At the start of 2024, I ran a series of town halls across my federal electorate of Ryan to work with the community in developing a vision for the future of Brisbane’s Westside. City populations are major contributors to global crises, producing 60% of global greenhouse gases. Cities are also the site of increasing social breakdown and isolation – because of several decades of poor urban planning focused on cars and private consumption.
As a former architect, I know we have the solutions to making our cities sustainable, and as The Greens’ portfolio holder for Infrastructure, Transport and Sustainable Cities, I’m working on a policy that will enable us to harness those ideas. The town hall series gave me the opportunity to test the policy with perhaps its most important audience, the residents whose lives would be affected by it.
This vision is focused on four key principles
- Everyone has an affordable place to live in: delivered by building affordable and public medium density infill housing, not suburban sprawl, restricting short-stay accommodation, and ensuring a portion of all private development is put aside for social housing
- All homes and precincts are sustainably designed: banning development on high-risk flood plains, making neighbourhood plans binding, ensuring all buildings meet high energy standards, and significant shade tree coverage
- Everyone has what they need within 20 minutes of their home, decreasing the need to drive and building integrated communities: a beautiful public park, a public library, schools, local shops, a public pool
- Everyone can get around the city safely and without traffic: with everyone able to walk to frequent and reliable public transport that doesn’t get caught in traffic and where side streets have 30km/h speed limits and traffic calming
At each forum, I gave an overview of this vision, showing case studies of how parts of Brisbane measure up against those principles. Community leaders spoke about some of the issues being faced by the area, and former Councillor Jonathan Sriranganathan spoke about how community consultation currently informs urban planning, and what opportunities exist for change. Each participant was given a workbook on the policy and key local issues.
Then we broke into small groups of around 8-12 people, to discuss the policy in the context of specific local issues, according to the the participants' local area. At the end of the session, themes from the discussions were shared with the wider group and passed on to my team, who put together summaries of that content for each event.
Below you can read in detail those discussion summaries for each of the five town halls across 5 areas within my electorate of Ryan - including my proposals for each local area.
Moggill & Bellbowrie
Inner West - St Lucia, Indooroopilly, Toowong and Taringa