Our first speaker is Professor Peter Newman and I'll introduce him now. Professor Newman is the professor of sustainability at Curtin University. He's a distinguished academic with a global reputation who has written 20 books and more than 350 papers on sustainable cities and I felt exhausted just reading that. He's worked with all levels of government, was an elected councillor in Fremantle and an author for the UN's IPCC on transport, and maybe even more importantly standing here in Claremont he's known for helping save and rebuild Perth's rail system. Peter will be speaking tonight at a fairly macro level about why we need good infill and how regenerative design applies to Curtin infill.

Climate positive, nature positive, and people positive. These three things need to be integrated. Climate positive is actually a federal issue of course, and the context is this: for the last 60,000 years when indigenous people were here, there was an Ice Age, there was a long period where they were dealing with a climate that wasn't very useful for making agriculture and cities, but the last 10,000 years has been very constant around the 1° Centigrade variation and that's when we built the cities and agriculture. We had a climate that enabled that and now you see that black line's going very rapidly up. We are getting out of the safe operating space and there's only one in 100,000 possibility that that's not us, so it is really a clear directive that we've got to move on. We are leaving that operating space. My story is not to scare people however, it's to say there's a heck of a lot happening that is very positive and hopeful and I think we can make rapid changes to reverse that situation and get into global cooling again. By the way, today I heard that 515 people died of heat stroke on the Hajj in Mecca because it was 52 degrees there. Now that's the kind of thing that's going to be happening more and more. There's a scary thing to start with, isn't it? So how do we do it? There are cities that are now leading the way on this climate positive approach to urban development. Paris has got a really good plan. The White Gum Valley project down there, they've got to electrify the valley now and they're going into how they can do further things there but we've worked a lot on that development there. It was one of the first in the world to be a net zero kind of development and now you can get Curtin Net Zero and that's not the university, that's the electorate, and it's a beautiful document that has been put together showing what could happen in this area to help with the climate issues.

The good news is, and I worked on this in this report for 5 years, there's a dramatic drop in the cost of solar, wind, electric vehicles, and batteries. Together they dramatically have led to the adoption of these technologies so much quicker than anybody expected. Even in our report, it's way faster than that. So in the last 5 years, have a look at those trends. They're not just exponential, they're super exponential. Batteries, for example, are coming down in cost but they're also getting a higher quality, so it's a different world that's emerging. Electric vehicles are dramatically growing now. The super exponential growth is a disruption. It means like smartphones, they get adopted so much quicker than any expert predicts. The International Energy Agency keeps predicting straight lines into the future, that's why they're saying we're going to need a lot more gas and coal just to sort of help us through. Well, I don't know about that because it is happening so quickly. Of course, today we've had the announcement that we're going to have to wait for nuclear until late, maybe into the 2040s, and then that'll fix us just before 2050 comes. Now I don't want to get into how stupid that is but I do want to say that the alternatives are developing very quickly and nearly everything that they're suggesting won't be done by renewables. It will, it is so easy to see these things. So that dotted line there, that's showing how solar and wind are rapidly coming over. That's the trend. The electrifying of the economy is happening with all the new things like heat pumps and so on and that means the emission is going to drop off the cliff very quickly. So that's the kind of thing we're now sitting in.

But what we have to do is see what does it mean for cities. This is a project that the White Gum Valley Project (WGV), it really was the first Net Zero Precinct probably in the world. It's 10 years ago now that this was put together and Josh Byrne was one of the heroes of this and it is pretty remarkable because it was so popular as well. Now we've got a project Josh and I called Net Zero Precincts and it's operating across Australia with lots of case studies, most of them here because we're doing a lot more than most, and we are trying to show exactly how renewables fit into the cities, into every part of life in ways that will need integration. Different ways for different places and it will be different to all the textbooks and manuals but we're going to show you that in 3 years we'll have it all scaled down, won't we Josh, and it will be a pretty extraordinary time. We've got examples like the Curtin precinct here which is just finished. That's a net zero development, it works really well, the students love being there, they don't even realize that it's net zero.

So good infill will enable households to electrify everything. They won't need to have gas provided, it will be a fossil fuel-free urban area. The nature positive is pretty obvious and it's been obvious for some time but doesn't mean you easily do it because Perth has been sprawling. Its potential to sprawl all the way to Mandurah, down to Bunbury really is there and if you allow it it'll happen, scattering but it's getting poorer and poorer in those areas. So infill is definitely part of the future that we need to prevent this and to stop the clearing of biodiversity. Now there are parts of this area, if you look down on it from this sort of bird's-eye view, this is from the Shenton Park station, I love the view across there because you can hardly see any urbanity at all, it's all covered in the tree canopy and that's in Subiaco, which is one of the densest parts of Perth. So it's possible to bring trees and canopies which are enabling biodiversity. It's also possible to do this sort of thing where there's not a tree in sight in the new urban development happening. We've got to stop that and do things with the power of trees. This is a document that we put together which is about tree canopies being spread across the whole of Perth and to underground the power in order to do that to make that a major commitment to providing a cooler city into the future as well as one that is more biodiverse. Hesperia, talking later, we did a project with them which looked at this and is published in a big journal, nature positive design and development case study on regenerating black cockatoo habitat in urban developments in Perth. A lot of interest in that, thousands of people have read this paper now. It's all about how we can make the linkages across the city enabling cockatoo habitat and flight paths that are joined into the infill, not just the reserves.

And the third thing is the people positive approach which is basically about how we can do things better economically as well. Now if you sprawl the city at the moment, it costs $160,000 from the state government for every block, that's the subsidy given to it now. So when people say oh it's too expensive, you've got to go out on the fringe, well it's subsidized. We should stop that, we should in fact be helping the infill and to do it really well because those fringe areas are becoming poor and it's increasingly dominated by the fact that they have to drive so far to anything. And $250,000 we calculated extra in transport costs over 50 years to live there and 4.4 tons per year more in greenhouse gases. So many positives if you do the infill and we've also found health benefits because of more walking and productivity benefits that are there. All of those numbers help but the key thing is that if we design it well, make it a really interesting place, you'll get PIMBY, not NIMBY, not in my backyard, please in my backyard. And this is what happened with this development, the local people really wanted it after a while when they saw all these other benefits and they helped it and they enabled it. I had a development next door to me that Adrian Fini was wanting to build and I went around and knocked on everyone's door not to gather signatures to stop it but to say we want it and 100% of the people whose doors I knocked on said yes we want this in Fremantle because we don't have enough housing available for people. This is 20 years ago and it worked very well. So PIMBY matters.

And the final thing is really about public transport. This is the problem that we're having on the fringe areas but it was the same here. This is me in 1979 when they closed our railway down and all of a sudden I thought oh jeez I've got to do something about this and there's some of my friends and family in who we roped in to run this campaign and suddenly it took off because people really wanted to have a railway and it was closed for 4 years. They were going to extend it across the whole of Perth, Perth would never need a railway and we won. So that whole process has led to me becoming an academic in the transport area and I've told that story across the world that we actually won on our railways and we've now built seven new rail lines that are part of Metronet. The Southern Railway in particular has been incredibly successful, carries eight lanes of traffic. So where would we be if we didn't have that? Where would you be going to the football if you couldn't go by train now? So there are some good infill around stations. That's my one picture, I've got to take a few more from the inside now but these are rare, they're not easy to do, all the rule books make it hard. It's something that you have to have very committed developers to do and local governments. And I dare say there were quite a few people who didn't like it but there's an awful lot of baby boomers like me who moved in because they want to stay in the area, they want to be where they can get access to all the good things in Claremont and they have been able to.

So the final for me is the trackless trams which I've been pushing for a while now. It is a way we can stop the sprawl because trackless trams can go across joining up the long rail corridors that we now have and it's an extraordinarily cheap and very effective new technology. This is one that's going to be built in Melbourne and the idea is that we have a series of station precincts like this around any of the stops that are built around the trackless tram as it is built along main roads and we can then have the city developing these net zero precincts slowly in different places but particularly associated with the public transport. And we've taken this to all the local governments in the area. They came up with a plan that essentially followed that one on the left there showing all the places that would take this infill, net zero infill and the state government have done a plan and pretty much the same. So it's a matter of us getting on and doing it now. We're calling it Greening the Greyfields at times, it's also about, that's a book that's free that you can get and essentially the redevelopment, we've done the calculations that can show that there's a lot of interest and a lot of development potential and this one at Curtin is showing that it can be done with a PPP. So you need public-private enterprises to show how to do these developments associated with the railways, not just the park of the station, it needs to be better than that.

So this is the final picture, what can a trackless tram do to a corridor? Imagine the infill possibilities. That's what we can do, thanks.