Canberra is the Best City in Australia

Andrew Leigh
Member for Fraser

Festival of Dangerous Ideas

Sydney Opera House
3 October 2010

Embargoed Until Delivery

I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet today.

Coming to Sydney to sing the praises of Canberra, I feel a bit like recruiters for the First Fleet
must have felt when telling Londoners about the wonders of Australia. Your streets may be a
little crowded at times, but the notion that a paradise lies southward is just too fabulous to be
believed.

Indeed, I recognise that for some Sydneysiders, the only way you’d contemplate a move to
Canberra is in leg irons. We’d love to welcome you into our city, but I hope that even if you
end this talk unpersuaded to pack the car and drive on down the M5, you’ll take away from
my talk a few ideas about ‘the Canberra model’, and how the rest of Australia can learn a few
lessons from the way we run a city.

First Impressions

First, a confession. I wasn’t born in Canberra. I was born in King George V Hospital in
Newtown, less than 10 kilometres from where we are now in the Sydney Opera House. As
the child of academics who worked on south east Asia, I grew up variously in Sarawak,
Melbourne, Jakarta and Banda Aceh.

But the largest part of my schooling was in Sydney, and like many Sydney school children, I
visited Canberra every two years or so. My memories of the trips are dominated more by the
journey than the destination. Cool kids on the back seat, nerds up the front. Endless games of
‘truth, dare, double-dare, torture, kiss or promise’. And the time a boy in my class overslept
and his mother followed the school coach down the Hume Highway, tooting until it finally
pulled over around the Big Merino, and he sheepishly stepped on board.

My first serious impressions of Canberra came when I moved to the city in 1997, to work as
an associate for Justice Michael Kirby. It was a Sunday afternoon, and it was my 25th
birthday. Having just graduated in law, I couldn’t imagine a more exciting job to be starting,
so I turned the music up and accelerated down the highway. It wasn’t until the blue lights
began flashing in the rear vision mirror that I realised what I’d done. When the officer came
to the window, I was still too stunned to say the one thing that might have gotten me off ‘You
know – it’s my birthday today.’ I still wonder whether he chuckled as he wrote 3 August onto
both the birthday and date fields of the speeding ticket. It’s the last time I’ve been fined for
speeding.

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Arriving in Canberra, the first thing that strikes you is that even as it approaches its
centenary, the city remains a ‘bush capital’. As you drive over the hill approaching Canberra,
you see… well, let me quote from a newspaper report that accompanied the 1906 scoping
party to choose a national capital.

‘In a district of fine landscapes, Canberra is one of the most picturesque of spots and
presented a charming spectacle this morning under the sun from an unclouded sky. It
was a clear, frosty morning, such as can be enjoyed at these high altitudes, where a
deep breath of the air is like a draft of champagne. Canberra, which lies below Mount
Ainslie, and about 200 miles from Sydney, is 2000 feet above sea level... the visitors
caught sight from a high ridge of a beautiful panorama – an extensive plain ... the
white homestead of Duntroon, nestling beneath a hill whose green dome contrasted in
a striking degree with the higher and rugged peaks behind, and the rich blue of the
mountain ranges still further off, with their tops of snow’

In the century since that passage was written, the decision not to allow development on the
mountains that ring the city means that many of the 357,000 people who live in Canberra can
look up from a suburban street and see a hill covered in gum trees. It also means that
Canberra is a bird-watcher’s paradise, with pairs of rosellas and king parrots, not to mention
squadrons of cockatoos and galahs. And if you get through Spring without being dive-
bombed by a magpie, you’re doing well.

But when I first arrived in Canberra as a ‘cosmopolitan’ Sydneysider, I wasn’t going to let a
little thing like natural beauty seduce me. I’d heard all the jokes about Canberra: ‘they spoiled
a perfectly good sheep station’, ‘a cemetery with lights’, ‘best viewed out the window of a
departing airplane’. After watching a promotional video about the city, Bill Bryson suggested
renaming the campaign: ‘Canberra - Why Wait for Death?’. Responding to a ‘Live in
Canberra’ campaign, NSW premier Morris Iemma called our city ‘Six suburbs in search of a
soul’.

And there are a few jokes that Canberra adds to the mix. We do have an astounding number
of roundabouts. And as you come down Northbourne Avenue into the city, there really is a
sign that reads ‘City Centre’. Brothels are legal, regulated, and restricted in their location,
which means that many end up in the light industrial suburb of Fyshwick.

But despite its quirks, a funny thing happened over my first few months living in the city. I
began to like Canberra. Working as associate to Justice Michael Kirby at the High Court, I
loved my job, and I realised that if you want to put in long hours and catch up with your
friends, it helps to be in a place with fabulous restaurants and near-zero commuting time. I
rollerbladed around Lake Burley Griffin, mountain-biked on Mount Majura, and popped off
for day-trips to the nearby ski-fields.

One day, I was working on some legal research on the 9th floor of the High Court, while the
annual hot air balloon festival was taking place on Reconciliation Place, which is right next to
the High Court. Much as I tried to concentrate on the Commonwealth Law Reports, it was
difficult to keep focus as inflatable bottles, kookaburras and koalas floated past. Eventually, I
gave up trying to read the law reports, and watched as the balloon pilots took it in turn to drift

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down towards the mist-covered lake, firing up the burners just as the basket touched the
surface, and leaving a line of ripples on the water as the balloon soared up again.

Choosing Canberra

When Canberra turns on its charm and offers that perfect day where the sun shines, the water
glistens and the temperature isn’t too cold nor too hot, it’s easy to see how the city charmed
the Federal Parliamentarians who visited in 1906 and 1907 on their tour of potential sites for
the new nation’s capital. Federal politician King O’Malley once of the decision about where
to site Australia’s national capital ‘I want us to have a climate where men can hope. We
cannot have hope in hot countries.’

It is often said that success comes from a lot of hard work and a bit of luck. Reflecting on the
cities which could have become the seat of government, Canberra had plenty of luck. At the
outset, the city wasn’t the preferred location of either the media or the politicians. But for the
perfect Canberra day on 13 August 1906 and then again on 23 August 1907, the parochial
interests of a Premier and the change of heart and vote by a Victorian Senator, our nation’s
capital could have been somewhere entirely different.

On the banks of the Snowy River, 50 kilometres south-west of Cooma, lies the town of
Dalgety. With one pub and 75 residents, you’d hardly know that the town was named in the
1904 Seat of Government Act as the location of the new federal parliament. But state and
local interest collided with the desires of national leaders. Dalgety was located in the
electorate of the then Home Affairs Minister Sir William Lyne. Keeping with the traditions
of Macquarie Street NSW Premier Joseph Carruthers refused to cede the town to the Federal
Government believing Dalgety to be too close to Victoria. Carruthers valiantly declared
Tumut, Yass or Lyndhurst as the only sites for the national capital. By coincidence, all three
towns happened to be in the Premier’s electorate.

Dalgety remained the favourite of Victorian and Western Australian senators who made
numerous attempts to have it reinstated as the site for the capital. But Carruthers’
determination to act in the interests of New South Wales was such that he threatened to take
the Federal Government to the new High Court for trespass should any survey pegs be driven
into the ground.

Eventually, the Dalgety-backers gave up, and by 1907, there was a growing consensus that
the site of the capital should be located somewhere within the triangle formed between the
towns of Goulburn, Yass and Queanbeyan. With the trout-fishing contingent now having
shifted their support to Tumut, the decision came down to Canberra versus Tumut. In
December 1907, the House of Representatives voted 39 to 33 in favour of Canberra. But in
the Senate, Canberra and Tumut were tied with 18 votes apiece.

Canberra owes its status to a Melbournian who believed the future lay in agriculture and
mining. Anti-Socialist Senator James McColl changed his vote and backed Canberra. Then,
like now, the numbers in Australian politics were finely balanced. But the new Labor
government of Andrew Fisher showed that a close vote doesn’t stop you moving forward
(sorry, couldn’t resist). A decision was finally made to select Canberra as the national capital.

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Besides its unique history, Canberra was also ahead of its time in terms of its planning. In a
male-dominated era, the city can boast the influence of a woman’s contribution in its
visioning. Modern Canberra was designed by a couple who had never visited Australia, much
less Canberra itself. A colleague of Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Burley Griffin heard about
the Australian government’s competition to design the national capital while on honeymoon
with his wife Marion in 1911. Although it was Walter’s name that headed the entry, theirs
was very much a collaborative effort. Without Marion’s elegant drawings, it is unlikely that
Walter’s design would have grabbed the judges, and lifted it above the other 136 entries in
the competition. Walter and Marion should be regarded as co-contributors to the design of
Canberra.

Walter Griffin is said to have vowed to enter only one international design competition in his
career, and the couple gave the Canberra plan his all. The Griffins’ ideas were ahead of their
time. They embraced what was the then new science of town planning. They were enthused
by the Federal Government’s decision to make the land leasehold, rather than freehold.

Writing to the Australian Government, Walter Griffin lamented that the grant of freehold land
had caused speculative holdings which had perverted the development of Washington DC.
He believed that whoever owned land had influence and control over governments.

Walter Griffin considered that a city’s architecture, landscape and town planning ought to be
integrated into a humanised and romantic environment. For a city to flourish Griffin believed
it needed a community with ‘great democratic civic ideals’. He wanted our capital to be a
place where citizens enjoyed a high quality of life based on ‘egalitarian legislation, genuine
public spirit and organic scientific cities’. Speaking in Minneapolis in 1912, he told the
audience:

‘We can all be interested in the Australian Federal Capital city not so much for what it
is now or will be necessarily, but because of what it stands for; as an opportunity, the
best, I believe, so far afforded for an expression of the democratic civic ideal and for
all that means in accessibility, freedom, wealth, comfort, conveniences, scale and
splendour’

Griffin in 1913 was appointed as the Director of Design and Construction of the capital and
famously drew up the contract himself. The terms placed effective control of the project in
Griffin’s hands and were humiliating to public officials, in particular to the head of the
Department of Home Affairs and the Director General of Commonwealth Works.

Yet despite the lull in construction that occurred during World War I, the results were superb.
Looking around at the building we are meeting in today, I wonder whether this great Sydney
Opera House would have been even closer to its creator’s vision if Jørn Utzon had had Walter
Burley Griffin’s contract negotiating skills.

The Griffin vision may live on in the city but the city’s success has also been due to the
Prime Ministers who have called Canberra home. Andrew Fisher recognised the need for
Canberra to have an art collection that befitted a national capital. Joseph Lyons laid the
foundation stones for the National Library, saying:

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 ‘for a young country like Australia, cut off by distance from direct and intimate
contact with the progress and thought of older and more experienced nations, there
was a greater need for the gathering into the National Library the greatest amount of
literature and material possible’

A generation later, Ben Chifley saw the passing of the Australian National University Act,
establishing the basis for what was to become one of Australia’s greatest universities.

Other Prime Ministers saw different virtues in Canberra. John Curtin liked it because he felt
less vulnerable to those pressing special interests upon him.

The Country Party’s Earle Page, though only Prime Minister for three weeks, helped
Canberra in a very practical way. Faced with a Canberra-bashing West Australian member of
Parliament, Page induced him to visit for a weekend, whereupon he took the man trout
fishing one night (he caught three large ones), hare shooting the next morning, and quail
shooting in the afternoon. Henceforth, Page records, the West Australian parliamentarian
became a Canberra enthusiast.

For Canberrans, the nation’s history is our local geography, with suburbs named after the
great nation-builders, from Deakin to Curtin, Scullin to Chifley. On this front, you can’t help
but feel sorry for Gorton, the only former Prime Minister to make his home in Canberra after
retirement. The powers-that-be decided not to name a suburb after him because of fear that
Canberrans would confuse it with the already-gazetted Gordon.

Speaking of names, I can’t help pointing out that Canberra is the only Australian capital city
named by its Indigenous people rather than the white interlopers

Prior to white settlement, Canberra was best known by the local Indigenous people as the
place where they held corroborees and feasted on bogong moths. White settlement began in
the 1820s, when Joshua John Moore established a homestead on the Acton peninsula, where
the National Museum and the ANU now stand. He called it ‘Canberry’, which he understood
to mean ‘meeting place’ in the Ngunnawal language. Newspaper proprietor John Gale
claimed that actually the word meant something else. He argued that because of the
prominence of Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain, the word Canberra meant ‘women’s
breasts’.

As a politician in the present environment, it would be unwise of me to call either a farmer or

a newspaper proprietor a liar. So I’ll leave it to others to judge the historical truth. But either
way, it’s got to be better to let your traditional owners name your city than to name it after a
bloke who lived on the other side of the world and inherited his title from his dad. Lord
Sydney, Lord Melbourne, and Lord Hobart, I’m talking about you.

In his History of Australia, Manning Clark wrote of Lord Sydney that ‘Mr Thomas
Townshend, commonly denominated Tommy Townshend, owed his political career to a very
independent fortune and a considerable parliamentary interest, which contributed to his
personal no less than his political elevation, for his abilities, though respectable, scarcely rose
above mediocrity.’

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Lord Hobart was a Tory who purchased his way into politics, representing one of the famous
‘rotten boroughs’ as the member for Bramber in the UK House of Commons.

And then there’s the Lord Melbourne. After his wife had an affair with Lord Byron,
Melbourne famously referred to the poet as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. Yet there was
nothing safe about knowing Lord Melbourne. As British historian Boyd Hilton wrote ‘it is
irrefutable that Melbourne’s personal life was problematic. Spanking sessions with
aristocratic ladies were harmless, not so the whippings administered to orphan girls taken into
his household as objects of charity.’

Admittedly, Canberra has its own ties to the darker side of life. One of our great bars is
Tilley’s café, located in Lyneham in the inner north. Founded as a women’s space in 1984,
the café originally operated on the rule that men could only enter if accompanied by a
woman. The space quickly became popular as a lesbian venue, and as a live music venue,
hosting everyone from Missy Higgins to Luka Bloom. Tilley’s was named after Matilda
‘Tilly’ Devine, the Sydney brothel madam who made her money from visiting US
servicemen during World War II, and who was known for her utter ruthlessness in dealing
with her rivals, including fellow Sydney madam Kate Leigh (no relation, so far as I’m
aware). The NSW press may have called Tilley ‘the Worst Woman in Sydney’, but she’s now
been immortalised in one of my favourite Canberra bars.

Australia’s Most Liveable City

But the seedy side of life feels far away most of the time in Canberra. Our home is in
Hackett, a 10-minute drive from the city centre, and a 5-minute walk from the base of Mount
Majura. When international guests come to visit, we’ll often pick them up from the airport
(15 minutes away), then take them up for a walk to Mount Majura. The suburb is designed
with walkers in mind, so footpaths conveniently allow us to cut through the streets and make
our way up to the bush reserve. If we time it around dusk, the rosellas will swoop over our
heads, the kookaburras will be letting out their belly laughs, and the kangaroos will be
coming down to the edge of the reserve to graze on the thicker grass. After seeing the
wildlife, we’ll probably stroll down to Wilbur’s, our new local café in the Hackett shops,
which serves macchiatos and muesli in the morning, before switching in the afternoon to
Coopers and gourmet pizza. The café is run by the three sons of James Savoulidis, a Greek
entrepreneur who opened the first pizzeria in Canberra in 1966, and taught Gough Whitlam to
dance the Zorba a few years later.

If we wanted different cuisine, we could easily enjoy terrific Ethiopian in Dickson, fabulous
Chinese in Campbell, delicious Vietnamese in Griffith, or great Turkish in Barton. Or for that
matter, we could pick up some fresh-baked pastries at Cornucopia or Silo, and have a picnic
on Aspen Island in Lake Burley Griffin, at the foot of the National Carillion. If it’s a
weekend, we might take the visitors to our favourite wood-carver at the Kingston Bus Depot
markets, to the local farmers’ market at Exhibition Park, or to the Trash and Treasure market
that the local Rotary Club have been running at Jamison since the 1970s.

We have a significant migrant base – not to mention nearly 80 embassies and High
Commissions. I won’t pretend the city is free of racism, but I can’t imagine a race riot ever
taking place on its streets. Canberrans are tolerant on other dimensions too. Canberrans
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wanting to worship can choose from Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Pentecostal,
Reformed, New Life, Christian Life Centre and Uniting Churches.

You can pray with the Salvation Army or at the Baha’i temple, the Synagogue, the Mosque,
the Tibetan temples, the Hindu temples and the Buddhist temples. If orthodoxy is more to
your liking, there are Greek Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Croatian Orthodox, and
Macedonian Orthodox Churches to choose from. Yet I’ve never heard a murmur from my
churchgoing friends about the fact that the local ABC radio station uses the frequency 666,
and most people seem quite relaxed about the group of witches that are said to gather on the
slopes of Mount Ainslie.

Social Capital

There are many reasons to love Canberra, but the number one reason is its social
connectedness. Since time immemorial, people have enjoyed the simple pleasure of sharing
time with friends and neighbours; of working collectively together in clubs, groups and
associations; of strengthening the social ties that bind us together as a people.

In this speech, I will refer to these ties as ‘social capital’, by which I mean the networks of
trust and reciprocity that link multiple individuals together. These bonds exist between two
friends who meet on Friday night for a beer. Such networks link together the members of a
local cricket team, who know that trusting teams win more games. And social capital joins
together co-workers, who find that working together gets the job done faster.

Social capital is the idea that the ties that bind us together have a value in themselves. The
other main types of capital are physical capital – such as machines and roads, and human
capital – such as knowledge and skills. Social capital is a bit controversial in some circles, but
that was once true of human capital too. In the 1960s, people debated whether you could
place an economic value on people’s skills like the value that you placed on a bridge.
Eventually, we agreed that human capital had economic value. More recently, people have
been debating whether social capital like interpersonal ties are economically important. My
guess is that in a generation’s time, social capital will be accepted as just as important as any
other form of capital.

It is easy to see how trust greases the wheels of commerce. A plumber who turns up on time
and charges the quoted price is a guy you’ll hire again. The barista with a smile helps ensure
that her customers will come back for their next day’s coffee. A boss who encourages
workers to knock off early on quiet days is more likely to find employees willing to stay a
little longer when times are busy. As Adam Smith once pointed out, when two people are
repeatedly interacting with one another in a market, they are more likely to behave well
towards one another in their society.

Of course, social capital isn’t invariably good. Criminal gangs rely on trust, and so are a form
of social capital. But equally, such gangs have human capital and physical capital. The world
would be a safer place if Osama bin Laden had fewer friends – but that doesn’t negate the
general rule that societies are healthier if they have more social capital.

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My interest in social capital came while I was studying my PhD at Harvard, where I worked
as a researcher for Robert Putnam. Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone, showed that social capital
in the United States had declined from 1960 to 2000. The more I read about Putnam’s
research, the less confident I became about the notion that the social fabric of my own
country was as intact as a brand new pair of Speedos.

To test the theory, I began collecting snippets of evidence from Australia. How had
community organisations fared? Were people more involved in politics? What about
workplace engagement? Were churches emptying out? How about sports? Do we volunteer
more or less? Can we drop in on our friends without calling to make an appointment?

Just as some people collect coins and others collect Pokemon cards, I collect pieces of data.
Through dusty libraries, emails, telephone calls, and online, I have been steadily
accumulating as much evidence as I can about community life in Australia. In a decade of on-
again/off-again research, I have compiled a mountain of statistical evidence about social
capital in Australia since about World War Two. The result is a book called Disconnected,
and published this month by UNSW Press.

The data clearly point towards certain conclusions. When it comes to organisational
membership, surveys show that we are less likely to be active members of any association
today than we were in the 1960s. This is partly because organisations themselves have gone
out of business. There are fewer associations in Australia today than in the late 1970s, and the
average age of members of organisations has risen. This is also because existing
organisations have shed members. As a share of the population, mass membership
associations peaked in the late 1960s and have declined markedly since then.

As to people giving their time, Australia saw a rise in the share of people volunteering in the
late 1990s (perhaps because of the Olympics), but volunteering rates are probably still below
their post-war peak. And the proportion of us who give money to charity has stayed stable
over recent decades.

One of the forms of civic activity that has suffered most over recent decades is religious
participation. This is partly because Australians are becoming less religious over time. But it
is mostly due to declining attendance among believers. Among the faithful, the share who
attend a church, synagogue or mosque today is substantially lower than in the past. Younger
Australians are considerably less likely to attend a religious service than their parents or
grandparents.

Political life has also taken a hit. Since about 1960, the share of Australian citizens who cast a
valid vote has fallen. Across all major parties, official membership numbers have collapsed.
Among those who remain, many are inactive. Australians have low levels of confidence in
politicians, which will make it difficult to reinvigorate our democracy.

In workplaces, unions have traditionally been one of the main forms of social capital. In three
decades, the share of the workforce in a union has dropped from around 50 per cent to under
20 per cent. The institutions that have emerged to replace unions – such as employer-
sponsored telephone helplines – make little attempt to perform any social capital function.

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When it comes to sport, Australians are about as likely to watch a live sporting match as in
the past. But we are substantially less likely to play an organised sport. On the cultural front,
moviegoing rates are substantially lower than in the 1950s and 1960s, and rates of
participation in cultural events (such as museums, art galleries and botanic gardens) have
dropped since the early 1990s.

In tracking informal socialising, I found evidence of a decline in the number of close friends
and neighbourhood connections from the 1980s to the 2000s. On average, Australians shed
two friends who would keep a confidence, and half a friend who would help them through a
difficult patch. Compared with respondents two decades earlier, the typical Australian in the
2000s has one and a half fewer neighbours of whom they could ask a small favour, and three
fewer neighbours on whom they could drop in uninvited. We are also more likely to live
alone. In response to those who claim that informal socialising has merely moved online, I
argue that new technologies may end up reducing trust and reciprocity rather than increasing
it.

The last set of indicators are those relating to trust and honesty. Here, the picture is more
positive. Interpersonal trust has risen slightly, and ratings of the ethics and honesty of
professionals have improved (though bankers and lawyers have slipped backwards). It is also
true that the best long-run measure we have of crime trends – the homicide rate – peaked
around 1990 and has declined since then.

To the extent that social capital has been eroded in Australia, I conclude in Disconnected that
there are several plausible explanations. The share of people working long and unsociable
hours has made it more difficult for people to participate in community life. The feminisation
of the workforce – on balance a terrific development – has meant that organisations
historically run by housewives have struggled to stay afloat. Ethnic diversity – again a
development that I think has been on balance a great strength for Australia – tends to be
associated with lower levels of social capital.

Technologies have also played their part. With the growth of television, many of us have
replaced friends with Friends and neighbours with Neighbours. It’s handy to be able to use
ATMs and scanners rather than bank tellers and checkout staff, but that’s two more human
interactions that we miss out on each day. Lastly, the growth of car commuting not only saps
hours from our day, but makes us more frazzled when we return home.

The difficultly with these explanations is that we can say good things about most of them.
Australia is clearly better off on balance for being a more ethnically diverse nation, in which
more women participate in the paid workforce than in the past. Long working hours mostly
reflect the preferences of workers, not bosses. Few of us would voluntarily relinquish cars,
televisions or ATMs.

What this means is that any attempt to increase social capital in Australia will not involve a
backlash against the causes, but new and innovative strategies to make us more socially
connected. We need to shape a better future, not simply try to revive the past.

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In thinking about how to boost social capital across Australia, it is worth asking the question:
Where is social capital strongest? In which Australian city are people most likely to give time
and money, engage in the political process, and participate in local sports?

Given the title of this talk, the answer is unlikely to surprise you. On virtually every social
capital measure, Canberra is at or near the top. Canberra has the highest share of charitable
donors and the highest volunteering rate. In a given year, 85 percent of Canberrans give
money to other causes, compared with 73 percent of those in NSW. When it comes to giving
time, 38 percent of Canberrans volunteer in a given year, compared with 33 percent of
Victorians.

This weekend we’re celebrating not only the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, but also what Roy
and HG have tagged ‘the Festival of the Boot Parts 1 and 2’ – or should that be Parts 2 and 3?
So what do we know about attendance at sporting events? According to the latest data, 47
percent of Canberrans attended a sporting event in the previous year, compared with 44
percent nationally. There’s an even bigger difference when you look at those who actually
take the field. 41 percent of Canberrans say that they play organised sport, compared with
around 30 percent in the rest of Australia.

On the cultural front, Canberrans are twice as likely to attend an art gallery or museum than
other Australians, more likely to go to the movies, and significantly more likely to go for a
stroll around the botanic gardens.

Now, I know what you’re going to say. What’s the point of going to watch live sport when
you can’t cheer for the Raiders, the Brumbies, the Canberra Capitals, or the Prime Minister’s
XI? Why go to your local gallery when you know that Canberrans are choosing between
seeing Alfred Deakin’s portrait at the Museum of Australian Democracy or Ned Kelly’s
death mask at the National Portrait Gallery? Sure, you’re saying, I’d go to the botanic
gardens more often if I knew that the cool solitude of the National Botanic Gardens was no
more than a half-hour drive from my front door.

Fine, let’s look at a few kinds of activities that other places pride themselves in. It’s true that
we don’t have a Sydney Opera House, but we’re significantly more likely to have attended a
musical or opera than NSW residents. We don’t have a Melbourne Arts Centre, but we’re
more likely to likely to have gone to a theatre performance than Victorians. For that matter,
Canberrans are more likely to have gone to a zoo, a pop music concert, or a dance
performance than other Australians.

Perhaps less surprising is the fact that Canberrans are also more engaged in the political
process than most other Australians. Across the country, 7 percent of enrolled voters failed to
show up, while 5 percent showed up but voted informal. Put those two figures together, and
you get a worrying 12 percent of the electorate who failed to cast a valid vote. Canberrans are
both more inclined to show up, and less likely to vote informal. So the share of Canberrans
casting a valid vote is 10 percent.

Don’t get me wrong about this: 10 percent of the electorate failing to cast a valid vote is 10
percent too many. In my own electorate of Fraser, I’m especially concerned that the number
of informal votes rose from 2679 in 2007 to 5171 in 2010. That’s more than five thousand
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people whose vote didn’t get the chance to affect the outcome of the poll. But it’s nonetheless
true that people in the ACT are more likely to cast a valid vote than in most parts of the
country.

So why has the ACT cracked the secret of social capital? Part of the answer lies in
commuting times. The typical city-dweller in Australia with a full time job spends 270 hours
a year commuting to work – the equivalent of 11 days a year. For Canberrans, it’s 182 hours
a year, or more like 8 days. For Sydneysiders, the number is 13 days. That means Canberrans
who work full-time have 5 more days a year than Sydneysiders to spend with their friends.

On top of these factors, Canberra’s physical environment is highly conducive to social

capital.

There are so many local parks that it’s hard to kick a football without hitting one. Cycling
paths are an integral part of the city’s development. Front fences are banned, which makes
houses more open to the street. And neighbourhoods are designed around small commercial
centres that typically contain a mini-supermarket, a café or bar and a restaurant or two. In
other Australian cities, you have to burn a litre of petrol to buy a litre of milk. But plenty of
Canberrans can walk down to their local shops. Canberrans don’t have to choose between
living in the suburbs or having walkable access to neighbourhood shops. Many of us have
both.

In terms of public housing, Canberra has always had a policy of spreading public housing
across the territory. Indeed, all but three Canberra suburbs include some public housing. The
policy focus today is to mix public housing not just within the same suburb, but within the
same development.

State and territory governments in the rest of Australia could readily adopt many of the urban
design features that have worked in Canberra. Wherever possible, new developments should
be designed to be walkable, with plenty of parks, and small commercial centres dotted
through the development. Although suburban Canberra does not have the population density
to support the kind of sidewalk life that New York urban activist Jane Jacobs would have
loved, the place seems to support high levels of social capital better than any other part of
Australia.

Of course, urban form isn’t the whole solution to social capital. In Disconnected, I also argue
that people should use their local stores, donate money and try a new activity each day. I
advocate harnessing new technology to build face-to-face connections, not replace them. And
I suggest that people should host a street party (my wife Gweneth and I have hosted ours
three times over the past six years). Creating social capital can be fun too.

Conclusion

Last Thursday, I stood amidst the crowd at the opening of the National Gallery of Australia’s
new Indigenous wing, which will house the world’s largest collection of Australian
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. Like Canberra itself, the wing is an amalgam of the
rest of Australia: South Australian Mintaro slate, Queensland red ironbark and Kimberley
green marble. Amidst these beautiful natural materials, the wing showcases the art of a

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people who are perhaps the world’s oldest culture, and contains everything from dot paintings
to modern art. To quote Seamus Heaney, it is the kind of place where hope and history
rhyme.

If Canberra were a person, I like to think that it would be an egalitarian patriot, the kind who
knows the past, but isn’t bound by it. Canberrans may be home to the Australian War
Memorial, but we were the only state or territory to vote for Australia to become a Republic
in the 1999 referendum. Canberra was the first jurisdiction in Australia to have a bill of
rights, and the ACT government is committed to halving carbon emissions over the next
decade. On most issues, Canberra is a touch more progressive than the rest of Australia.

In 2013, Canberra will celebrate its centenary. Already plans are in place to use this chance to
re-engage Australians with their capital, and build legacies that last well beyond the
celebration itself. Walter Griffin said that he was designing a city for a nation of ‘bold
democrats’. We need to use this chance to think about how we want Canberra to develop over
the century ahead.

Canberra happens to be my home, but it is our national capital. In this talk, I have tried to
persuade you that the story of this extraordinary city is one of which all Australian can be
proud. But Canberra is more than its parliament. It is also a place that takes seriously its
environmental responsibility, and prides itself on its Indigenous heritage. In an era when
Australians are becoming disconnected from one another, Canberra has some of the highest
rates of civic engagement in the nation. Canberrans are more generous with our time and
money, more engaged in our local community groups, more likely to play sport with our
friends and neighbours, and more likely to participate in cultural activities. Part of the reason
for this is that we spend less time in the car than most other Australians. But I suspect that we
owe a debt to Marion and Walter Griffin for helping to forge a city in which local
communities really mean something.

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