Attendees: Adjunct Professor Jim Taggart – GWS RR Chairman, David Borger – Sydney Business Chamber, Stephanie Dale – Parramatta Chamber of Commerce, Jenny Hannan – University of Western Sydney, Deborah Carr – Parramatta Mission, George Sayhoun – Karima Group, Steve Phillips – Jani King
John Chedid – Parramatta Lord Mayor, Dr Robert Lang – Parramatta City Council, Tony Hercok – Watts McCray Lawyers, Michael Walls – Western Sydney Business Access.
Dr Jim Taggart: Well good morning everyone and thanks so much for coming. We have around this table some very influential people to discuss a very important issue which is the Parramatta The Way Forward. Can we start with introductions please? George.
George Sayhoun: George Sayhoun, CEO of Karima Group. We’re quite a diverse company, and our primary business is hospitality. We own WatervieW Convention Centre; we’re in the restaurant business. We have cafés and a whole host of hospitality options. Approximately 1,000 people working in that particular division.
Just for a little bit of diversity we own LJ Hooker Parramatta.
Jenny Hannan: I represent the School of Business, University of Western Sydney. I’ve got two remits. One is to do with research and one is to do with teaching, with our third year students. Part of my job is to link the students with the world of work. I also run mentoring programs. I also work on projects, biggest one of which now is Small Biz Connect, which involves six LGAs around the area. And it is business advising particularly focussing on small and micro businesses.
John Chedid: My name’s John Chedid, and I’m honoured to be the Lord Mayor of this great city of ours. I’m a local, grew up in Parramatta since the age of eight, went to the local school, so I’m very much like many of you that are here, very passionate, committed to our city. But more importantly, what we have is a council that’s committed to this and to work with its major stakeholders.
Tony Hercok: Tony Hercok, Chief Operating Officer of Watts McCray Lawyers. We’re an operation of 80 or so people. We have seven offices around Sydney, surrounding area and Canberra and the Central Coast, and a new office in Norwest, which is a serviced office, to see how we proceed in that market. Our major focus of law is family law. We are Australasia’s largest family law organisation. We’re the most accredited specialists in the country. We have also a commercial focus which supports the family law environment. Our head office is in Parramatta
That’s a bit about us, and we’re looking forward to working with you all.
Michael Walls: Michael Walls. I’m the publisher and owner of Western Sydney Business Access. It’s a newspaper that covers business in this region of Australia. We also do some media and PR consulting, PR and have a custom publishing arm.
Deborah Carr: Morning, everyone, my name’s Deborah Carr. I’m the Director of Fundraising and Communications for Parramatta Mission. For those of you not so familiar with Parramatta Mission, our areas of focus are looking after people who are homeless, people in crisis and, much more significantly these days, people living with mental illness. We’re an organisation with 310 staff at the moment – most of those in full-time positions – and at any one time, about five to 600 volunteers. We’re spread over about 80 geographic locations around Greater Sydney and our head office and main admin office is here in Parramatta.
Steve Phillips: Good morning, everybody, pleasure is to be here. Steve Phillips is my name, general manager of a company called Jani King. We’re a global franchise network about 20 years old. We’ve got a network of about 950 franchisees and around four and a half thousand clients. Part of what I do in my business life is to dedicate time to the development of Greater Western Sydney, obviously including Parramatta. Thanks to Michael for putting me between two ladies; appreciate that.
Michael Walls: That was deliberate.
Stephanie Dale: Hi, Stephanie Dale. Most of you would know me. I’m here with two hats, it says on here. President of the Parramatta Chamber of Commerce. Similar to our Lord Mayor, this is my second opportunity. I was President 2005-2007, and April this year stepped up to the plate again. Thoroughly enjoying it. My other hat is I’m the Managing Partner of a company called DMC Advertising Group. We have our production centre down in Rydalmere and our head offices are up in Castle Hill, so I’ve sort of got a foot in both camps; I straddle the two.
Dr Robert Lang: I’m the CEO of Parramatta City Council. The Lord Mayor and I have a greater vision for Parramatta in delivering services. But I’m also the Chair of the Place Leaders Association of Australia, and have a background in place management and property services and property development, marketing, and tourism and events, and have spent the last five years in Local Government, and enjoying it enormously. Previously a career in the private sector and in State Government.
David Borger: David Borger. I’m the Western Sydney Director of the Sydney Business Chamber. The Sydney Business Chamber is owned by the New South Wales Business Chamber, which is one of the oldest business associations in the country. We have a particular focus on working with the chief executives of the larger companies within Western Sydney, public and private, and I guess our role is to initiate advocacy on behalf of those businesses, but more particularly to try and develop a vision for how we can make Western Sydney globally competitive.
Jim Taggart: Thanks so much everyone for attending and of course to Jani King for sponsoring our Regional Roundtables. Lord Mayor, I’m going to throw straight over to you the very first question. Lord Mayor, how do you characterise Parramatta today, both in terms of its benefits as you see them in your role, and also are there – I guess there’s a question – any negatives with Parramatta? And let’s make this robust.
John Chedid: Well, firstly, the benefits. I see Parramatta as a city with unlimited potential. I think a few years ago Parramatta realised that it is the centrepiece of Sydney and a gateway to the rest of Western Sydney. So we play a critical role in what we have. We’ve grown in a number of industries, including finance, legal. Having the university next door I believe is an asset to Parramatta. What we started to also do is plan for the future, something that I believe needs more focus on. So we started now to plan for our railway, the light rail. I believe that is critical for Parramatta. So we are investing in our infrastructure in the sense that we’re out there talking to the State and Federal Government about the critical issues at hand now, and what we can expect in ten, 20, 30 years’ time with our projected growth. The transport access is critical. If we don’t get that in place in the next five to ten years, I can see some huge issues occurring for our city.
Dr Robert Lang: I think the thing that people don’t probably immediately get about light rail is that it does actually two things. It’s first of all a transports service, as the Lord Mayor has mentioned, but it’s an immediate draw. This is not commuting people from, you know, Bondi to here. This is commuting people from Castle Hill to here, from Bankstown to here, from you know, people that are a 15 kilometre radius, not a 30 or 40 or 50 kilometre radius. So that’s the first thing it does. The second thing it does, it creates development density. And that is, it allows a whole bunch of other things to make sense because you’ve got things like a light rail corridor around which people turn their fronts, not their backs. The thing that’s different about a bus corridor and a light rail corridor is you turn your back to a bus corridor because of the noise, because of the smell, and because of the high speed nature of it. Light rail is quiet, it doesn’t have any, you know, smell or whatever, and people want to be close to it because the stops are quite close together. It encourages shops, it encourages residential activity, and it covers urban density. So what light rail brings to Parramatta is a denser city, that is a more accessible city, and a city that’s going to be able to take those kind of growth numbers that everyone talks about we need to take.
Michael Walls: So when you say it attracts business, so you’ve got a light rail station, right. So that area around them will attract commercial development.
Dr Robert Lang: And that happens all around the country, whenever those kinds of developments go in.
Michael Walls: And have you zoned the land around that accordingly to enable that to happen?
Dr Robert Lang: But that’s the challenge. So when the light rail corridors go in, we will need to look at the zoning around every bit of that corridor and say, “Okay, how we can get greater uplift in these areas?”
Michael Walls: And that’s inevitable.
Dr Robert Lang: Inevitable.
Michael Walls: That’s got to be a State Government process?
Dr Robert Lang: Well, multiple steps. The first step’s a feasibility study. If it’s proven to be viable, and we think it is, and there’s a number of the people around the state, we’re on a steering committee that are helping us to look at that. But assuming that it is, and you take that case to the State and Federal Government and assuming they fund it, then what happens is a whole bunch of things are going to roll out of that, including rezonings.
Jim Taggart: David, your response?
David Borger: I think the other thing that it potentially is Westmead Hospital. It has hospitals and four medical research institutes. It’s the thickest labour market for post-graduate residents. I mean, it’s the second-highest suburb for residents that actually have a Masters or a PhD of any suburb in New South Wales. That’s something really special. I think Birchgrove’s number one, and all the rest of them are in the inner west. So one route would see Westmead and North Ryde being connected. And I think that has great benefits in terms of connecting those labour markets along the corridor. So the other thing I think, Westmead and Parramatta aren’t well-connected. There’s a park that separates them, a lovely colonial park that we all love, but ideally there would be a street and a public transport connection through that park – which I think would actually improve it, but it would also allow Westmead and Parramatta trade. There are very little transactions between Westmead and Parramatta. The station’s not really in the Westmead precinct. It doesn’t have a civic heart. There’s no retail in Westmead. Access is very poor. There simply aren’t enough streets, there’s not enough parking. And the experience when you get there is kind of ... really poor. So I think if you wanted to do something to sort of stimulate the innovation jobs in Western Sydney ... I know there’s great stuff in Penrith and other areas happening as well, but I think the government can do something about improving access to Westmead, and the light rail’s one particular option which I think has a lot of merit.
Jenny Hannan: Yeah. Well, actually, while David was talking I wrote down two things in terms of linking the city and medical research - pull in expertise, make Westmead a really world-class centre of medical excellence. It’s already on that road. We have such high levels of postgraduate-qualified people there, we’ve also got the University of Western Sydney, down in Campbelltown; we’ve got our medical school; in Parramatta we have a nursing, and a lot of our allied health services. II think Westmead as a precinct certainly needs to be linked, certainly needs to be promoted. It needs to be seen as one of the world-class medical research centres.
Deborah Carr: That’s right.
Dr Robert Lang: And one of the great corridors in this light rail thing we’re looking at at the moment is that the one that connects Westmead through Parramatta through Rydalmere to beyond – Epping, North Ryde, wherever. That, and that Rydalmere connection is really important. Rydalmere gets up to 13,000 current students, but there are 30,000 potential students that might be there in ten, 15 years’ time.
Jenny Hannan: And also I’ve just noticed there’s a new company that’s probably one of the most aggressive exporters of pharmaceuticals to Southern China, Homart – I mean, that’s a really impressive organisation. So we should be harnessing that
Jim Taggart: It’s clear we’re talking about a number of benefits in the present, and I’d like now to talk about opportunities. Deborah, can I throw to you, the challenges facing your organisation when we look at Parramatta?
Deborah Carr: I suppose for Parramatta, being able to service people, provide services for people who fall through the cracks is a difficult one for us as a city, and like all major CBDs Parramatta attracts its fair share of people that are doing it tough. Despite problems with getting here and traffic and parking and things like that, it does have heavy rail and it does have great services, so there are, you know, lots of banks and social services and Centrelink offices and medical facilities, and all of those sorts of things that attract people. So with attracting people it attracts people that are severely disadvantaged that need help as well and there are lots of services here. So the support from business and from individuals and from government is something that is greatly needed, not just for Parramatta Mission, but for the whole not-for-profit sector in this area. Our resources are spread very thinly. Unlike the CBD, there is very little duplication of services in Western Sydney with not-for-profits, so there’s no situation where we’re all delivering multiple crisis refuges or multiple support services for the same thing. We’re all trying to plug gaps and use our resources very efficiently.
Jim Taggart: How many meals would you perform on a daily basis?
Deborah Carr: We’ve done these numbers a few times, but we’re currently serving over 120,000 meals. And every night in our care we would have around 500 people in our care across Greater Sydney. Just at the moment we’re preparing Christmas hampers and presents. We’re preparing over 560 Christmas hampers which will go out to people across Western Sydney.
Jim Taggart: Deborah, thanks for sharing that. There was a reason for me to ask for those cold, hard quantitative stats There’s a lot of great intentions and people trying, but I don’t think there’s a strategy around helping these people. And that’s not a comment on anyone. It’s just on a daily basis we get up and do the best we can. So the take-out for me is that perhaps, Lord Mayor, that there is a strategy around looking at how we can do that at a later date, of getting the various organisations. We’ll leave that for another day with regards to it. The next question is really critical. If the premise is correct that Parramatta is the gateway, then why should they invest in Parramatta?
Michael Walls: Are they investing?
Steve Phillips: Cost-effectively, space. I mean, it’s cheaper here in Parramatta than it is in other areas of Sydney as far as leasable area – $400, $500 per square metre. So that would be attractive. Obviously the transportation and then work on the developments going forward are going to be attractive to invest into Parramatta.
Stephanie Dale: I was just going to say, the downside of that is, though, that the business rates for Parramatta are higher than a lot of the other CBDs, so that while the rents are lower the rates are higher, so they kind of negate each other on some occasions.
Steve Phillips: Rates here are a lot cheaper than the City of Sydney or North Sydney.
George Sayhoun: But the reality of it is the type of accommodation is very mixed, and the rates are expensive on what’s available at the moment. So there’s a real shortage of good quality property, and the level of development over the last few years has been very low, and is not providing for future growth. I really think it’s a very disjointed process. The dilemma from a business point of view, it’s not necessarily attractive to come to Parramatta. I think it’s a great government town; it’s not necessarily a great business town, and we’ve got a lot of disjointed operational hubs operating on the perimeters of Parramatta, and none of them are linked. Whether it be light rail as a solution; we’ve got Camellia sitting at one end of the town, and it should be linked to the Silverwater precinct now the Shell’s gone. You’ve got the university at the other end in Rydalmere and you’ve got Westmead at the other end, and then you’ve got this M2 corridor and M4 providing transport networks. None of it’s linked.
Jenny Hannan: No, nothing.
George Sayhoun: Business point of view it’s actually a very expensive town that doesn’t have infrastructure that links operational hubs. And then it’s got the classic downside of being the western suburbs. And you know, I think it’s been changing over the years, but I don’t think it’s changing fast enough. And I think we need to attract pure business as opposed to government-orientated business development in this area, and that’s where And I notice that there was a finance hub, which is great, they always want to be in regional centres. But where are the other strands of business options? We’re a great city; we are the capital of the Greater West. We need to be investing in that type of infrastructure that allows this city to grow to what it should be.
David Borger: I think all these points are valid. I guess when George was talking I was thinking, “Why haven’t we got our own Apple shop in Parramatta? I mean, that is a symbol of wealth and attainment. Why hasn’t that sort of happened here? I mean, I’m an optimist. We’ve got the lawyers and the doctors, which is great. The doctors are at Westmead, the lawyers are in Parramatta, but they don’t live here yet. And one day they’re going to live here, and we need I think more housing that’s going to sort of appeal to that group so we have more of a balance. We’ve got, you know, public housing, we’ve got lots of affordable rentals that are probably going up, but we haven’t had the other end. I think some of that’s going to change on the Parramatta River. The river’s going to be opened up, we’re going to be the last suburb along the Parramatta River to have our riverfront stage ...
John Chedid: I just want to add to something George said. There is a perception out there about Parramatta and what we lack. But in saying that, as the Local Senate the transformation from 20 years ago to where we are now it’s been phenomenal. But I believe every government has done Parramatta a disservice. I’ve felt like we’ve always been the smaller brother, the younger sister. It’s only recently that they’ve taken Parramatta seriously. And our demographic, or geography, is critical so they’ve got to invest. Had they invested properly ten, 15 years ago, George, we wouldn’t be in this problem. We’d be well-connected to Westmead. We’d be well-connected to your university. That’s what we’re aiming for now.
So yes, we’ve had to go back and unlock some of the decisions that I believe should have been made many, many years ago. In saying that, I believe we are heading towards some great things, George. If I could just finish with this: by the time we finish our master plan on the river, we will be a river for the greater city, where young families, businesses, people that want to come and enjoy. Our arts and culture I believe is moving in the right direction, and we’re lobbying to get a convention arts precinct in Parramatta.
George Sayhoun: The direction we’re going is brilliant. I mean, I’ve seen it over time. From a private enterprise point of view it’s way too bloody slow, sorry. And if we were running a business, at the moment we’d be gone, we would have gone broke. And the reality of it is we’ve got an opportunity that if we don’t act on it quickly we will end up with another Norwest on our perimeter.
David Borger: How do we turn that around? Leightons has done well, but we actually haven’t snared the head offices that went to Norwest and you sort of think, “Well, this is probably a better location for many workforces. Why didn’t they come here?”
George Sayhoun: I remember when Woolies went there, and the decisions that were being made, and the compensation that they had to provide their employees to physically get them there.
Stephanie Dale: Marketing wise, Steve Grant knew what he was doing 30 years ago. You only have to drive through Bella Vista Waters. Those houses are now selling minimum $1.2M. They have nothing to offer other than a block of land where the houses are this close together. They’re architect-designed, so they have no views. They do have a lake; it’s about the size of this table, no transport. I think that it is the persona of the whole place. It has a quality look and feel to it. And that’s what we have to start putting into Parramatta.
Jim Taggart: We do, yeah.
Jenny Hannan: But they are putting in a light rail, one a month opens up. They have a higher population and they have a lower cost of doing business, obviously. But if we had that drive that they have to say, “Well, we’re going to have it happen, and it’s going to happen now,” the whole of Singapore has changed in the last 40 years.
Jim Taggart: I agree. Tony, just your thoughts?
Tony Hercok: If I can probably backtrack a bit and go to another world that I once worked in, and I looked at it from a research or a marketer’s perspective. It seems we’ve got a couple of issues going on. I think we’ve got people living here ... that statistic that you gave us was staggering. So I think we need to understand how we can help their lives improve and then build things around that to support them first off, because they’re not going anywhere. They’re not going to sell off and move and live somewhere else. They’re going to stay here and live. So your constituents, Mayor, are going to stay, so we need to find a way to make sure that the businesses that are here now are supported to encourage the people we’ve got here now, the consumers now, to participate. The next challenge with those people I guess is to build things like you’re doing – the river – and encourage them to become part of the city and participate in the city and want to be here and not go elsewhere. Australia Day functions, you need a big calendar of events where when all these things are built that people, the consumers themselves, want to turn up to. I’m saying you’ve got to build some infrastructure to support the people you’ve got here now, and they have to be world class. So the transport systems and the river needs to be a big part of it, where people will want to come. Then you’ve got to get to the point of once you’ve designed that, you’ve then got to say to some very big brands – and this is where the marketing comes in, ’cause I think this is a marketing exercise in the end – you’ve got to go to some big brands, some big companies, and say, “This is what we’re doing in the marketplace. We want you to come.” And then you’ve got to build the right incentives to encourage those people to come.
Dr Robert Lang: Look, I think there’s a couple of interesting points. First of all, with the 2% vacancy rate in A-Grade office space, we have a chicken and egg problem. I’ve had people ring me up, a private sector CEO, to say, “I’m looking for 5,000 square metres in Parramatta. What have you got?” And after I stop laughing I say, “Nothing,” because you can’t get 50 square metres in Parramatta in A-Grade office space. So until somebody builds a building you know, and I mean a significant building, that ten, 20, 30,000 square metres, where we can start to fill it with 5,000 square metres at a time, no one’s going to come here. So there’s your problem. So the problem is not that there aren’t people interested in coming; there are lots of people interested in coming. The problem is there’s nowhere for them to come to. So what we’ve got to do, and what we’re doing as a city, and the Lord Mayor’s already alluded to it, is we are encouraging that kind of stuff to happen. Leightons ... in fact, I wrote down a quote from Mark Gray, the CEO of Leightons, who said yesterday he just sold the Eclipse building at $6,500 a square metre. And he said that cements Parramatta as the location for institutional investment for prime grade commercial property. We were in Singapore recently with the previous Lord Mayor, and the Singaporean real estate investors say, “We’re really interested in Parramatta.” Why? Because we got the second-highest property yields in Australia after Perth. So there is a big wave coming, and it’s about investment in real estate in Parramatta. We talk ourselves into a bit of depression saying, “Oh, isn’t it terrible here at Parramatta.” We’re actually the second-fastest-growing city in the country after Perth. During the last five years, 8,500 new CBD jobs came to Parramatta. Eight and a half thousand – that was during the GFC. When every other city in the country was going backwards, we grew 8,500 jobs. Our current target is 10,000 jobs every five years, and I think that’s the low end of the range of possibilities. Ten thousand jobs is something like, you know, multiplied by 15, 150,000 square metres of commercial property that needs to be built in Parramatta in five years. Now, Eclipse is 25,000, so 150 – that’s six of them. Six Eclipses every five years. That’s one and a bit Eclipses per annum. Now, we’ve got to get on with it, ’cause if we don’t start building that property that jobs growth won’t come here; it’ll go someplace else because we don’t have any product.
Jim Taggart: But on a serious note, because it leads into the next one, I’m going to go straight to you if I may, Rob. The Lord Mayor alluded to unlocking previous sins and doing things. Where are the genuine growth areas in and around Parramatta?
Dr Robert Lang: It’s coming. Look, I think geographically there are three key regions possibly a fourth. And the three regions are – and we’ve already identified them – Westmead, the CBD itself, and Rydalmere. Rydalmere because not only the university’s growth, which is going from 13,000 to 30,000 students over the next 15 years, but also because right next door to that there’s an opportunity to create a Rydalmere Business Park very similar to a Macquarie Business Park .That’s geographic opportunities. A couple of weeks ago the State Government put out a new job target for Parramatta. They increased from 27,000 jobs over the next 25 years to 52,000 jobs over the next 25. So doubled it. Now, we think that even the 52,000 is at the low end. We’re aiming somewhere between 52 and 80,000 over the next 25 years. That’s enormous. That will make the CBD of Parramatta skyrocket. We’re already talking about you can build 65-storey towers in Parramatta today, and we’re going to start with the first one, and we’re going to encourage others to follow.
We’re going to see the city grow up enormously. At the same time with residential growth, the current target’s up for 20,000 new dwellings in Parramatta. That’s 40,000 new residents. That’s an intensification in terms of residential growth that was also quite interesting. And North Parramatta and South Parramatta, that current Auto Alley area, has got to be both commercial and a residential opportunity down the track, and probably east and west as well.
David Borger: I agree with Rob on all those points. I think Auto Alley has greater potential than most people. It’s huge land assembly. I mean, the blocks are sort of 10,000 square metres, some of them. Parramatta’s the fourth-busiest station on the network. So it goes Central, Town Hall, Wynyard, Parramatta. Just picture for a moment walking out of Wynyard Station 100 metres down the road and finding a single car lot. That’s what we’ve got at the moment in Parramatta. So the density of activity is just so shockingly low. I do think Auto Alley has the potential to be a mixed use zone.
Dr Robert Lang: We’ll update it.
David Borger: We need to find a way to get the mixed use in there, but I think residential’s going to be a driver, and I think residential would move there tomorrow and we’re talking super high-densities. And I think the problem is that the council’s got a plan which says on Church Street it should be commercial only. We struggle to get the commercial in the CBD where there’s much greater value. And Rob’s right – it’s 20 years before they’re going there. I think that’s too long to wait. I think there has to be some solution around breaking up those big blocks in Auto Alley and making them mixed use and allowing them a bit more flexibility.
John Chedid: It’s got to be considered in our planning when we do review our planning instrument. But you’re right about Auto Alley, David. I’ve just picked that up two weeks ago. I had a meeting with a couple of applicants who said, “You’ve changed the mixed zoning, but what you’ve done is you’re not allowing anything to happen on Church Street. So that’s got to stay commercial; it’s only behind residential.” But here’s the problem: before we were talking about commercial space and how important it is; we want the big companies here. So here’s the challenge: every landowner wants to build residential
Jim Taggart: What other incentives can our State Government do to help us grow?
John Chedid: Well, on that point, if you don’t mind me saying this, you spoke about ministers of State Government. I’m delighted there’s been a new board appointed of the Parramatta Park Trust, but I can tell you I had no idea who was going to be appointed. We need to utilise our stadium a lot better. It is a great, it’s part of our events calendar. We want more games; we want more, maybe concerts. I know people don’t want to hear the noise factor; they complain about the speedway. But once again, it’s part of our fabric of the city. You need to do that more.
Stephanie Dale: It’s true.
Dr Robert Lang: It’s 100% right.
John Chedid: But honestly, like, you know, you look at parks all around the world. You name me one park that doesn’t have an activity there throughout the whole day and night.
David Borger: I think we need to think about in terms of cultural infrastructure, sporting and cultural infrastructure, we need to think about, you know, if we are the second largest CBD in New South Wales, sixth largest in Australia, 10,000 jobs arriving in the next few years just in the inner part, you know, the biggest medical precinct in the country is at Westmead, has great potential if it’s connected, I mean, we’re a city of a certain scale and importance there. What’s the cultural infrastructure that we need to attract and keeping talented people living and working in the city in the future? So I would say that there should be a shopping list, and there needs to be plans that are ready for governments to fund, because if you don’t have a plan you don’t get any money. And it needs to be at the right time, you know. Rob’s done a great job, and John and the team, with the light rail proposal and, you know, the Gold Coast had their plan ready, and they were lucky, at the right time.
David Borger: So we need more money in the stadium. And at some point, the city deserves to have some sort of an art gallery.
Regional identity
Steve Phillips: At the very first Round Table. I think George you were at the very first one, we said, “Where’s Western Sydney? Give me some identity. And that was a really interesting debate and discussion and people’s thought processes around that. So you’re right; we talk about Western Sydney but what are we really talking about?
Dr Robert Lang: Can I just jump in. The Riverside Theatre is a wonderful place, and is the second theatre outside the CBD of Sydney in New South Wales. However, it’s 25 years old, and it absolutely needs revamping, and the council’s currently considering a master plan exercised to change it. And I mean everything from knock down and rebuild to, you know, minor modifications where we’ve got a very open mind about that. But it’d be lovely to say to the State Government, “We need 30, 40, 50 million to fix the Riverside Theatre” along with a whole bunch of other ideas. The stadium, we’ve got a real opportunity to ride the market because the government is considering stadium plans, but they are saying there’s only going to be one stadium in Western Sydney of 45,000 capacity, I think. We’re currently at 20,000. So that’s a pretty major thing. You can of course knock down the pool and build an aquatic centre. Obviously Parramatta Council owns the pool; there’d be probably a right to compensation for that. But one of the things perhaps to help this conversation: council about 12 months ago put together during John’s previous term the ten big ideas. These were just ten, you know, crazy ideas, and one of them was a stadium, and one of them was the light rail, and there were many others. Ten big ideas that would see a significant change. It’s probably time to refresh that list and have a look at it again. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we as a group, we as a city, could come up with the ten big ideas, put a bit of effort behind it, and said, “These are the ones we’re going to lobby for.”
Michal Walls: From a marketing context, that message probably sells very strongly as much or more so than, say, you know, “We need this amount of office space and we need it for infrastructure and that building there, that building there.” Ideas have power
Dr Robert Lang: Sure.
Stephanie Dale: And they should create more of a visual element then, in marketing speak.
Jim Taggart: Well, just to whet everyone’s appetite, you may know about David and our Lord Mayor, but again George was privy to it, when we had the guys from Penrith at our last Round Table and the $750M development out there is spectacular. It’s going to be in ten years, right? And we were privy to have a look at the plan and the whole big university’s going up there, your university. I mean, this is a proposal; this is not set in concrete. This is Jim speaking, not the organisation. But the things that they’ve put in there is amazing, what they’re doing – five football ovals and so on. I don’t see integration; sometimes I see a dislocation, and disinclination. But I’m just simply saying is Parramatta the mantelpiece of Western Sydney? .See, just Parramatta Stadium, my mind boggles every time I go there, just .imagine it could be something magnificent. I don’t know why there’s not an underground tunnel from the Leagues Club to the restaurants.
John Chedid: Can I just say this might be pretty big. And I learned this a while ago, and I’ve been speaking to our CEO about this. Sometimes we fall into the trap of marketing where we say, “The company went to Norwest. The company went to Homebush, Rhodes and so on. It’s great to see other regions grow. And what I’d like to see us is focus on what we can do for our city, and to be complementary to the Sydney CBD. But I’m proud to have the best city in the world, Sydney Harbour. And I want Parramatta to have its own ID, okay. And I want us to grow as a city and stop looking at competing against others. Because the reality is, with our projected growth they’ll be more spoken about today. We’re going to need a stadium in Parramatta, and we’re going to need one at Penrith, and one day we will need one at Campbelltown. Let’s not make the same mistake they’ve done in Victoria. They are killing the regional cities. A gentleman was telling me the other day, “You’re so well-spread, it’s fantastic. In Melbourne, outside the CBD, there’s nothing.
Is Parramatta the capital of western Sydney?
Jim Taggart: The question then is, is Parramatta ... let’s move into that. Is Parramatta perceived as the capital of western Sydney? On what basis?
David Borger: It’s probably better to ask people who are outside of Parramatta.
Stephanie Dale: We’re a bit biased.
John Chedid: Because Phil Gould will tell you. He is right. He said, “How can you call Parramatta the heart of Western Sydney when it’s only when you get to Penrith? That’s Western Sydney.” Yes, we are the gateway to Western Sydney. I don’t know if we’re the capital. That could be argued.
Dr Robert Lang: I think the problem is – and just to give a little bit of geographical logic to the thing – we’re actually not the west at all. We’re the centre. We’re the centre. There are an equal number of people living west of Homebush as there are living east of Homebush. In ten years’ time, when there’s six million or in 25 years’ time when there’s six million people, more than three million of them are going to live west of here. So I’m not sure that we are the capital of Western Sydney. We’re certainly the capital of Central Sydney. There are more people who live within a 15 kilometre radius of Parramatta than live within a 15 kilometre radius of Sydney. There’s an interesting statistic for you. The people in Penrith, they think they’re the west, and they’re right.
David Borger: There are three regional cities – Penrith, Liverpool and Parramatta – and then there are second-tier cities of Blacktown, Bankstown and Campbelltown, and then there are sort of other ones, Fairfield and so on. I don’t think that economically all of these places are going to develop evenly; they’re not. Frankly, Parramatta’s actually achieving its job targets now; it’s exceeding the job and residential targets. The other places just aren’t. And I think that Blacktown and other places should spend the next ten years fixing their ground play. I mean, when you go to Blacktown the retail offer is very poor outside of the big shopping centre. At street level it doesn’t feel safe or interesting, and they want 40,000 jobs. It’s good that they want 40,000 jobs; I think that’s a great, noble aspiration. But until they can actually capture their own population to come in and use the centre, no one’s going to put a dollar of investment in there.
Steve Phillips: The trick is to look at it as catchment. If you draw a circle around Penrith and say, “How many people live within, you know, 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 15 kilometres or 30 kilometres of here?” it’s got limited cash on it at the moment. Its time will come, you know. It’ll be a major city in due course. It probably isn’t the first cab off the rank.
Dr Robert Lang: If you look at any place in the world, city, whatever, at any scale, you look at all the things that line up to make a great place. When you tick every one of those boxes, then people start to come. They start to come to live, they come to start to play, and they come to start to work. But you’ve got to tick every box in the place before you get there.
John Chedid: That’s right.
Dr Robert Lang: There is a challenge for us. The challenge is to fix the jobs deficit that’s currently in Western Sydney. Over the next 25 years 700,000 jobs will be created in Sydney. What we’ve got to do is make sure the bulk of them happen out here. And so unless we lobby hard and work hard and tick all the boxes in our place thing, then we’re not going to get them. Even if we wanted to, we can only take a very small number, 50 to 80,000 of them. So where are the rest going to go? Well, they’ve got to start going everywhere else. So we actually rely on all those other cities in Western Sydney and southern Sydney and northern Sydney to actually pick up their game, guys, because you’re going to have to take 5,000 or 10,000 or 15,000. We might take the 50 to 80 – nobody else’ll take that many – but they’ve got to start taking small numbers or we won’t get there.
Deborah Carr: All of those jobs that are needed aren’t necessarily what we were saying before at the high-level educated level of jobs. I mean, what we see in Parramatta is an incredible increase in the number of people seeking support that are working, but they’re on low fixed incomes. And a lot of people that we’re helping that have really fallen off the wagon are people that aren’t going to step into high-level finance jobs or IT jobs. They’re people that want a basic job on a production line in a manufacturing facility, and people that need assistance to get those jobs so they can live and be independent and pay their rents and all of those things and not need to rely on welfare. And if those jobs aren’t around in Western Sydney, those people are welfare-dependent.
David Borger: San Francisco, Seattle, all those areas, for every one innovation job they create five jobs in the general community. So an unskilled person in San Jose earns more than a graduate from Raleigh or Flint, Michigan. So if you want to help unskilled people you actually want really good jobs.
Tony Hercok: That’s all real good that we think that Campbelltown or whatever, or Penrith, should have an identity, and they should go and fix whatever they’re going to fix. The thing is that you can’t go and dictate to people what they want to fix. So whichever way we go, we’ve still got the issue that we can’t control what they do. So we’ve got to run our own race. We’ve got to be like a brand in the marketplace, understand what our old brand .That’s really the fundamental issue. So we shouldn’t get sidetracked by another brand, otherwise you just follow them down the track.
Steve Phillips: You could use some modelling too of some of the other cities. Like Tweed Heads, Batemans Bay. They’ve all got identities. And you could go and have a look at what they’ve done to create their area and say, “Okay, who do we want to be or who are we, and where do we want to go next?”
George Sayhoun: But, see, the the Top Ten for me is a real winner, it’s a marketing pitch.
David Borger: It is.
George Sayhoun: Like I’ve never seen in my life, so go and tell someone, for God’s sake.
Jim Taggart: If I can just say, Lord Mayor and CEO, it is about telling people. Here I would like to say I respect everyone around this table and I’ve got good friends around this table. People who are influential wouldn’t know what those top ten are.
David Borger: Also then I think one of the things Rob’s done particularly well, and John, is to get into the sort of high-profile Sydney networks. So Rob’s on every ... he’s on our group, which is the Sydney Business Chamber ...
Dr Robert Lang: I’m on every committee that’s ever been named. Sometimes it feels that way, too.
