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Dear ,

It’s only a week until our McIlwraith Lecture with Maha Sinnathamby. If you haven’t booked yet, don’t delay. Click here.

Housing is a basic need, but in a modern world it takes great skill to produce it. Maha knows better than most how difficult it can be to produce just a basic product, but he’s gone one further.

Greater Springfield is Australia's largest master-planned community. It has won international awards for the quality of its planning, and Maha has been awarded an AM and an honorary doctorate, as well being named one of Queensland's 50 greatest thinkers as a consequence of his work.

The  lecture is just one week away on October 16, 7:00 for 7:30 pm at the Victoria Park Golf Club, Herston Road, Herston. To book click here. AIP members are $165 a head for a two-course meal with drinks.

When Brisbane was opened to free settlement 182 years ago housing was easy. All you needed was a paddock, and a handy sawmill to provide the lumber to build your home, and a store to provide some basic hardware and paint.. There was no electricity, no running water, no sewerage, no crossover between your house and the unsealed track that went past your front door. Surveyors existed, but not town planners.

Building inspectors hadn’t been invented, and you probably put it all together yourself with some simple tools, unless you were very rich. And you didn't need to be very rich to own a house then because standards were minimal, but sufficient, and there was lots of space.

That’s not how it works today. Subdividing and building is an intensely complex, regulatorily rich, capital punishing, elongated, and risky undertaking. At least in the built-up urban areas where most of us live.

And I’m just talking about small subdivisions.

Greater Springfield, a city that will grow into over 105,000 residents within 6 years is orders of magnitude of difficulty greater than that.

Yet somehow, a Malaysian immigrant of Tamil origin, with an engineering background, a modest capital base, and boundless vision, managed to pull it off.

Sir Thomas McIlwraith, the patron of our lecture, was a great entrepreneur himself, but he lived in the old era when housing was easy. I can imagine he would be struck with awe at the labyrinths we moderns make our entrepreneurs journey through to provide the most basic of commodities.

This will be an inspiring and informative talk - and timely - as we face the need to build 5 Springfields every year just to deal with the current influx of migrants. And it’s an issue we at the AIP spend a lot of time as a think tank thinking about.

Once again, to book, click here.

Regards,

GRAHAM YOUNG
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR