Professor says public servants should work in outer suburbs More public servants should work in Queensland's outer suburbs in a radical re-think of Australia's urban planning policy, one of Queensland's leading urban planners said Friday. Associate Professor Jago Dodson, from Griffith University's Urban Research Program said Australia had to radically restructure urban planning policy concentrating on city CBD. Professor Dodson said this would improve unemployment in outer suburbs and ease public transport problems connected to the "tidal flow" of workers to and from the CBD. His comments followed the release of Labor's Cities policy on Friday, which promised to set up Outer Suburb Growth Taskforces. Professor Dodson welcomed the concept as the first time in 40 years a federal government had set up suburban planning to help cities grow. "One way to address it is to use the power of governments - both state and federal - to deliberately restructure the distribution employment in the city through the relocation of public servants to targeted concentrations in suburban areas," Professor Dodson said. "They can then attract private sector jobs, particularly in industries related to those public services," he said. He said more public servant offices should be establish in Logan, in Ipswich, the Gold Coast and Caboolture to drive the program. Executive public servant positions should remain in the city heart. But things like drivers' licence issuing centres, processing licenses, processing applications, all the back office type work that is done by government does not need to be in the city centre. Professor Dodson said Labor was on the right track in its Cities Policy, which proposes growth strategies for outer suburban suburbs. "Many urban planners right across Australia will be delighted that for the first time in an election campaign - at least for 40 years - a major party has put forward a substantial policy that addresses the challenges and problems in our cities," he said. And particularly in our suburbs. Professor Dodson said he was pleased to see the policy recognised that mega-infrastructure projects - like the Cross River Rail project - did not always provide best options for suburbs. He told a planners forum that Brisbane's $4.2 billion Cross River Rail had "questionable merit." "It is another example of a major project that is heavily targeted towards the central city and it is spending money on mega-infrastructure that is providing capacity that simply addresses the heavy concentration of employment in the central city," he said. It is these tidal flows of people moving in and out of the city (that are the issue). Planners have recently revealed that despite new transport projects, people living in the outer suburbs subsidise public transport than people in the inner-city. He said if more jobs were provided in outer suburbs, projects of the scale of $4.2 billion Cross River Rail may not be the best solution. Instead you could use the funds that you save that type of infrastructure for the provision of more basic public transport services, like extra bus routes connected to train lines in suburban locations.