Think Tank: Ray Group CEO Tom Ray on what the Gold Coast must do to improve sustainability
TRANSPORT, crime and political short-sightedness are threatening the sustainability of the Gold Coast, says Ray Group executive director and CEO Tom Ray.
Opinion
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TRANSPORT, crime and political short-sightedness are threatening the sustainability of the Gold Coast, says Ray Group executive director and CEO Tom Ray
Bio
TOM Ray began his working life as a ski instructor in Whistler, Canada, after graduating from Bond University. On his return to Australia, he worked in Sydney with John Singleton Advertising, becoming the agency’s youngest ever account director and managing a range of accounts including press and radio for Paul Keating’s 1996 Australian Labor Party election campaign.
At 25, he joined Macquarie Bank before moving to London as managing director of -0800 Reverse Limited, where he helped establish the successful UK operation of the Australian Group. In 2003 Mr Ray returned to the Gold Coast and family business Ray Group, run by his father, a developer and marketer of masterplanned residential and resort communities, founded in the 1970s. In 2005, due the sudden passing of his parents in a tragic plane crash, he took over as executive director and CEO. Ray Group is primarily a commercial property developer and investor with projects including Puma Energy service and retail fast food centres in Loganlea and Rockhampton, Caltex retail centres in Toowoomba and Beaudesert, and the well-known Salt Village in Kingscliff. The group has developed, invested in and operated pubs and retail such as the Salt Bar Beach Bar and Bistro in Kingscliff, the Courthouse Hotels in Cairns and Port Douglas and the IGA Salt Village. They are currently developing a childcare centre in Brisbane. Mr Ray is also a director of The Southport School Foundation and founding chairman of the Perry Cross Spinal Research Foundation. With his father, he also co-founded the Salt Surf Life Saving Club, which now has over 300 members and has kept its patrolled beach fatality-free for the 12 years since its inception.
What do you love about the Gold Coast?
“The Gold Coast has evolved a lot over the last 40 years since our family got here.
“Back then, it was a much smaller place, but it had the lifestyle attributes that had brought people to the place long before then — which they still do today, the beach and the open spaces and natural environment.
“That made people make compromises in being here, that I don’t think are quite as pronounced today.
“What’s happened in the city over the last 40 years, and is continuing to happen, is that it’s providing young people in particular, job and employment opportunities that it hadn’t been able to.
“The city has changed rapidly over the last 15-20 years from a holiday town to being a place that can be considered a true alternative for people to start businesses and work in a diverse range of industries.
“Everybody is here for a better life for themselves.”
What do you think could be done better on the Gold Coast?
“Moving around the city with three kids who are at schools and kindergartens at different places, I see the downsides to growing and producing all those opportunities — it makes it much more difficult and challenging to get around.
“We have two or three main arterial roads to transport people north and south and I don’t see them as having the capacity they need.
“I applaud Tom Tate and the council, while he’s been in office, for being much more proactive about creating infrastructure and allowing sensible development to occur, but in doing that, you have to ask yourself `how do we put higher concentrations of people into the same areas — like Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach and Southport and marry that up with the ability to move them around the public infrastructure’.
“The light rail, at the moment, is a lost opportunity and that might be driven by cost constraints.
“It hasn’t done anything to solve any of my problems. I live at Nobbys and my kids are at school in Southport and I travel along that thoroughfare every day and yet that light rail does nothing for me — it doesn’t help me get my kids to and from school.
“What it’s done is restricted the ability for the Gold Coast Highway to be upgraded to handle more traffic.
“Unless you tunnel or reclaim more property — which is either cost prohibitive or socially prohibitive — the light rail’s going to continue to choke that arterial.
“So they’ve either got to network it properly and do it quickly, or consider it not to have achieved its objectives.
“Also crime. From a destination point of view, if you want someone to come and live somewhere, or stay somewhere as a tourist you’ve got to make them feel safe and you’ve got to be projecting the right images around Australia on television sets or social media to make people think it’s a safe, secure and stable place to come.
“I think they’ve done a lot to clean that up, but you can never do too much.
“The real market opportunity for tourism and attracting young talented people to come and live here is to target young families.
“Young families are good yielding tourists — they’ll come with their families and spend money on all sorts of attractions and travel around.
“That’s why I would say the V8s and Schoolies Week don’t, in my mind, fit the image that I would think as a great family destination for the Gold Coast.
“I’m not saying they’re not good events, and I’m not saying they haven’t been successful.
“But do images of these two things, portrayed into people’s loungerooms and on their social media, project the image of the Gold Coast that we should be seeing? If we’re going to attract the right people?
“I would disagree. I also think, particularly with the V8s, that it’s unacceptable to have an event like the V8s block the arterial roads of the Gold Coast as it does to a city that requires people to live and work here every day — not just when the V8s aren’t on.
“The expense of having those roads blocked while that event’s on, I don’t think the positives outweigh the negatives.”
In your travels, what have you seen being done elsewhere you think could work well here?
“Chicago has been an example that, in the 50s and 60s was looking like it could have gone the way of the rust belt cities that fell into decline in the US — but it didn’t because it got a strong Mayor, a guy called Richard Daley, who was Mayor there for 21 years.
“During his time he invested heavily in infrastructure and transport and crime reduction.
“He created open spaces for public events that wouldn’t choke the city’s infrastructure or disrupt the day-to-day lives of everybody else.
“He created expressways, subways, tackled crime and made Chicago a really attractive place to do business.
“He built the Sears Tower, which was at the time the tallest commercial office tower in the world.
“Built the Chicago O’Hare Airport which was at the time the biggest airport in the world.
“I’m not suggesting we should become like Chicago but if you look at the vision he had, he was prepared to invest beyond an election cycle and have the courage to see beyond the term of his mayorship and invest in things that would pay dividends for generations.
“I think the Gold Coast needs visionaries prepared to look beyond the next election cycle.
“It’s never too late to start planning and if you look at cities like Munich in Germany, which was largely rebuilt after the war, they created spaces that would work not only for vehicle traffic but for public transport and pedestrian traffic and for cycling.
“Open space for events rather than closed public infrastructure to hold events.”
If money, time, laws and approvals were no issue, what is one big project you’d undertake tomorrow?
“People came here to escape big crowds and traffic but gradually we’re becoming the place they left to escape.
“My brother and I were up at Southport the other day and it would talk me less time to ride my pushbike from Southport to Miami to get home than what it took to drive the car that afternoon.
“I got down the Esplanade and they had the night markets on and they’d closed the esplanade.
“There’s only two arterial roads that go north-south and on a Friday afternoon at 4.30pm why would you close the esplanade?
“I could ask the council and they’d say `because the night markets are an important tourism drawcard and they create a great atmosphere on the front’ and I don’t deny that but there’s are more than 500,000 people who live in this city who are trying to move around.
“To pick up kids from school, to get to wherever they need to get to.
“You cannot, to create a tourism industry, shut the infrastructure of the city down — you have to find another way.
“Fixing the transport is going to take co-operation between state, local and federal governments, which makes it even more complex, it’s going to take huge investment but it’s unfortunately not going to go away, it’s only going to get worse if we don’t deal with it.
“You either pull the light rail out or properly network it.
‘I know they’ve got plans to build off branch networks and they’re extending stage two now but, either get on with it, and do it quickly not over 20 or 30 years.
“Or accept that fact that it’s not working the way it is at the moment.
“If money was no object, I think there’s no other way to move people north-south than to build a tunnel underneath.
“If I want to get from Southport down to Burleigh why do I need to sit in traffic in Surfers Paradise or Broadbeach for 20 minutes on the way down there?”
What conversations should Gold Coast movers and shakers be having?
“No matter how much we tell ourselves that this is a great place to live and no matter how aware we are of that being the truth, the perceptions in many parts of this country are far from what we know to be the case.
“While those perceptions are out there, they’ll continue to hold us back from being taken seriously as a place to come and start a business.
“If you look at the cost of living here, the lifestyle attributes, against the broadening industry opportunities this place is presenting, we are, by comparison, such a better place to live than most other places in this country I can think of.
“There are places that have the attributes we have but none have got as many in one area.”
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