Originally published as an editorial under a joint by line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 34, no. 10 (November 2008): 4.
In last month’s Planning News, Tim Biles made a call for reform from within (“Reflections on Reform School”). Citing the unhappy experience of friends who had been trying to get a simple renovation through Council, he queried whether “the rule book and its policies have become the refuge of the faint hearted,” and made the following call for change:
Is there something simple you could do to make our planning system more effective? To put a smile and not a snarl on the face of the constituents we are meant to serve? Is it possible that this change, the ideas for reform, could well up from the bottom rather than be left to others at the top?
We salute, and heartily endorse, Biles’ call for self-examination in the profession. Yet we would add one major qualifier to his comments. Because Biles writes as one of the state’s most longstanding and respected private consultants, and frames his comments in the context of an account of the difficulties dealing with an unnamed Council, these comments could be seen as a call from one side of the profession to the other to lift their game. That’s an impression we think should be dispelled. There is no point in advocating for introspection if that becomes call for others to take a good look at themselves.
We don’t mean to suggest that this was Biles’ intention; apart from anything else, his involvement of MAV president Dick Gross in judging the best suggestions speaks to his wish for bipartisanship. However, we wanted to underline the point, because it raises another of the principal pollutants in the planning dialogue: an “us and them” mentality, and in particular a gulf between local government planners and consultants, who so often find themselves facing each other at the coalface of the Council planning counter. It is a point we raise with some trepidation, since any attempt to discuss this divide can devolve into finger-pointing and thus make the problem worse. Some readers might remember the kerfuffle over “six golden rules for local government planners” published in this magazine in August 2002; the ill-feeling that resulted represents a recent low point in the profession’s internal debate. We have no wish to stir up that kind of argument again, and like to think that generally there is now a little more sophistication in how the dialogue occurs across the gulf.
We raise it, though, because that divide still exists, and remains one of the key threats to the health of the profession. Rather than debate problems across the divide, we need to start to see the divide itself as one of the most fundamental of issues that we should address. When it comes to Biles’ call for self-improvement, perhaps the best tip for planners of all persuasions is to work harder to understand the issues faced by those on the other side. The best planners are those who can see the legitimacy of issues raised by those with whom they are dealing, and who can pro-actively work to resolve everyone’s concerns to their mutual satisfaction. The flip-side is that indulging in stereotypes of either the bureaucratic, small-minded, timid local government planner, or the self-interested, money-hungry “dark-side” consultant, will create poor planners. There is an element of self-fulfilment here; believing stereotypes is a sure recipe for embodying them. It tends to be the council planners and consultants who give in to the stereotypes of their “opposition” who stray farthest from the shared goal of achieving good community outcomes, and become mere players in a game: spoilers or advocates, respectively.
So our main response to Biles’ call for self-betterment would be to call for all planners to reach out and try to see the other side’s point of view; hopefully, to the point where we might minimise the sense of their being an “other side” at all. If that seems all a bit touchy-feely or summer-of-love, it might be worth thinking about what systemic measures contribute to the problems of understanding. We understand Biles’ scepticism about reform being anything other than a “bottom up” exercise, but nevertheless are inclined to see the public / private divide as at last partly a system failure rather than strictly a problem with individuals. After all, while there will always be short-sighted and narrow-minded planners, it seems doubtful that any one sector has a monopoly on them. So if particular sectors (or individual Councils or firms) are developing attitude problems, it is worth looking for some systemic causes and solutions.
The single most vital factor that can address belligerence and misunderstanding on either side of the counter is professional mobility. Councils will deliver better results when more of their employees have an understanding of the pressures of the private sector, and vice-versa. At the moment, the movement between the two sectors isn’t nearly fluid enough, and is overwhelmingly one-way. Councils frequently get a “first look” at a lot of the talented graduates, but a few years down the track many of those planners are lost to consultancies; far too rarely do experienced planners make the journey the other way. There is probably a need for greater targeting and prioritisation of private sector skills in recruiting at local government, but the biggest challenge will be making local government a more attractive sector to work, so that Councils can attract private sector applicants in the first place. As we argued in our May editorial, this about both improved conditions and also more general system reform. While planners continue to struggle with so much meaningless busywork, it will remain a challenge to market the desirable aspects – and they do exist – of local government planning. A better targeted planning system will lure more private planners to local government and help build the bridges between parts of the profession.
This is the flipside to the apparently intractably interconnected series of challenges that face Victorian planning. When the problems reinforce each other, the solutions do as well; fixing one area can lead to improvement in others. We shouldn’t see the frustrations of the system as something caused by the bad attitudes or lack of vision of other planners. Rather, we should continue to talk to each other, learn from each other, and push together for better ways of doing things. After all, while planners come in many colours and persuasions, we are still all one profession.