[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
when you ask the average European to
think about Australia they usually get
very excited and to start talking about
the great weather lots of Sun uluru the
outback and of course we all have
kangaroos in our backyard and when you
brought them a bit more you’ll find that
Australians are seen as a friendly love
with a great sporting culture and some
very livable cities however there’s also
one thing that is much less known to the
average European my name is some of
enamels fourth and you’re probably
wondering why is this Dutch guy talking
to us about the rivalry between two
Australian cities I moved to Australia
just over eight years ago and I work for
the committee from Albin which is an
apolitical member Network that brings
together more than 100 leading
organizations from across melville’s
business academic and community sectors
and for the past 12 months I’ve been
lucky enough to lead the Melbourne
four-point-oh task force where together
with our members we looked at the future
of Melbourne against the backdrop of a
rapidly changing environment and it is
in that context that I’d like to talk to
you about this Melbourne Sydney rivalry
a rivalry that’s been around for ages
and often the topic of great banter
which is the best city to live where
which sport is more important or who
serves the best coffee you can always
count on a good discussion however
there’s also times when the rivalry can
turn into disputes even to the point of
building an entire new city as was the
case with camera in 1908 after a long
dispute between Melbourne and Sydney of
the location of Australia’s seat of
government and so while rivalries can be
great fun and even spare a bit of
healthy competition there’s also times
when it really doesn’t work in our favor
and to illustrate my point I’d like to
show you the following graph you’re
probably thinking this must be something
between Melbourne and Sydney but in fact
this is something about the East and the
West
the late British economist Angus
Medicine with some phenomenal work
plotting out the economic history of the
world all the way back to the year one
and as you can see for the first
eighteen of the past 20 centuries China
and India made up more than half the
world’s economy and so when people talk
about the rise of China or the Asian
century they often think about the
phenomenal growth that we’ve seen over
the last couple of decades however what
we’re really witnessing is the
re-emergence of the historical balance
between the East and the West and when
that happens Australia will be right in
the middle of the most lucrative but
also the most intensely competitive
regional playing field of the 21st
century and so today I’d like to talk
about what happened here and why it’s
important for what’s happening today and
how this Melbourne Sydney rivalry fits
into all of this but to do that we have
to take a step back even further about
16,000 years this is the Social
Development Index and was developed by
Ian Morris from Stanford University and
with Social Development Ian Morris
refers to a groups ability to master its
physical and intellectual environments
to get things done and it’s a
fascinating chart because as you can see
for thousands and thousands of years
humankind was on a very slow upward path
early settlements Wars empires religions
philosophies nothing really made it much
of a dent and then about 200 years ago
all of a sudden something profound
happens or as Erik Brynjolfsson and
Andrew McAfee called it
something happened that literally bend
the curve of human history almost 90
degrees the Industrial Revolution the
Industrial Revolution marks the decisive
turning point for humankind where
average incomes and population went
through unprecedented and sustained
growth and it certainly gives a whole
new meaning to Paul Krugman’s phrase
when he says that productivity isn’t
everything but in the long run it almost
is since the first Industrial Revolution
we’ve had another a number of major
additional developments in fact the
World Economic Forum and others have
identified and another three industrial
revolutions all of which have had a
profound impact on our societies the
first one as I mentioned so the first
wave of urbanization and increased life
expectancy in those cities about a
hundred years later the Second
Industrial Revolution so enormous
improvements in public health and
sanitation and saw the rise of the
middle class and the introduction of
public education about ecology is later
we saw the third Industrial Revolution
where enormous advancements were made
with the mainframe computer the personal
computer and the Internet and I don’t
think I need to explain to you here what
an incredible impact that has made now
most people believe we’re in this third
Industrial Revolution but in fact we are
at the early stages of the fourth
Industrial Revolution where we’re seeing
a fusion of physical digital and
biological systems and as you can see it
used to take about 100 years for the
next Industrial Revolution to come along
but the speed at which we are witnessing
progress today is rapidly increasing and
in its skill scope and complexity the
fourth Industrial Revolution will be
unlike anything humankind has
experienced before it will profoundly
change the way we live work and do
business so just imagine in a few
decades from now what billions and
billions of people will be able to do
when they’re connected by mobile device
with almost unlimited processing power
and storage capacity and you multiply
all this but today’s emerging
breakthroughs in nanotechnology robotics
autonomous vehicles quantum computing
and artificial intelligence just to name
a few so you can imagine in such a world
the ability for companies and cities to
innovate will be absolutely crucial to
their ability to compete and prosper so
where does the Melbourne Sydney rivalry
fit into all of this well let me show
you this image this is a stunning image
that NASA the North American Space
Agency composed between April and
October of 2012 of more than 400 images
it took of the earth at night and it
shows the nighttime light emissions of
humanity’s greatest activity centers
cities and today more than half the
world’s population lives in cities and
for years and years researchers have
been looking into this phenomenon and
then just over a decade ago three urban
researchers Richard Florida Tim Holden
and charlotta Melander produced a
groundbreaking study into the rise of
the mega region now mega regions are
integrated sets of cities with their
surrounding suburban hinterlands across
which you can easily move capital and
labor and up until their study we used
to look at the world economy almost only
through the lens of nation-states
however with today’s globalization
capital and labor can move a lot more
freely and so national boundaries mean a
lot lot less and this brings me to the
really interesting part in their study
they found that the world’s top 40 mega
regions housed only 18 percent of the
world’s population but they were
responsible for two-thirds of global
economic output and close to 90 percent
of paths and innovation in other words
mega regions are the central competitive
unit so what do they look like
on the North American continent we can
see the vast Boston New York and
Washington corridor or on the west coast
the Cascadian corridor stretches all the
way from Portland and Seattle right up
to Vancouver across the Canadian border
or in Southern California as pericana
has mentioned the sprawl of Los Angeles
passes right down to San Diego across
the Mexican border into Tijuana and now
even Tijuana and San Diego share an
airport terminal into which you can exit
into either country and moving across to
Europe you can see many mega regions
including Europe’s largest one the one
that I grew up in stretching all the way
from Amsterdam right down to the Ruhr in
Germany across Brussels and Antwerp in
Belgium and ride down to Lille in the
north of France and moving across to
Asia where the Asian century is being
driven by the powerhouse mega regions
such as the Yangtze River Delta around
Shanghai which only houses 6% of China’s
population but produces a massive 20% of
that country’s economy and similarly the
Pearl River Delta with its eleven cities
around Hong Kong and Guangzhou soaks up
a massive twenty percent of China’s
foreign direct investment and that’s
because it’s no longer known simply for
its copycat products in fact it’s
becoming a world-leading cluster of
innovation but even Apple setting up an
R&D centre and the economists now
coining it’s Silicon Delta so
increasingly when multinationals are
looking to invest they are looking at
mega regions as opposed to individual
countries and so where does this leave
Australia aside from the major bushfires
that you can see in waa because math I
composed the pictures over a number of
months we have to zoom all the way into
the East Coast to see our three capital
cities Brisbane Sydney
and Melbourne none of which are forming
an integrated mega region and so that
means our capital cities are often
competing with each other for
investments and in many instances simply
lack the skill to play at the global
stage and so here’s my point if we
recognize that one Asia is regaining its
historical prominence and that Australia
will be right in the thick of it to that
we are at the early stages of the fourth
Industrial Revolution in which the
ability to innovate will be absolutely
crucial and three that mega regions are
the central competitive unit in which
economic activity and innovation thrive
then maybe maybe we can start thinking
about this Melbourne Sydney rivalry in a
very different light so what if we were
to imagine an Australian East Coast mega
region a mega region not only linking up
Melbourne and Sydney but also Brisbane
and Canberra and a mega region like that
would need powerful transport networks
right now the airwaves between Brisbane
Sydney and Melbourne are among the
busiest in the world so we need a much
better land transport network and
high-speed rail has been talked about
for ages in Australia and we need really
need to start acting on the ideas that
are already out there and given today’s
rate of innovation we might even be able
to leapfrog rail technology altogether
in favor of a Hyperloop which is a pod
in a vacuum tube traveling at a thousand
kilometres an hour so this would see you
from the CBD of Melbourne to the CBD in
Sydney in less than an hour and I
suspect that’s quicker than the morning
commute of many of you here today
however this is not only about linking
up the capital cities far from it
actually because critical to the
formation of a mega region is the
activation of the region’s now imagine
that same Hyperloop getting you from
Geelong to Melbourne in just four
minutes or albury-wodonga in another 15
and yes I know these technologies are
still at a very very early stage but so
where autonomous vehicles only just a
few years ago and that brings me to
another aspect of connectivity an East
Coast mega region would also need
world-class internet successful
economies in the 21st century will be
underpinned by digital business models
with a global reach and as you can tell
today Australia is at the bottom of the
top 50 in global internet speeds and
that’s just not good enough particularly
for a country that is geographically as
isolated as Australia however this is
not only an idea about economic growth
activating the region’s will also
relieve the enormous pressures on our
capital cities which are projected to
double the size of their populations in
the next 30 years and so if we don’t
have an integrated and holistic planning
approach across state borders we’re
certainly not going to be seeing a
doubling in our life ability and finally
there’s a wise old saying that says when
goods don’t cross borders soldiers will
and no more is his evidence than the
continent that I grew up in for
centuries and centuries the European
continent was ravaged by wars between
pretty much every single country on the
continent and after the Second World War
this ultimately led to the formation of
the European Union
when Germany and France decided to
combine their coal and steel industries
and today is practically unthinkable for
Germany and France to go to war with
each other again and so the even deeper
global connections that an East Coast
mega region would contribute to builds
on this idea and promotes international
collaboration rather than confrontation
so is melbourne sydney rivalry what if
we stopped talking about why one city is
better than the other and instead
combine forces on the global stage
what if we truly aim higher and start
asking ourselves the question what can
we do together that we can’t do alone
I truly believe these ideas that I’ve
talked about today need some further
developments but I also truly believe
they are an idea worth sharing with you
today because all too often we get told
that they’re way too difficult but that
we can’t afford them but I’d like to
turn that around and if all of you asks
here today can we afford not to thank
you
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
when you ask the average European to
think about Australia they usually get
very excited and to start talking about
the great weather lots of Sun uluru the
outback and of course we all have
kangaroos in our backyard and when you
brought them a bit more you’ll find that
Australians are seen as a friendly love
with a great sporting culture and some
very livable cities however there’s also
one thing that is much less known to the
average European my name is some of
enamels fourth and you’re probably
wondering why is this Dutch guy talking
to us about the rivalry between two
Australian cities I moved to Australia
just over eight years ago and I work for
the committee from Albin which is an
apolitical member Network that brings
together more than 100 leading
organizations from across melville’s
business academic and community sectors
and for the past 12 months I’ve been
lucky enough to lead the Melbourne
four-point-oh task force where together
with our members we looked at the future
of Melbourne against the backdrop of a
rapidly changing environment and it is
in that context that I’d like to talk to
you about this Melbourne Sydney rivalry
a rivalry that’s been around for ages
and often the topic of great banter
which is the best city to live where
which sport is more important or who
serves the best coffee you can always
count on a good discussion however
there’s also times when the rivalry can
turn into disputes even to the point of
building an entire new city as was the
case with camera in 1908 after a long
dispute between Melbourne and Sydney of
the location of Australia’s seat of
government and so while rivalries can be
great fun and even spare a bit of
healthy competition there’s also times
when it really doesn’t work in our favor
and to illustrate my point I’d like to
show you the following graph you’re
probably thinking this must be something
between Melbourne and Sydney but in fact
this is something about the East and the
West
the late British economist Angus
Medicine with some phenomenal work
plotting out the economic history of the
world all the way back to the year one
and as you can see for the first
eighteen of the past 20 centuries China
and India made up more than half the
world’s economy and so when people talk
about the rise of China or the Asian
century they often think about the
phenomenal growth that we’ve seen over
the last couple of decades however what
we’re really witnessing is the
re-emergence of the historical balance
between the East and the West and when
that happens Australia will be right in
the middle of the most lucrative but
also the most intensely competitive
regional playing field of the 21st
century and so today I’d like to talk
about what happened here and why it’s
important for what’s happening today and
how this Melbourne Sydney rivalry fits
into all of this but to do that we have
to take a step back even further about
16,000 years this is the Social
Development Index and was developed by
Ian Morris from Stanford University and
with Social Development Ian Morris
refers to a groups ability to master its
physical and intellectual environments
to get things done and it’s a
fascinating chart because as you can see
for thousands and thousands of years
humankind was on a very slow upward path
early settlements Wars empires religions
philosophies nothing really made it much
of a dent and then about 200 years ago
all of a sudden something profound
happens or as Erik Brynjolfsson and
Andrew McAfee called it
something happened that literally bend
the curve of human history almost 90
degrees the Industrial Revolution the
Industrial Revolution marks the decisive
turning point for humankind where
average incomes and population went
through unprecedented and sustained
growth and it certainly gives a whole
new meaning to Paul Krugman’s phrase
when he says that productivity isn’t
everything but in the long run it almost
is since the first Industrial Revolution
we’ve had another a number of major
additional developments in fact the
World Economic Forum and others have
identified and another three industrial
revolutions all of which have had a
profound impact on our societies the
first one as I mentioned so the first
wave of urbanization and increased life
expectancy in those cities about a
hundred years later the Second
Industrial Revolution so enormous
improvements in public health and
sanitation and saw the rise of the
middle class and the introduction of
public education about ecology is later
we saw the third Industrial Revolution
where enormous advancements were made
with the mainframe computer the personal
computer and the Internet and I don’t
think I need to explain to you here what
an incredible impact that has made now
most people believe we’re in this third
Industrial Revolution but in fact we are
at the early stages of the fourth
Industrial Revolution where we’re seeing
a fusion of physical digital and
biological systems and as you can see it
used to take about 100 years for the
next Industrial Revolution to come along
but the speed at which we are witnessing
progress today is rapidly increasing and
in its skill scope and complexity the
fourth Industrial Revolution will be
unlike anything humankind has
experienced before it will profoundly
change the way we live work and do
business so just imagine in a few
decades from now what billions and
billions of people will be able to do
when they’re connected by mobile device
with almost unlimited processing power
and storage capacity and you multiply
all this but today’s emerging
breakthroughs in nanotechnology robotics
autonomous vehicles quantum computing
and artificial intelligence just to name
a few so you can imagine in such a world
the ability for companies and cities to
innovate will be absolutely crucial to
their ability to compete and prosper so
where does the Melbourne Sydney rivalry
fit into all of this well let me show
you this image this is a stunning image
that NASA the North American Space
Agency composed between April and
October of 2012 of more than 400 images
it took of the earth at night and it
shows the nighttime light emissions of
humanity’s greatest activity centers
cities and today more than half the
world’s population lives in cities and
for years and years researchers have
been looking into this phenomenon and
then just over a decade ago three urban
researchers Richard Florida Tim Holden
and charlotta Melander produced a
groundbreaking study into the rise of
the mega region now mega regions are
integrated sets of cities with their
surrounding suburban hinterlands across
which you can easily move capital and
labor and up until their study we used
to look at the world economy almost only
through the lens of nation-states
however with today’s globalization
capital and labor can move a lot more
freely and so national boundaries mean a
lot lot less and this brings me to the
really interesting part in their study
they found that the world’s top 40 mega
regions housed only 18 percent of the
world’s population but they were
responsible for two-thirds of global
economic output and close to 90 percent
of paths and innovation in other words
mega regions are the central competitive
unit so what do they look like
on the North American continent we can
see the vast Boston New York and
Washington corridor or on the west coast
the Cascadian corridor stretches all the
way from Portland and Seattle right up
to Vancouver across the Canadian border
or in Southern California as pericana
has mentioned the sprawl of Los Angeles
passes right down to San Diego across
the Mexican border into Tijuana and now
even Tijuana and San Diego share an
airport terminal into which you can exit
into either country and moving across to
Europe you can see many mega regions
including Europe’s largest one the one
that I grew up in stretching all the way
from Amsterdam right down to the Ruhr in
Germany across Brussels and Antwerp in
Belgium and ride down to Lille in the
north of France and moving across to
Asia where the Asian century is being
driven by the powerhouse mega regions
such as the Yangtze River Delta around
Shanghai which only houses 6% of China’s
population but produces a massive 20% of
that country’s economy and similarly the
Pearl River Delta with its eleven cities
around Hong Kong and Guangzhou soaks up
a massive twenty percent of China’s
foreign direct investment and that’s
because it’s no longer known simply for
its copycat products in fact it’s
becoming a world-leading cluster of
innovation but even Apple setting up an
R&D centre and the economists now
coining it’s Silicon Delta so
increasingly when multinationals are
looking to invest they are looking at
mega regions as opposed to individual
countries and so where does this leave
Australia aside from the major bushfires
that you can see in waa because math I
composed the pictures over a number of
months we have to zoom all the way into
the East Coast to see our three capital
cities Brisbane Sydney
and Melbourne none of which are forming
an integrated mega region and so that
means our capital cities are often
competing with each other for
investments and in many instances simply
lack the skill to play at the global
stage and so here’s my point if we
recognize that one Asia is regaining its
historical prominence and that Australia
will be right in the thick of it to that
we are at the early stages of the fourth
Industrial Revolution in which the
ability to innovate will be absolutely
crucial and three that mega regions are
the central competitive unit in which
economic activity and innovation thrive
then maybe maybe we can start thinking
about this Melbourne Sydney rivalry in a
very different light so what if we were
to imagine an Australian East Coast mega
region a mega region not only linking up
Melbourne and Sydney but also Brisbane
and Canberra and a mega region like that
would need powerful transport networks
right now the airwaves between Brisbane
Sydney and Melbourne are among the
busiest in the world so we need a much
better land transport network and
high-speed rail has been talked about
for ages in Australia and we need really
need to start acting on the ideas that
are already out there and given today’s
rate of innovation we might even be able
to leapfrog rail technology altogether
in favor of a Hyperloop which is a pod
in a vacuum tube traveling at a thousand
kilometres an hour so this would see you
from the CBD of Melbourne to the CBD in
Sydney in less than an hour and I
suspect that’s quicker than the morning
commute of many of you here today
however this is not only about linking
up the capital cities far from it
actually because critical to the
formation of a mega region is the
activation of the region’s now imagine
that same Hyperloop getting you from
Geelong to Melbourne in just four
minutes or albury-wodonga in another 15
and yes I know these technologies are
still at a very very early stage but so
where autonomous vehicles only just a
few years ago and that brings me to
another aspect of connectivity an East
Coast mega region would also need
world-class internet successful
economies in the 21st century will be
underpinned by digital business models
with a global reach and as you can tell
today Australia is at the bottom of the
top 50 in global internet speeds and
that’s just not good enough particularly
for a country that is geographically as
isolated as Australia however this is
not only an idea about economic growth
activating the region’s will also
relieve the enormous pressures on our
capital cities which are projected to
double the size of their populations in
the next 30 years and so if we don’t
have an integrated and holistic planning
approach across state borders we’re
certainly not going to be seeing a
doubling in our life ability and finally
there’s a wise old saying that says when
goods don’t cross borders soldiers will
and no more is his evidence than the
continent that I grew up in for
centuries and centuries the European
continent was ravaged by wars between
pretty much every single country on the
continent and after the Second World War
this ultimately led to the formation of
the European Union
when Germany and France decided to
combine their coal and steel industries
and today is practically unthinkable for
Germany and France to go to war with
each other again and so the even deeper
global connections that an East Coast
mega region would contribute to builds
on this idea and promotes international
collaboration rather than confrontation
so is melbourne sydney rivalry what if
we stopped talking about why one city is
better than the other and instead
combine forces on the global stage
what if we truly aim higher and start
asking ourselves the question what can
we do together that we can’t do alone
I truly believe these ideas that I’ve
talked about today need some further
developments but I also truly believe
they are an idea worth sharing with you
today because all too often we get told
that they’re way too difficult but that
we can’t afford them but I’d like to
turn that around and if all of you asks
here today can we afford not to thank
you
[Applause]
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