Australia Growth Centres / National Settlement Strategy (DURD)

Core idea

Federal decentralisation programme designating growth centres, led by Albury-Wodonga, to counter capital-city primacy

Why it matters

Australia's most ambitious national decentralisation push, though largely wound down after 1975

Description

Launched by the Whitlam Labor government through its new Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD), the Growth Centres programme was Australia's most ambitious attempt at national decentralisation. Following a January 1973 inter-governmental agreement between the Commonwealth and the New South Wales and Victorian premiers, the cross-border city of Albury-Wodonga was designated the flagship national growth centre, with a development corporation and projected population of around 300,000. Substantial federal budget allocations in 1973–74 and 1974–75 supported a wider set of designated centres, including Bathurst-Orange and the planned Monarto, intended to draw growth away from Sydney and Melbourne.

Significance

The programme represented the high point of Australian decentralisation policy and a rare experiment in cooperative federalism on urban settlement. Although the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 led to the rapid winding-down of DURD and most of its growth centres — Albury-Wodonga never approaching its target — the episode remains the reference case for ambitious national settlement strategy in Australia.

What shaped it

• The master plan (early 20th c.)
• Ekistics (1968)

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albury-Wodonga_Development_Corporation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albury%E2%80%93Wodonga
• https://www.alburycity.nsw.gov.au/leisure/museum-and-libraries/collections/local-and-social-hist