Brian Haratsis: Thinking big on population

• Bigger Australia, better Australia, or both? Brian Haratsis, Managing Director and Chief Economist of Macroplan,  talks about his view of population growth in Australia.

  Brian Haratsis sees a radical vision for Australia. It involves more and bigger cities, a property market unfettered by over-regulation and a relocation of the nation’s capital to the north.

  Haratsis, managing director and chief economist of MacroPlan Australia, will deliver a keynote address at the Property Council’s Congress summit next month on population and economic growth in Australia.

  The address is timely, given the ongoing public debate on population growth, migration and the economy in the lead-up to a federal election that will determine a new roadmap for Australia.

  The debate over population, most recently centred on the “big Australia” concept, is a crucial one to finalise. According to Haratsis, failure to resolve the debate risks declining living standards for all Australians.

  The realities of our demographic bulge finalises the issue for Haratsis – we need immigration.

  “The concept of 36 to 39 million (people) being a ‘big Australia’ is fallacious,” he says. “The whole debate has been stolen by people in Australia who have views on not growing and developing Australia.”

  The timing is right to reset the nation’s attitude to population growth. Haratsis argues that paying off the national debt in the middle of this decade allowed the country to consider population growth when, in the decades before, it had been off the agenda.

  Now it’s time to align a new direction for population growth with a nation and city building agenda.

  “We should be growing more cities,” Haratsis says. “We need a national charter of principles and objectives for regional city building. At the moment, there’s no point of reference for anything.”

  Australia’s new cities should be specialists – resource cities, tourism cities. Good transport nodes should link them all – more international airports that expand the limited network of gateways we have now.

  However, before the nation can embark on an ambitious city building plan, some large barriers need to be torn down.

  One of the biggest is planning policy.

  “We need a national approach to planning …” says Haratsis – one piece of legislation that adopts a triple-bottom-line approach and delivers certainty for development through a single set of development controls.

  He argues it is illogical for Australia to have an open system for its equities market, but a closed market for city building, hamstrung by planning over-regulation.

  “We can talk about carbon taxes, but we can’t even get a properly functioning property market. We can’t even get land supply right,” Haratsis says.

  It’s a crucial point. Cities, Haratsis says, should be considered the technology to make labour productive. Affordable housing produces affordable labour costs and a stronger economy.

  Haratsis is soon to release the fruits of his Australia 2050 project, a book on collaborative nation and city building he describes as a “heads up for planners, developers, nation and city builders that planning and provision for the future has not changed since Federation, but Australia has”.

  But one city Haratsis sees a lesser future for is Canberra. He advocates transferring the seat of power to Townsville, Darwin or Broome in order to signal our country’s willingness to embrace Asia and indigenous Australia.