Cinderella comes of age.
Brisbane has transformed itself from a flat, suburban mono-culture city, to a thriving metropolis that people no longer need to leave to get ahead, according to demographer Bernard Salt.
Mr Salt – who was in Brisbane yesterday to launch his latest book Cinderella City, which was commissioned by Austcorp – said the capital had grown significantly in the past decade and, in particular, over the past five years.
He predicted the population of Brisbane’s inner suburbs, in a 5km radius from the CBD, would top the 200,000 mark in the next 12 months and more people would soon live in the innermost suburbs of Brisbane than Melbourne.
Mr Salt said Brisbane had an “extraordinary ability” to draw people from other parts of Australia, like no other city.
“The city of Brisbane has been the fastest-growing city every year for 15 years,” he said.
“Sydney and Melbourne had started floundering in the ‘90s, while Brisbane continued to surge forward. And it does not look like yielding that position in the short term.”
While Brisbane once was derided by southerners as a big, country town and somewhat mocked with the term Brisvegas, Mr Salt said there had been a cultural shift.
It started on a smaller scale with the Commonwealth Games in 1982 and was followed by Expo 88 and the construction of larger retail centres such as the Myer Centre.
Stopping the dredging of the CBD reaches of the Brisbane River had also helped.
“I think this has a profound impact on the cultural of Brisbane,” Mr Salt said. “Young people don’t think it is necessary to leave Brisbane to establish themselves somewhere else.
“I think that is very much the case now than it was the case in the ‘90s and certainly in the ‘60s.”
Business leaders are now more likely to come from Brisbane than any other capital city and 19 locals had been named on the latest BRW Rich 200 list compared with only 10 in 1992.
And, on its Young Rich list, 16 of BRW’s 97 entries were based in Brisbane or on the Gold Coast.
Mr Salt said good employment figures in Queensland would continue to make it an attractive home to interstate migrants.
Mr Salt was commissioned to write Cinderella City by Austcorp which is building Brisbane’s tallest tower, Vision, on a site between Mary and Margaret streets in the city.