Bring back Tom Uren

All this sustainable cities stuff that Julia Gillard has started her campaign off with is a very pale imitation of two previous ventures into the area of urban development by a Labor government. Back in the Whitlam years we had the full-scale decentralisation approach with the creation of a Department of Urban and Regional Development but Treasury eventually killed off that escapade as soon as a coalition government returned. Then in the early 1990s it was Brian Howe’s turn as deputy Prime Minister to develop a Better Cities program that did not last much longer. Will the Gillard government’s proposals to spend a couple of hundred million achieve anything more than its predecessors?

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