Adelaide boring, Canberra worse - NSW MP says

[Plasmatron]

Maybe we would be taken more seriously if we had taller buildings. You know, because they look cool and stuff. Lift these ridiculous height limits immediately, or I'll kill a puppy!

Please, think of the puppies.

Note: No puppies were harmed in the making of this post.

[Cruise]

Maybe we would be taken more seriously if we had taller buildings. You know, because they look cool and stuff. Lift these ridiculous height limits immediately, or I'll kill a puppy!

Please, think of the puppies.

Note: No puppies were harmed in the making of this post.

I will also kill a puppy!!! (for no reason attached to your post, I'm just sadistic)

[ynotsfables]

I think we should forget this crap and just get on with the job of building our city, and put aside childish remarks and non constructive criticisms. These people that make these stupid remarks are'nt acting in our best interests they're friggin morons.

[Queen Anne]

I don't know about you guys but after this childish attack,I feel that the turning point for Adelaide is not far off. Adelaide bashing is getting old and boring IMO considering the city is changing for the better these days.

However this SA campaign is a bit cringe worthy considering the state of our PT system is in and the growing congestion on our roads. Though for a 'supposedly' mature MP to have a go at another city then brag on that their city is the best in the country is even more cringe worthy.

NSW looks pretty much screwed at the moment, thanks to the incompetent state government run by the mature and brilliant premier Iemma Morris [sarcasm/]

However this ends up on as EXCLUSIVE NEWS in the Advertiser tomorrow, I'll scream!

I think these ads are a bit cringe worthy too. I agree with those who have said the clever thing would be to just get on with the work of building a great city - the best advertising of all. I feel that Adelaide is at a turning point too, but how we move in the next few years will determine its success.

It seems like the state gov is trying to get out of things cheap. Our fortunes might well be changing but you can't just tell people about it and hope they'll believe you. People are not in the habit of always believing what governments say. *Show* those intersate, and the people of SA, that we are up and coming. Then, word of mouth will be all the advertising we need, I think: apparently, word of mouth really is extremely influential - often, even more so than slick ads.

It seems so simple. 'Talk is cheap.' 'Actions speak louder than words.' I thought politicians understood cliches?

[canopy]

I just love adelaide city.........I already start working here and my office is in King William street.

[Ho Really]

I just love adelaide city.........I already start working here and my office is in King William street.

Good onya mate.

Cheers

[alfer7_3]

I don't know about you guys but after this childish attack,I feel that the turning point for Adelaide is not far off. Adelaide bashing is getting old and boring IMO considering the city is changing for the better these days.

However this SA campaign is a bit cringe worthy considering the state of our PT system is in and the growing congestion on our roads. Though for a 'supposedly' mature MP to have a go at another city then brag on that their city is the best in the country is even more cringe worthy.

NSW looks pretty much screwed at the moment, thanks to the incompetent state government run by the mature and brilliant premier Iemma Morris [sarcasm/]

However this ends up on as EXCLUSIVE NEWS in the Advertiser tomorrow, I'll scream!

I think these ads are a bit cringe worthy too. I agree with those who have said the clever thing would be to just get on with the work of building a great city - the best advertising of all. I feel that Adelaide is at a turning point too, but how we move in the next few years will determine its success.

It seems like the state gov is trying to get out of things cheap. Our fortunes might well be changing but you can't just tell people about it and hope they'll believe you. People are not in the habit of always believing what governments say. *Show* those intersate, and the people of SA, that we are up and coming. Then, word of mouth will be all the advertising we need, I think: apparently, word of mouth really is extremely influential - often, even more so than slick ads.

It seems so simple. 'Talk is cheap.' 'Actions speak louder than words.' I thought politicians understood cliches?

The state government is purely trying to encourage some sydney people to move to SA because we are in need of alot more people to fill up the jobs which are coming up with the mining and and defence industries growning here. This has nothing to do with Adelaide being exciting or boring and that is not at all what the sa government is trying to say thats what tourism commissions are employed to do. I think once these industries start to prosper more adelaide will in turn become a more vibrant place. on the other hand i like Adelaide more than Sydney for living in (not bagging sydney) i don't like traffic, i'm an AFL supporter not NRL, there is enough nightlife in the city to be ok, the beach and hills are close by. im not bored living here...

[Queen Anne]

I don't know about you guys but after this childish attack,I feel that the turning point for Adelaide is not far off. Adelaide bashing is getting old and boring IMO considering the city is changing for the better these days.

However this SA campaign is a bit cringe worthy considering the state of our PT system is in and the growing congestion on our roads. Though for a 'supposedly' mature MP to have a go at another city then brag on that their city is the best in the country is even more cringe worthy.

NSW looks pretty much screwed at the moment, thanks to the incompetent state government run by the mature and brilliant premier Iemma Morris [sarcasm/]

However this ends up on as EXCLUSIVE NEWS in the Advertiser tomorrow, I'll scream!

I think these ads are a bit cringe worthy too. I agree with those who have said the clever thing would be to just get on with the work of building a great city - the best advertising of all. I feel that Adelaide is at a turning point too, but how we move in the next few years will determine its success.

It seems like the state gov is trying to get out of things cheap. Our fortunes might well be changing but you can't just tell people about it and hope they'll believe you. People are not in the habit of always believing what governments say. *Show* those intersate, and the people of SA, that we are up and coming. Then, word of mouth will be all the advertising we need, I think: apparently, word of mouth really is extremely influential - often, even more so than slick ads.

It seems so simple. 'Talk is cheap.' 'Actions speak louder than words.' I thought politicians understood cliches?

The state government is purely trying to encourage some sydney people to move to SA because we are in need of alot more people to fill up the jobs which are coming up with the mining and and defence industries growning here. This has nothing to do with Adelaide being exciting or boring and that is not at all what the sa government is trying to say thats what tourism commissions are employed to do. I think once these industries start to prosper more adelaide will in turn become a more vibrant place. on the other hand i like Adelaide more than Sydney for living in (not bagging sydney) i don't like traffic, i'm an AFL supporter not NRL, there is enough nightlife in the city to be ok, the beach and hills are close by. im not bored living here...

Hi Alfer 7_3,
Personally, I think that if SA is trying to attract interstate people we should have our ducks in rows when we boast our advantages. I don't think it reflects well on us to boast, when we have our own important infrastructure issues to sort out. From what I read we are starting to think more carefully about our PT and roads but it has taken us so long and there has usually been more talk than action, as far as I can gather. That said, I hear that PT in Sydney is really dire, nowadays, so perhaps Sydney people would genuinely be pleased to find they have a better work-life balance in Adelaide.

Perhaps I should have expressed my post differently - it was the infrastructure aspect of things I was on about. You will never hear me saying Adelaide is boring - I simply don't think it's easy to judge such abstract concepts. Adelaide is as interesting a city as any other, to me. I agree with you that once all our new ventures are up and running, all of a sudden Adelaide won't be nearly so 'boring' as it is perceived - we just need more people in town to create that buzz which seems to brand a city as worthwhile. But my thought is, why not boldly spend our money and energy on dealing with our infrastructure issues in a comprehensive and visionary way? Why not find some money for that one iconic development that might well transform our city's reputation? Perhaps we would find it a lot easier to attract the people we need if we just bit the bullet and did these things. The ads? Meh. IMO, they are of questionable value. Perhaps they will have an effect but I can't shake this feeling that we could do so much better - that we are on the cusp of a big change in our state which needs to be grasped with confidence and a willingness to think big, if we are to truly benefit
Cheers, Caroline

[Howie]

Adelaide: beautiful one day, comatose the rest
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/adel ... 25886.html
John Montgomery
May 15, 2008

Advertisements on Sydney's railway stations are telling frustrated commuters: "You'd be home by now if you lived in Adelaide." And a special report on South Australia's economy published in The Australian this month hailed Adelaide's economic turnaround and a coming mining boom.

What masterpieces of floss and wishful thinking. The South Australian Premier, Mike Rann, urges us all to see how Adelaide has changed. But I returned to Adelaide in October last year after a gap of nearly three years. Adelaide has changed: for the worse.

I checked out my old haunts. The West End, once a thriving hub of artists, was a ghost town during the day, and a wild west of binge drinkers at night. I visited Central Market early on a Saturday morning, picking my way through vomit and broken glass, and came upon about 15 drunks fighting over a taxi. This was at 7am, outside McDonald's and about 100 metres from the police station. There were no police in sight.

The market was as I remembered it: daggy and dingy. In Rundle Street East, nearly all the good restaurants have disappeared. The Exeter Hotel, in these new puritan days, is suffering from the smoking ban. I saw little sign of new development, except for the City Council-promoted redevelopment of the bus station, and the Law Courts. The latter is certainly large, perhaps to cope with the serial murderers and molesters for which Adelaide is becoming infamous.

Adelaide might have a Perth-style resources-led boom, which I rather doubt, but let's hope so - the city has little else to offer as an economic hub. Defence contracts are all very well, but they are based on government largesse rather than new wealth creation. They are simply plugging the gap left by the Mitsubishi closure. The reason Adelaide is so "competitive" as a business location is that no one wants to move there, other than a few downsizing "lifestyle" businesses.

Meanwhile, Adelaide continues to lose its brightest and best to Sydney and Melbourne. This has been going on for years and I fear the momentum will not slow, because Adelaide is a city that dashes opportunity. Its economy lacks dynamism - at first an attractive feature, as living there is easy and there are no traffic jams. But after a few months you begin to notice that nothing ever happens. There is no thriving creative industry, although the potential is plain to see, and Adelaide's arts sector is largely welfare-dependent.

Most people who arrive with optimism and new ideas leave again in a year or two. Meanwhile Adelaide gets back to its favorite pastime of navel-gazing, holding conferences and festivals and appointing "thinkers-in-residence" from Tony Blair's Britain. Meant to signal "cutting edge practice", this instead confirms the cultural cringe. Someone should point out that Blair is no longer Britain's prime minister and is widely derided as the worst incumbent of Downing Street in living memory (a feat in itself). The truth is that New Labour made a mess of Britain. So why copy the politics of failure?

Adelaide's slowness suits some people well, especially the civil servants and politicians who strut about as if they own the place. I suppose they do, in a way. They like Adelaide the way it is. But those who want to see the city revitalised need to understand this will happen only if the city rediscovers enterprise and small business growth and a varied and dynamic economy. Governments do not create wealth, they never have. Another one-shot deal, mining, will not be sufficient to remake a city.

In her masterpiece, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs writes that if cities do not maintain economic dynamism they revert to "dull and inert towns". Sadly, this once great little city is on the slippery slope. Nothing happens in Adelaide because nothing happens. They prefer to talk about it.

Dr John Montgomery is an urban planner and the author of The New Wealth Of Cities: City Dynamics And The Fifth Wave. He lived in Adelaide from October 2002 to May 2004.

What a barstard!

[Will Derwent]

Having just moved back here to Adelaide from Canberra, I can say two things very quickly:

1. Canberra's traffic is terrible given the fact there are only 300,000 people in the whole town. Adelaide has traffic that is only marginally worse than Canberra despite the fact that Adelaide has five times as many people. And Canberra houses cost a fortune (about ten per cent cheaper than Sydney), and are generally of pretty poor quality.

2. Adelaide is not as boring as Canberra.

But I'd also caution that and say that once you get out of the CBD in Adelaide, it can get very sparse very quickly. Local planning authorities and the lack of a large disposable income mean that swathes of suburbs out of the inner city have no shops, pubs or restaurants (try counting the number of pubs south of Flinders Uni, considering how many people live down south). This effect happens in all cities to a degree once you head out of the core, but I suspect that the effect is worse in Adelaide than in larger cities, again due to the disposable income factor.

A lot of Adelaide's woes will be fixed by a big fat injection of mining boom money. I think that many of the things that people get upset with Adelaide are directly related to a sputtering economy, which is only partly the fault of less than stellar governance.

[Queen Anne]

Adelaide: beautiful one day, comatose the rest
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/adel ... 25886.html
John Montgomery
May 15, 2008

Advertisements on Sydney's railway stations are telling frustrated commuters: "You'd be home by now if you lived in Adelaide." And a special report on South Australia's economy published in The Australian this month hailed Adelaide's economic turnaround and a coming mining boom.

What masterpieces of floss and wishful thinking. The South Australian Premier, Mike Rann, urges us all to see how Adelaide has changed. But I returned to Adelaide in October last year after a gap of nearly three years. Adelaide has changed: for the worse.

I checked out my old haunts. The West End, once a thriving hub of artists, was a ghost town during the day, and a wild west of binge drinkers at night. I visited Central Market early on a Saturday morning, picking my way through vomit and broken glass, and came upon about 15 drunks fighting over a taxi. This was at 7am, outside McDonald's and about 100 metres from the police station. There were no police in sight.

The market was as I remembered it: daggy and dingy. In Rundle Street East, nearly all the good restaurants have disappeared. The Exeter Hotel, in these new puritan days, is suffering from the smoking ban. I saw little sign of new development, except for the City Council-promoted redevelopment of the bus station, and the Law Courts. The latter is certainly large, perhaps to cope with the serial murderers and molesters for which Adelaide is becoming infamous.

Adelaide might have a Perth-style resources-led boom, which I rather doubt, but let's hope so - the city has little else to offer as an economic hub. Defence contracts are all very well, but they are based on government largesse rather than new wealth creation. They are simply plugging the gap left by the Mitsubishi closure. The reason Adelaide is so "competitive" as a business location is that no one wants to move there, other than a few downsizing "lifestyle" businesses.

Meanwhile, Adelaide continues to lose its brightest and best to Sydney and Melbourne. This has been going on for years and I fear the momentum will not slow, because Adelaide is a city that dashes opportunity. Its economy lacks dynamism - at first an attractive feature, as living there is easy and there are no traffic jams. But after a few months you begin to notice that nothing ever happens. There is no thriving creative industry, although the potential is plain to see, and Adelaide's arts sector is largely welfare-dependent.

Most people who arrive with optimism and new ideas leave again in a year or two. Meanwhile Adelaide gets back to its favorite pastime of navel-gazing, holding conferences and festivals and appointing "thinkers-in-residence" from Tony Blair's Britain. Meant to signal "cutting edge practice", this instead confirms the cultural cringe. Someone should point out that Blair is no longer Britain's prime minister and is widely derided as the worst incumbent of Downing Street in living memory (a feat in itself). The truth is that New Labour made a mess of Britain. So why copy the politics of failure?

Adelaide's slowness suits some people well, especially the civil servants and politicians who strut about as if they own the place. I suppose they do, in a way. They like Adelaide the way it is. But those who want to see the city revitalised need to understand this will happen only if the city rediscovers enterprise and small business growth and a varied and dynamic economy. Governments do not create wealth, they never have. Another one-shot deal, mining, will not be sufficient to remake a city.

In her masterpiece, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs writes that if cities do not maintain economic dynamism they revert to "dull and inert towns". Sadly, this once great little city is on the slippery slope. Nothing happens in Adelaide because nothing happens. They prefer to talk about it.

Dr John Montgomery is an urban planner and the author of The New Wealth Of Cities: City Dynamics And The Fifth Wave. He lived in Adelaide from October 2002 to May 2004.

What a barstard!

Oh dear!

I haven't heard of this guy, I might look him up. I wonder where he is from? Yes, he is a bastard but the crying shame is many people will probably be only too glad to believe him.

This is another reason why I think these ads are a bad idea. We cannot just *tell* people we are a great place to live. I know Adelaide is a great place to live and you guys know it. But (and maybe I'm paranoid in saying this) the rest of Australia is not particularly interested in patting us on the back - and why should they be, I guess (though it would be nice to see this country pull together, for once, rather than bicker all the time). If we do not put in place some pretty compelling reasons for the rest of the country to believe we are on the up, ads like these will do nothing but provide yet another reason to ridicule and dismiss Adelaide, IMO

This article is just heart-hurting. The nastiness of this reaction is even worse than I had feared. I had even begun to wonder if I was being too harsh about the ads. SA is doing better than it has in years - State Gov, why open us up to scrutiny which is bound to damage us, just when we are getting our act together? At best these ads have jumped the gun. At worst they are a real blunder. Maybe others have a more positive take on it than me? (she asks hopefully).
Caroline (feeling a bit lousy now)

[Queen Anne]

Oh cripes!

I just looked him up. I do know who he is. He's that Scottish bloke who came to Adelaide to save us and left in a huff, isn't he? Holy moly, he sure can hold a grudge!

I wonder if this disgusting 'article' is more about sour grapes than his caring a hoot for our 'once great liitle city'?

He has just done us a great disservice, and sadly, we served him up the opportunity

[jk1237]

Oh dear Mr Montgomery, your a jerk. This is obviously an attention seeking article put it a Sydney newspaper, cant get any low than that. I could write a negative article on every city in the world too if I wanted.
What I cant work out is that he said Adelaide used to be a great little city (maybe back in the 1960s when this guy wasnt even here), but if hes comparing us to the 1990s or 2002-2004, Adelaide is so much more vibrant and better today.

And our economy is so much more dynamic now. We used to rely virtually on white goods manufacturing and car manufacturing from 1960s to 80s, now we rely on all growing sectors. This article seems to be as unintelligent as the average letter to the Advertiser editor, yet hes supposed to be an urban planner.

[Paulns]

This ones really a no brainer.

I lived in Sydney for 6 years and I can say what ever this man says can't be taken seriously anyway. I mean this is the same person that keeps telling Sydney siders the multi million dollar Cross City tunnel and Lane Cove tunnel projects are a good thing??? WTF????? No one uses them????

The Sydney public transport system for a city that's apparently sooooo good is a joke. Trains and bus's in peak hour constantly over flow if not run late or both.
Don't even get me started on the road network...... If its not congested to the point where you may as well get out of your car and start walking down the Multi billion dollar motorway your paying some outragously stupid amount to travel what takes 5 minutes to drive. Eg the Eastern Distributor now has a one toll of $5?????.

This clown can say what he likes about Adelaide but as far as I'm concerned you can make the best of anywhere you live and I know very well where I'd rather be... Sydney can have all the glitz and glamour if that's what you have to put up with on a daily basis. From my experience, its not always worth it???????

I wouldn't worry about his comments. No one in NSW even listens to him anyway..... It wouldnt surprise me if people in his own party have started to lose confidence in the NSW transport system??

[Shuz]

I could just kill that guy who wrote the article.
Go home, we don't need you here.