Here Out West aims to shift the perception about what it means to tell contemporary Australian tales to a broad audience while staying true to the suburbs and communities of Western Sydney.
In order to support people effectively, craft appropriate messages and predict virus spread, it is crucial to use the languages and local networks that bind multicultural communities together.
Public health information for migrant communities needs to cover off the basics but it also needs to provide nuanced messaging to counter myths and misinformation about COVID-19.
It was once thought the Aboriginal names for the Hawkesbury had been lost forever. But after a remarkable find in the Mitchell Library, almost 100 place names will be restored to Dyarubbin Country.
With COVID-19 spreading in Sydney’s southwest, can New South Wales avoid a return to lockdown and a similar scenario to Victoria’s second wave? The answer depends on whether there is community spread.
A new airport, aerotropolis and development of two of the ‘three cities’ in the metropolitan strategy all aim to create jobs in Western Sydney. But right now the only certainty is a huge jobs deficit.
Centrelink queues shocked Australians but long before COVID-19 Western Sydney had job-poor neighbourhoods with very high unemployment rates.
Loren Elliott/AAP
Western Sydney’s growth-driven boom had ended before COVID-19 hit. Some neighbourhood unemployment rates were 2-3 times the metropolitan average, with female workforce participation as low as 43%.
Up early and home late: that’s the daily routine for hundreds of thousands of commuters out of Western Sydney.
Dean Lewins/AAP
Education fuelled extraordinary growth in Western Sydney’s professional services workforce, but their jobs aren’t local. More than 300,000 commute to work outside the region.
Sydney CBD is highly accessible and remains clearly the dominant centre in the metropolitan region.
Holli/Shutterstock
When a city gets to a certain size, it starts to make sense to have multiple centres of activity, and three are planned for Sydney. So what needs to be done to bring the city closer to this goal?
Significant investment in public transport is essential to ensure the Central City CBD can handle the predicted growth in commuting trips.
Dean Lewins/AAP
Central City 2048 proposes one new rail line, three metro lines and almost 300,000 extra jobs for the new CBD, one of three proposed for metropolitan Sydney. Clearly, the investment needed is massive.
Parramatta has been designated as the central CBD of three future city centres in the Greater Sydney region.
haireena/Shutterstock
The Greater Sydney metropolis is envisaged as having three CBDs by mid-century, but an assessment of the proposed Central City around Parramatta shows how much work is needed to make that a reality.
Sydney has grown rapidly since the safe injecting room was established in Kings Cross in 2001.
LAURA FRIEZER/AAP Image
Sydney’s supervised injection room in Kings Cross has helped reduce harmful drug use. But many drug users who live in the outer suburbs find it difficult to get to the inner-city facility.
‘Soft fall’ surfaces are widely used in play areas where children might fall, but can also get very hot in the sun, which undermines this safety benefit.
Brisbane City Council/Flickr
Commonly used surfaces in play areas, such as “soft fall” materials and Astroturf, can heat up to 80-100°C in the sun. This makes them a hazardous design choice, especially as the climate gets hotter.
The term ‘Leb’ embodies hyper-masculinity on the street.
Generic image from Shutterstock.com
Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s novel The Lebs is a realistic portrayal of teenage boys in Western Sydney.
The Sydney suburb of Liverpool, with its high concentration of ethnic migrants, has improved its levels of community trust since the Cronulla riots.
Wikimedia Commons
Trust has returned to areas with a higher concentration of ethnically diverse migrants significantly since 2005, but more must to be done if we want to avoid another Cronulla riot.
In the seat of Blaxland, held by Labor’s Jason Clare, 73.9% of respondents said ‘no’ to making same-sex marriage legal in Australia.
ABS
Early intervention via education and training will cost money straight up. But it makes no sense to watch young people drift through unemployment and disengagement and turn into unemployable adults.
Many people in culturally diverse populations in Western Sydney have lived in Australia for many years, if not several generations.
Shutterstock
Reasoned debates on sustainable migration intake levels are important. But transport and health infrastructure shortfalls in Western Sydney won’t be solved by reactive anti-immigration attitudes.