 39:24
  Or one of the most urbanized countries in the world.
• 39:26
  Yeah.
• 39:26
  70% of the population is living in a city.
• 39:29
  It is very urbanized.
• 39:30
  And it's only four cities.
• 39:31
  No.
• 39:32
  I mean, in terms of big ones.
• 39:33
  Big ones, yeah.
• 39:34
  Most of them are in those big cities and then the rest of it is empty.
• 39:38
  I mean, there are some small cities, but not many and not very big.
• 39:41
  No.
• 39:41
  I mean, I'm always, regular listeners will know I always bang on about the need for medium-sized cities.
• 39:45
  I like countries with medium-sized cities.
• 39:47
  I think it's great.
• 39:48
  What do you mean by medium-sized cities?
• 39:51
  I would mean a city that had about a million people.
• 39:55
  Okay.
• 39:55
  In the Australian context.
• 39:57
  Which is like, I mean, America is like a country of medium-sized cities.
• 40:01
  Yeah, exactly.
• 40:01
  Sydney would be one of the largest cities in America if it was in America.
• 40:05
  Yeah.
• 40:05
  But obviously, you know, there are 50 cities in America that have more than one.
• 40:09
  Yeah, that's what I mean.
• 40:10
  Like, so if you don't want to live in a huge metropolis, you just can't afford to.
• 40:14
  Yeah.
• 40:14
  In Australia, your choice is basically move to a small town.
• 40:18
  Yeah.
• 40:19
  We don't have the equivalent that Americans do of moving to Minneapolis or moving to Austin or moving to, you know, there are so many cool cities, Cleveland or whatever, you know, wherever you might want to go where you're still going to get that city vibe.
• 40:34
  and you don't have to be one of the top five metropolises in the country.
• 40:39
  The other weird quirk we have in Australia is we also have very little mobility between
• 40:43
  the big cities.
• 40:43
  So in America, it's really normal for you, for example, for you to go to another
• 40:47
  city to go to university than the city that you grew up in.
• 40:50
  In fact, it would be weird to stay in
• 40:52
  the city that you were in.
• 40:53
  Whereas in Australia, that very rarely happens.
• 40:55
  If you grew up in
• 40:56
  Sydney, you will go to university in one of the Sydney-based unis.
• 40:59
  You wouldn't go to Melbourne.
• 41:00
  Well, so you don't live on campus in Australia usually.
• 41:02
  So it's more like in Europe where you
• 41:04
  might be likely to stay at home.
• 41:05
  Although in Europe, they also have a lot more mobility
• 41:07
  between cities.
• 41:08
  Do they?
• 41:08
  On the continent?
• 41:09
  Yeah.
• 41:10
  So that's one of the other quirks of
• 41:12
  Australian kind of urbanism is actually, they really are city states.
• 41:16
  Like Sydney,
• 41:17
  the population of Sydney is far more kind of anchored to Sydney than say this population
• 41:22
  of New York, who, if you raise the property taxes, genuinely might just leave.
• 41:26
  Yeah.
• 41:26
  Well,
• 41:27
  I mean, but New York is one of the most itinerant cities in the world because it's sort of a global
• 41:30
  capital, isn't it?
• 41:31
  But if you, yeah, I'm not sure.
• 41:33
  New York may be a poor example, but like, you know,
• 41:35
  let's say Austin or Boston or Minneapolis, you know, like if you're in Minneapolis, well,
• 41:41
  you go to St. Paul, you know.
• 41:43
  But that's the same place.
• 41:45
  But yes, yeah, you could go to Philadelphia.
• 41:49
  Yeah.
• 41:49
  Okay.
• 41:49
  So let's talk about transportation then, because mobility reminds me of that.
• 41:53
  So
• 41:54
  it's not just about getting, you know, it's not just about whether or not you want to leave the
• 41:57
  city of your birth and where you were raised, but it's also about your capacity to move
• 42:01
  both between cities in the country and within the city.
• 42:05
  So I'll start within the city.
• 42:08
  Charging people to drive.
• 42:09
  I mentioned tolls in Australia earlier.
• 42:12
  London has a congestion charge
• 42:14
  where you get dinged if you go through this invisible barrier into central London.
• 42:19
  New York
• 42:19
  now has a congestion charge.
• 42:23
  Do they work?
• 42:24
  What's the rationale?
• 42:26
  They're so good.
• 42:27
  Tolls are so good.
• 42:28
  I want to make the case for tolls because obviously everybody hates tolls, but they're really, really good.
• 42:33
  They could be done way better than the way-
• 42:35
  Well, yeah, I'll push back on the way that Sydney does tolls.
• 42:37
  Sure.
• 42:37
  Definitely.
• 42:38
  And I probably wouldn't disagree.
• 42:39
  Yeah, in the sense that you have just an ad hoc arrangement with a private consortium to build a new highway and then you guarantee them revenue.
• 42:47
  A toll concession.
• 42:49
  And then they just charge.
• 42:50
  So it's completely sort of random.
• 42:53
  I mean, I would think there should just be a toll on the number of kilometers that you drive in particular regions of the particular bands of the city and you get charged.
• 43:00
  A distance-based charge.
• 43:01
  Yes.
• 43:02
  That is probably time of day.
• 43:03
  So if you drive at peak hour, you pay a little bit more.
• 43:06
  That is the gold standard.
• 43:07
  Right.
• 43:08
  Congestion charges aren't bad as well, although they have a little bit more of externalities
• 43:12
  than a distance-based charge.
• 43:13
  What are the externalities of a congestion charge?
• 43:16
  They tend to kind of push people out of that central area.
• 43:19
  Yeah, so you get a lot more traffic around.
• 43:20
  I mean, London has made their congestion charge so grand, it's not the inner city anymore,
• 43:23
  right?
• 43:23
  It's like actually most of the greater London area.
• 43:25
  Well, I think there are two tiers.
• 43:26
  There's the low, yes, there is the high and the low versions.
• 43:29
  Yeah, I think in the centre you get really slugged.
• 43:32
  They're really getting to a point where their toll, their congestion charge is really to
• 43:35
  disincentivise driving at all.
• 43:37
  They really are trying.
• 43:38
  They're saying, you know what?
• 43:39
  A public transport system is so good now
• 43:41
  that you really have no excuse not to catch the train or the bus.
• 43:45
  And so we want to really
• 43:46
  incentivize and encourage you to do that.
• 43:48
  So here's why tolls are good.
• 43:50
  The only thing that
• 43:52
  stops traffic jams is paying for the road.
• 43:55
  The only roads that don't get traffic jams are tolled
• 43:58
  roads.
• 43:58
  And that is a universal truth around the world.
• 44:01
  It's the only thing.
• 44:02
  You build extra lanes
• 44:03
  on a road, you think that might reduce traffic.
• 44:05
  More people get on the road and it goes back to the exact same level of traffic jam that
• 44:10
  it had previously.
• 44:11
  How long does that take?
• 44:12
  Do you know?
• 44:13
  It can take as quickly as three months.
• 44:15
  It can be three years sometimes, but often it's within the first year of the opening
• 44:20
  of the expansion of the motorway.
• 44:21
  It's done nothing.
• 44:22
  Yeah.
• 44:23
  Almost immediately, there's a great Utopia episode where they're trying to like, oh,
• 44:27
  this one's amazing.
• 44:28
  This is an Australian television show.
• 44:29
  This is a satire of government and how government processes work.
• 44:32
  And they had a congestion busting program of rolling out road expansions.
• 44:36
  And they're like, oh, year two, it does nothing.
• 44:37
  This is massively wasting money.
• 44:40
  So tolls are good because they reduce traffic jams.
• 44:43
  If you are driving on roads, you're paying one way or another.
• 44:45
  You're either paying cash or you're paying time.
• 44:48
  And for people who live on the outskirts of cities, you're paying a lot of time, a lot of time in traffic.
• 44:53
  You know, it could be 20, 30 minutes of your life every single day.
• 44:57
  That is a really large charge on people's lives.
• 45:00
  And people would, you know, people don't sort of assign a value to that in their day-to-day lives, but they would assign a value to that.
• 45:06
  That's time not spent with family.
• 45:08
  It's time not spent with kids.
• 45:09
  Time not working, you know, the job a little bit harder to make a little bit more money.
• 45:14
  And so tolls have a really good beneficial sort of alternative to give you an option to pay money instead of time.
• 45:21
  Not everybody can afford to do that.
• 45:22
  No, I mean, yeah.
• 45:24
  So the criticism is that they're regressive in a sense, right?
• 45:27
  that, you know, obviously if you have so much money that you just don't care about spending
• 45:31
  a thousand, potentially a few thousand dollars a year on tolls, then you're just going to pay
• 45:35
  no attention to it.
• 45:36
  You're going to drive wherever you want.
• 45:37
  You're never going to hit traffic jams
• 45:38
  except for on the untold roads.
• 45:42
  Can I point out that traffic is also really regressive
• 45:45
  because rich people can afford to live in areas where they can get on the train or they can not
• 45:49
  have a very long drive because they live much closer to the places they want to go.
• 45:52
  So it is
• 45:54
  regressive.
• 45:54
  Undoubtedly tolls are regressive, but so is traffic.
• 45:57
  We're actually talking about
• 45:58
  two different systems that are both really, really poorly designed, really regressive,
• 46:02
  and which one is better.
• 46:04
  Because the people who live on the outskirts of the city and spend the
• 46:07
  most time in traffic jams tend to be the people who can't afford to live closer.
• 46:11
  Right.
• 46:12
  But they may not also be able to afford the time to sit in traffic jams.
• 46:16
  I mean,
• 46:16
  yeah, it depends what asset you have, whether it's time or money.
• 46:19
  And you see this happen with a lot of people who are working jobs that they're way overqualified for purely because they're closer to where they live and where they can afford to live.
• 46:29
  This is like bad for society.
• 46:31
  It's bad for productivity.
• 46:32
  And it's bad for those people because they can't access the good jobs.
• 46:35
  The benefit, you know, if you're looking at those two side by side and saying, okay, two regressive, pretty crappy options in terms of traffic jams or tolls, you know, how do we choose between them?
• 46:44
  The benefit of tolls is that you have a revenue source that you can use to fund alternatives to being stuck in traffic.
• 46:50
  So you can take those tolls in the best case scenario, and this is the model that New York
• 46:54
  is using with their congestion charge.
• 46:56
  You take the money raised from the congestion charge and you put it into train lines to
• 47:00
  the places that all of a sudden have been slugged with a tax to say, here's an alternative
• 47:04
  available to you.
• 47:05
  Right.
• 47:05
  We don't do that in Australia because our tolls go towards the private company that
• 47:09
  built the toll.
• 47:09
  A little bit.
• 47:10
  Well, for the government-owned tolls, that's where they go.
• 47:12
  They go into a transport.
• 47:13
  There aren't very many of those, are there?
• 47:14
  There's a Harbour Bridge.
• 47:16
  That was the one that I was going to say.
• 47:17
  Yeah.
• 47:18
  Yeah, look, we can be, I mean, a lot of the work that the current state government is doing is to figure out how to do it better.
• 47:24
  Yeah.
• 47:24
  My, you know, if we were going to improve the tolling system in Sydney, the other thing you want to do is really look at not just having it on a couple of roads, but actually spreading it around.
• 47:34
  Yeah.
• 47:35
  One of the classic examples we had in Sydney was we built a really awesome motorway underneath a really terrible road.
• 47:42
  One of the worst roads called Parramatta Road.
• 47:44
  Yeah, BM4, you're talking about.
• 47:45
  Yeah.
• 47:46
  Yeah.
• 47:46
  And so Parramatta Road is basically like lots and lots of traffic lights.
• 47:50
  It used to be
• 47:50
  a high street, kind of the high street where people would, you know, promenade along or
• 47:55
  horse-drawn carriages.
• 47:57
  Runs all the way from the center of the city, basically, to the western edge of the city.
• 48:00
  Yeah.
• 48:01
  Yeah.
• 48:01
  It's a long way.
• 48:02
  We gave people this alternative, which was a road underground that was really, really great.
• 48:06
  But because we put a toll on the tunnel and not on the surface road, it meant that a whole bunch
• 48:10
  of people stayed on the really crappy road and got stuck in traffic.
• 48:14
  Almost a better option would
• 48:15
  have been to put the toll on the surface road and encourage people to go underground or to you know
• 48:20
  vary those a little bit more to make it more preferable for people to go underground because
• 48:24
  that is genuinely a better option for them they'll get to where they need to go quicker
• 48:27
  and they'll also take traffic off a street that could be a great high street if we just got all
• 48:32
  i mean the problem there would be that no one would pay a toll to go on a slow high street
• 48:38
  right and then you get a traffic jam in the tunnel well you might get some i mean you'd
• 48:42
  probably still need to keep a small price on the on the tunnel to kind of but it would be much i
• 48:47
  mean i do think from a social justice an economic justice point of view you need some free way to
• 48:51
  get around don't you or maybe not don't you need a free alternative to people who have time but no
• 48:57
  money driving's not free you got to buy a car you got to pay for petrol i mean we have a we have a
• 49:01
  distance-based tax on driving which is the petrol levy yeah it's not free yeah yeah i mean like i i
• 49:08
  look at the principle you're talking about there it is right and proper that a that a good society
• 49:12
  provides ways for people to get around social and economic-
• 49:15
  But it doesn't have to be free roads.
• 49:17
  I mean, it's never free.
• 49:18
  Yeah, yeah.
• 49:19
  If it was free, it's made out of taxpayer dollars, right?
• 49:21
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 49:23
  G'day, humans.
• 49:24
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• 49:28
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• 49:31
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• 49:32
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