Local Government

Given the current interest in population growth, in the third of my articles I’ll take a look at forecast population growth in Greater Western Sydney councils.

To reiterate, the projections I’m discussing are based on forecasts released by the NSW Government Bureau of Transport Statistics (BTS – formerly the Transport Data Centre) and the usual caveats apply about their reliability or otherwise.

In the last article I discussed the 14 Sydney councils that will have populations over 200,000 in 2036, compared to the two we had in 2006. As I noted, no less than nine of these councils are located in Greater Western Sydney (GWS). However, the story of forecast growth in GWS does not end just with these “mega-councils”.

The table below shows the projected population increases and growth rates across the 14 GWS councils. In total, the BTS forecast predict that the region will grow by over a million people or over 58%, significantly higher than the projected Greater Metropolitan Area (GMA) growth rate of just under 38%. This will result in GWS having over 40% of the total metropolitan area population, compared with 35.5% in 2006.

GWS Councils population forecasts

It should be noted that the GMA includes the Hunter and Illawarra; if these are excluded, Greater Western Sydney would hold about half of Sydney’s population by 2036.

Not surprisingly, the councils with populations over 200,000 each will experience the lion’s share of the region’s growth and in fact the average size of a GWS council would be just over 209,000 by 2036. Five of these councils (Blacktown, Camden, Campbelltown, The Hills and Liverpool) will also experience growth rates above the metropolitan average – in the case of Camden, Liverpool and Blacktown, substantially so.

Of the five councils not expected to grow to over 200,000 by 2036, Auburn, Wollondilly and Hawkesbury will still experience growth rates above the Sydney average. Only Blue Mountains and Holroyd are expected to reach neither 200,000 nor an above-average growth rate, though Holroyd’s forecast growth rate is only just under the metropolitan average.

I’ll discuss the implications of the high rates of growth in Greater Western Sydney and elsewhere in a future post.

Given the current obvious interest in “Big Australia”, big cities and all things to do with population I thought I’d take a further look at the so-called “mega-councils” of Sydney’s future that I identified in my last post.

To reiterate, the projections I’m discussing in these articles are based on forecasts released by the NSW Government Transport Data Centre (TDC – now renamed the Bureau of Transport Statistics) earlier this year and the usual caveats apply about their reliability or otherwise. I should also stress that I’m not taking a position about population issues or the optimum size of councils, but just pointing out some of the more interesting implications of the distribution of Sydney’s growth as forecast by the TDC. 

In the last article I noted that if we accepted the TDC’s projections based on the current boundaries, the number of councils in Sydney with populations over 200,000 would grow from just two in 2006 (Blacktown and Sutherland) to 14 in 2036. OK, so which councils will be over the 200,000 mark by then? 

The following table identifies the councils in this group and their projected growth over the 30 years from 2006 to 2036. Its important to note that the “top 14” in 2036 were not necessarily the largest councils in 2006 and they are not all necessarily the fastest-growth Sydney councils – although their average rate of growth is well above the Sydney average of around 38% and the average forecast numerical increase is almost 50,000 more than the average for Sydney councils. Combined, they will house just over half of Sydney’s population in 2036.

Councils forecast to be over 200,000 in 2036

The other interesting aspect is their location. All but Sydney City Council are in outer-ring – or at least on the outer edge of the middle ring – suburbs. They form a “donut” around the city from Wyong and Lake Macquarie to the north, through Greater Western Sydney (where nine of the 14 are located) to Sutherland and Wollongong to the south. 

In summary, the 14 councils forecast to have over 200,000 people each by 2036 will: 

• Be home to over 1.2 million additional residents, or nearly 62% of Sydney’s overall growth;
• Grow by an average of 50% or over 87,000 people, compared to a city average rate of around 38% and 37,300 per council, with Camden set to grow by a staggering 390%;
• As a result, accommodate over 3.6 million people or over half of the city’s forecast population of just under 7.19 million.
• Have average populations of nearly 260,000 each (almost double the forecast Sydney average of 135,600), though this figure is skewed by the projected size of Liverpool (over 324,000) and Blacktown (over 48,1000)
• With the exception of Sydney city, be located around the city’s middle to outer suburban ring, with nine of the 14 in Greater Western Sydney. 

I’ll explore a few more implications of Sydney’s projected population growth at the council and regional levels in future posts.

If you were told that by 2036 the number of councils in Sydney with populations of more than 200,000 would be seven times the number today, you might be forgiven for thinking that these forecasts were based on some fairly strong assumptions about council amalgamations. 

In fact, as somebody pointed out to me recently, if Sydney’s population grows in the way that State Government forecasts suggest, the mega-councils, or at least the reasonably large councils, will come to us without a single boundary change or amalgamation. 

A check of the latest forecasts from the NSW Transport Data Centre (TDC – in the process of becoming the Bureau of Transport Statistics) makes this clear. These assume that the population of the Sydney Greater Metropolitan Area (GMA, which also includes the Hunter and Illawarra) will grow by almost two million people, from 5.21 million to 7.19 million, an increase of around 40%. The TDC has also made forecasts of Local Government Area (LGA) population growth based on the current council boundaries. 

Before I go on I should make all the usual qualifications – population forecasting this far out, especially at the LGA level, is an inexact science, reliant on all sorts of assumptions about factors such as migration and decentralisation policies. Lately some of these factors have come under intense scrutiny as part of the “Big Australia” debate. 

These forecasts are also based on another fundamental presumption – that the current council boundaries will not change at all in the next 25 years. However, it is instructive to run with this and see what happens if the current boundaries are left intact. 

First, a 40% increase in Sydney’s population would mean a similar substantial increase in average council size, from 98,300 to 135,600. Naturally this growth rate will not be uniform across all councils but even if it is, the outcomes in numerical terms are obviously going to be much more noticeable in the larger councils. 

The graph below shows the distribution of councils in 2006 and 2036 in population bands starting with zero to 50,000, 50,000 to 100,000 and so on. Councils with over 200,000 have been grouped together in a single band. The number at the bottom of each column is the number of councils in that band for either 2006 or 2036. 

Sydney Councils: projected growth by population bands, 2006-2036

It should be noted a similar number of councils in 2006 and in 2036 in a particular band does not necessarily mean that these are the same councils. Some 2006 councils may have increased in population to the extent that they have moved into a higher band, to be replaced by councils increasing in population from the band below. 

With that qualification in mind, let’s have a look at the estimates. The middle bands, 50,000 to 100,000 and 100,000 to 150,000, remain relatively stable both in terms of the number of councils and population. However the number of councils under 50,000 is halved from 12 to 6, while the number of councils in the 150,000 to 200,000 band decreases from 11 to 6. Both bands will also experience similar proportional declines in total population. 

The story for the 200,000 councils is a marked contrast. In 2006 there were only two (Blacktown and Sutherland), totalling just under half a million. By 2036 there could be 14 such councils with a combined population of over 3.6 million. 

It can be argued that most of the projected 12 additional members of the “200,000 club” were in the 150,000 to 200,000 category in 2006 and that this change is merely one of degree. To an extent this is true, but there are a few interesting exceptions. Campbelltown and Wyong leapfrog from the 100,000 to 150,000 band into this group, but the most spectacular change is that projected for Camden, which is estimated to grow from under 51,000 to nearly 250,000 in this period as a result of the development projected for Sydney’s south-west. 

It also has to be acknowledged that the forecast overall increase in the proportion of Sydney’s population in the largest councils, at around 2%, is relatively incremental. However if the overall population projections prove to be accurate and council boundaries remain unchanged, there could be some interesting challenges and opportunities in having 14 councils of this size collectively responsible for providing local services and infrastructure to over half of Sydney’s population by 2036.

In December I was a participant in an international roundtable on peripheral cities held in Paris. This was part of a seminar organised by FALP (an acronym from the French for “Forum of Local Authorities of the Periphery”) in conjunction with the University Paris 8 at Saint Denis and the Plaine Commune, which is a regional organisation for eight municipalities of the northern periphery of Paris.

The seminar was organised in the run-up to the FALP and the United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) “Peripheral Cities” second congress planned for 10-12 June 2010 in the Spanish city of Getafe. Within the framework of preparing for this conference, several seminars are being held in different countries. 

The FALP network was founded in 2003 by councils on the edges of large cities in Latin America and Europe. Today, over 150 local authorities from 22 countries participate, mainly still from Europe and Latin America, but also some from Africa and the Middle East. 

I understand I was invited to participate in the FALP Paris seminar on the basis of my work at the urban periphery through the Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils (WSROC) and I believe that I am the first Australian to participate in one of these forums. 

The overall theme of the Paris seminar was “suburbs as hearts and hubs for solidarity-driven cities” (I think it loses a little in translation). As the program noted: 

Cities are at the heart and hub of the 21st century’s key social, democratic and environmental challenges. The question is whether they should all simply fit into the same mould and embrace the competitive, market-shaped rationale, at the risk of deepening social exclusion, spatial fragmentation, environmental harm and democratic deficits.

My roundtable was on the theme: “A different development model: inclusive metropolises”. The program summarised this as:

The worldwide economic and financial crisis is challenging the predominant metropolitan development model today, and its limits are becoming palpable. So it is vital to shift the paradigm and focus on building fair and balanced cities that rank human and environmental concerns above merely economic factors.

 Whilst there was general agreement that outer urban areas are bearing the brunt of economic, social and cultural change, there was less consensus about the best policy responses – for example, do we develop decentralised centres at the fringe to offer suburban residents the same sorts of services that inner-city dwellers enjoy, or do we improve connectivity from the suburbs to the centre? There was also a strong emphasis on the rights of suburban residents and the importance of social housing, which receives much more attention and support in Europe than in Australia.

I’ll post a summary of my presentation shortly. If anyone is interested in attending the peripheral cities conference in Spain in June, please post a comment here or send an email to alex@goodingdavies.com.au

Paris at the periphery - a different view

The former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone’s recent City of Sydney CityTalk address contained a strong argument for greater investment in education, infrastructure and sustainable transport to tackle climate change, but he made another  important comment on city management  in the Q&A session afterwards. As a result it did not appear in the published version of his talk and has therefore not received the attention it deserves. 

Livingstone was musing how his position as a popularly elected mayor contributed to his sweeping reforms of planning, public transport and other areas of service delivery in the UK capital. He noted that the extensive powers devolved by the UK government  in setting up the position certainly helped, but another key factor was the way in which the position had been structured. 

He observed that as a member of the British Labour Party he had spent most of his political life making deals “inside the building” as he put it, within the party room and caucus, both inevitable features of the Westminster system and very similar to their counterparts at the state and federal levels in Australia. 

Livingstone pointed out that the reinstated and radically reformed position – in effect the creation of a directly elected executive mayor – had forced him to look “outside the building” for the first time. 

He had been required to negotiate and build alliances directly with organisations and structures that were not necessarily part of the political system, as well as with the wider community, to build support for his policies. Livingstone concluded that this aspect of accountability contributed to making a directly-elected mayor an ideal city manager. 

The initial reaction among many in the audience after his address was admiration for the results Livingstone had achieved mixed with an almost-universal attitude of “obviously it’ll never happen here”. This is due to the remote prospect of any Australian state government creating a directly-elected metropolitan-wide position that could be seen as a competitor. 

However, Livingstone’s perspective is still food for thought. With the partial experience of Brisbane, no major Australian city has a single entity, elected or not, with sole responsibility for city management, in particular around key planning and transport issues. Most of the key decisions are still made not only within state governments, but firmly “inside the building”. 

The apparent success of Livingstone’s London “experiment” should make state governments and councils in Australia look outside their own buildings a bit more, to reassess their perspectives on urban management and consider experimenting with different forms of more direct and accountable metropolitan governance.

Melbourne-based firm .id (informed decisions) have just launched economy.id, an online economic profile to “describe, explore and promote” local economies.

economy.id joins the .id stable of profiles and other web-based programs, including profile.id, atlas.id, forecast.id and housing.id. .id’s main client base is local government, with over 180 councils and regional organisations of councils across Australia using one or more .id product. However the beneficiaries of economy.id and the company’s other products are not just councillors and local government staff, as most councils also make these products available online for local residents, businesses, community organisations and others to use (click here for an overview of .id’s products).

economy.id (which so far can be viewed for Penrith City Council in NSW, the City of Monash in Victoria and the City of Joondalup in WA) has a deceptively simple structure. It sets out to answer questions in two key sections called “our economy”, focused on economic characteristics and performance and “our resources”, which concentrates on profiling the resident workforce as well as the labour force and key local infrastructure.

The questions include, for example, “what is the size of the local economy?”, “how is the local economy performing?” and “what are the local labour force characteristics?”. These questions economy.id attempts to answer through a series of accessible tables, graphs and thematic maps – and whilst the focus is on the local, most tables and graphs provide comparisons to relevant metropolitan and state level benchmarks.

Like the company’s other products, economy.id is hosted on the .id server, but councils and other clients can customise the profile’s appearance, incorporating their logos and linking it to their own websites. This approach is consistent with .id’s other products and the company has largely succeeded in maintaining a similar look and feel.

This belies the complexity involved in putting together a local economic profile, which has required the integration of a wide variety of data, including information from the census, national accounts, and other ABS data sources, DEEWR small area labour markets data and input-output modelling from REMPLAN. The latter is particularly significant for councils, providing accessible input-output modelling at the local level.

All this means that economy.id moves well beyond the parameters of .id’s “flagship” product, profile.id, which is mainly based on census data. Not surprisingly the costs are also higher, with an up-front charge of $35,000 and an annual fee of $7,500, the latter covering hosting the profile, regular updating as new data becomes available and a comprehensive training program. However, as a council staffer pointed out at the NSW launch, economy.id has the potential to deliver significant savings to councils in financial and staff resources.

Until now, councils interested in researching and analysing local economic performance have had to commission either academic researchers or private consultancy firms, usually on a one-off basis. Invariably this approach is very expensive and whilst the results can be and often are of a high standard, this has not always been the case. In addition the data produced has usually been static in nature and difficult to update, with limited community access, especially online.

economy.id succeeds in addressing these issues. It also provides a more consistent and higher standard of economic data available for use within council (ensuring, for example, that all reports to council use the same economic parameters and even the same graphs and tables) and in promoting the local area for investment. This information will also put councils in a much better position when negotiating with state government, federal government and the private sector.

This is not to say that economy.id is perfect. Ideally, some modules such as local infrastructure will be fleshed out with more material in future. In addition, the issues noted in the supporting information regarding data sources and quality need to be considered carefully. Whilst economy.id may not meet everyone’s requirements for local economic analysis but it will go a long way by providing a baseline of the best available and up-to-date economic data in a consistent and accessible format.

Whilst councils need to decide whether this product will meet their local needs (and, as with all web-based products, should always assess the relevant Web 2.0 risk factors discussed here), economy.id has the potential to provide great value for money. It will allow councils and others using economic information to redirect their resources away from basic number-crunching, formatting and presentation to more strategic analysis of the results.

Ultimately it will also provide a great local community resource. Local communities, businesses and organisations may well be the major beneficiaries, especially if enough councils across the country or even within a particular region adopt economy.id as their standard for local economic profiling and make it publicly available through their websites.

Disclaimer: whilst the author has no current relationship with .id, he was once involved in commissioning the company to prepare a regional profile based on the 2006 census.

Before I return to NSW growth, employment and infrastructure – and in case some of you are getting bored by these weighty matters – I thought I would make a brief diversion into the practical side of strategic thinking.

When we initiated this blog, we stated that we wanted to look at strategic thinking within organisations, as well as examining “big picture” strategic planning affecting the wider community. An important aspect of this is the use of new tools to assist in strategic planning and thinking, including project planning and organisation management.

One such tool is mind mapping software. Mind mapping has been around for a long time as a manual, pen-on-paper exercise. Wikipedia provides as good a definition as any:

“A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.”

Many organisations, consciously or otherwise, use a form of “manual” mind mapping when they hold brainstorming sessions to develop strategic plans, set up projects or respond to new opportunities or unexpected crises.

However there are often problems with the manual approach. Most of you will be familiar with the brainstorming process – a room full of people around a whiteboard or gathered in small groups with sheets of butcher’s paper, trying to capture the “big picture”. At the end of the forum, someone has the unenviable task of translating a set of indecipherable notes linked by a scrawl of lines and arrows into some sort of report.

The result often bears only a limited resemblance to the original session because the “tools of trade” such as whiteboards and butcher’s paper are inadequate to the task. In addition the linear structure of a written report is often too limited to properly present the big picture that everyone was seeking in the first place. And even if you do have a printout of the original whiteboard scribbling that is legible, it often becomes a static document, disconnected from the following implementation processes.

Mind mapping software presents an effective tool to overcome these limitations. There are dozens of mind mapping programs out there, but most work the same way, allowing a single user planning a project – or with the aid of a data projector and screen, a group of participants developing a major strategy – to add ideas as branches to a core concept. The software allows you to move these ideas around the resulting tree on screen, detaching them from one branch and attaching to another, and to add new ideas as sub-topics to these branches, as the following example shows:

Most programs will allow you to prioritise these topics and sub-topics, to format them in other ways and to add information such as deadlines, resources, document files and web links. These features point to what may be the greatest advantage of the software over the manual approach – the efficiency and flexibility of the documentation process.

All mind mapping programs can provide a simple, visual one-page map of a planning session. By themselves, these are often much more effective than a conventional report. However, these maps can also become effective “live” management documents which can be used as frameworks for implementing an organisation strategy or to manage a project.

Some programs feature extensive project management features to record and “roll-up” progress directly on mind maps and/or allow them to be synchronised with project management programs, as well as with Outlook and other office software. These maps can be used to as overarching project files to manage all resources associated with the project and to present progress on implementation at team meetings.

There are many different mind mapping programs and I don’t intend to review them all here. Virtually all companies provide free trials and some online Web 2.0 programs have feature-limited versions which are free on an ongoing period. There are also free, open source programs and many are also cross-platform. Some of the major programs are:

As well as strategic planning and project development, mind maps can be used for a wide range of other purposes, which I’ll discuss in a future post.

At Gooding Davies Consultancy we use MindManager extensively and can provide a range of strategic planning and program management solutions for your organisation based on this versatile program.

Recently the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the estimated resident population figures for states, local government areas (LGAs) and statistical local areas (SLAs) as at 30 June 2008 (see ABS publication 3218.0). These figures have major implications for governments, councils and community organisations.

The ABS reported that the NSW population in 2008 was 6.98 million people, an increase of 79,200 people, with a growth rate for 2007-08 of 1.1%. This was higher than the average annual growth rate for the five years to June 2008 (0.9%). Most of this growth occurred in Sydney with the population increasing by 55,000 people (or 1.3%) to 4.4 million people. Sydney now has around 63% of the state’s population.

SLA POPULATION CHANGE, SYDNEY – 2007-08 (source ABS)

The ABS figures indicate that almost all local government areas in Sydney experienced growth and that nine of the ten LGAs with the state’s largest population growth were also in Sydney (see map and Table 1). The top four were all in Greater Western Sydney: Blacktown (5,300), Parramatta (4,000), the Hills (formerly Baulkham Hills – 3,300 people) and Liverpool (3,200). 

The ABS also reports that over half of Sydney’s LGAs experienced a growth rate higher than average NSW rate of 1.1%, with around one in five recording rates of 2.0% or more. The top two were in Greater Western Sydney: Auburn, (3.1%) and Parramatta (2.5%). 

TABLE 1: LGAs WITH LARGEST POPULATION GROWTH, SYDNEY (source ABS)

From a strategic planning perspective, the population growth estimates make interesting reading. Despite the majority of Sydney’s population living in eastern Sydney, a majority of the growth occurred in the three sub-regions that comprise Greater Western Sydney (GWS), which increased by 29,781 compared to eastern Sydney’s 25,266. The top two and fourth sub-regions in terms of total growth were in GWS: West Central (12,227), North West (11,664) and South West (5,890). The third, South (8,097), was in eastern Sydney (see table 2 and graph).

In terms of growth rates, GWS grew by 1.6% compared to eastern Sydney’s 1.0%. At the sub-regional level West Central grew the fastest, at 1.8%.

 TABLE 2: SUB-REGIONAL POPULATION GROWTH, SYDNEY (based on ABS data)

The upshot of this is that population growth has accelerated in Greater Western Sydney over the 12 months to June 2008 with over 54% of Sydney’s growth, compared to just under half of total growth in the five-year period to 2008 (table 3).

Growth rates were particularly low in the Inner North (0.5%) and North East (0.2%) which had a combined growth of less than 2,000 people. All eastern Sydney sub-regions had growth of less than 3,000 people each, with the previously-noted exception of South Sydney which grew by more than 8,000.

 TABLE 3: EASTERN AND WESTERN SYDNEY GROWTH RATES (based on ABS data)

However, a significant proportion of this growth has occurred as urban consolidation in the well-established suburbs of the West Central LGAs, particularly Auburn and Parramatta but also Bankstown, Fairfield and Holroyd which experienced growth of around 2,000 people each. Growth also occurred in the North West sub-region LGAs which have a mixture of established and new release areas, such as Blacktown, Baulkham Hills and Penrith, as well as in Liverpool in the South West.

These results need to be carefully considered by everyone involved in planning and providing infrastructure and services, not to mention those seeking to increase densities in established areas, particularly in eastern Sydney. GWS has done much of the “heavy-lifting” in accommodating Sydney’s growth and if this pattern continues, the point at which Greater Western Sydney surpasses eastern Sydney’s population will occur sooner rather than later.

 In future posts I will look at rural growth patterns as well as the implications of these figures in the context of changes in employment patterns and infrastructure provision.

Alex Gooding

If you want further analysis of current ABS demographic and other data and its implications for strategic planning, please contact the author at info@goodingdavies.com.au.