"It won't work Johnny - there are no freakin' jobs around here.

When John Batman first arrived on the banks of the Yarra River in 1835 and proclaimed “This is the place for a village”, it’s just as well that Chris Berg from the Institute of Public Affairs wasn’t around.

Gen Y genius Chris Berg

Berg would have told him it wasn’t a good idea, as there were not enough jobs and amenities to encourage people to relocate from Van Dieman’s Land (or Tasmania as it is now known) and, besides, people are better off living in the cities, not in the struggling and socially disadvantaged “backwoods” – it’s not good for them and they’ll get depressed!

Berg would have suggested Batman goes packing back to Launceston and stay there. Melbourne would have never been and there would now be no National Gallery, no MCG, no Melbourne Cup, no AFL footy and – much to his horror, I imagine – no inner-city latte belt for Chris to hang out with other GenY academics.

Berg’s article on the ABC’s The Drum‘Backwoods policy making’ attacks Federal and State government programs designed to encourage population growth in the regional areas of this massive country. He says it’s “wrong” to encourage people to leave the cities and move to the regions where there are fewer opportunities and services. Most of those who do move will regret it and want to come back, he says. He even quotes a lightweight Age article about some treechangers who got it wrong to back that assertion up:

Tree and sea changes may be appealing, but regional and remote areas offer fewer ways to earn money – and fewer ways to spend it. A report in the Sunday Age in 2009 found a substantial proportion of people moving to quieter parts of the country regretted it – 90 per cent planned to leave within the next five years.

You see, according to Berg, “urbanised” people are “happier” and “richer” than their country counterparts. He knows this because another academic wrote a book about it:

The Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has described the city as humanity’s “greatest invention”. Policies which try to divert growth away from cities – shift activity and population away from where they would otherwise prefer to go – could create more problems than they solve.

After all, an urban population is a richer population. In his new book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, Glaeser describes the “near-perfect correlation” between urbanisation and prosperity.

City dwellers aren’t only richer – they’re happier too. The more urban a nation, the higher that nation’s reported happiness, even after you factor in the happiness-boosting effect of income and education.

Successful cities, Glaeser uncontroversially says, are those which attract smart and creative people, and allow those people to interact in close proximity to each other.

That interaction sparks aggregate economic growth and individual economic opportunity for creative and non-creative alike.

And, of course, cities have amenities. It’s easier to provide services to dense communities, and provide a greater array of those services.

Talk about stating the bloody obvious. Great research there, Chris. He’s patronising too:

Sure, if people choose to move away from cities and to regional areas, that’s their business. But it’s a problem if government policy deliberately induces people to do so – to buy houses and find their feet in areas which, all else being equal, have fewer opportunities, fewer essential services and offer a potentially lower standard of living.

Public policy should not favour cities, certainly. But neither should it encourage people to leave them.

What a twit. I have to wonder if Berg has ever considered the eternal question of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Does he realise that all cities – Melbourne included – started out with “no amenities” and “no jobs”? Yet people still came and, somehow, built an economy. How? Could it be that the money they brought with them actually created jobs? I reckon Melbourne has kicked on a bit better than Launceston since Batman made his “wrong” decision to up stumps and move to the mulga.

I also wonder if Berg has ever ventured past the end of the tram lines in Melbourne and into that great “urbanised” area known as the outer suburbs. You know, the place where the great majority of Melbourne’s 4 million o-so-happy and o-so-wealthy (and “smarter” and “creative”) population resides.

Places like Werribee & West Melton in the west or Doveton and Hampton Park in the outer east. What about Frankston in the south, Chris, are they “smarter” down there than, say, people living in beautiful and thriving regional centres like Ballarat or Bendigo? I don’t think so – not judging by Sam Newman’s street talks.

You need to get out more Chris. Ballarat, Bendigo, Albury-Wodonga (and even Bairnsdale, Shepparton & Wangaratta) are “cities” too. They might be smaller than Greater Melbourne but they’re actually more “urbanised” and liveable than the the dull, dreary, infrastructure-poor, congested and over-crowded outer suburbs. You see, the great bulk of the place you seem to think is a throbbing & pulsating “city” is more like the arse end of the world.

Of course it’s right to encourage people to move out and populate the regional “cities” and their surrounds. It’s a no-f*ckin-brainer, Chris!

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