Button Mashing: The Housing Statement and Planning Reform

Still from the Buster Keaton short "One Week" in which Keaton examines a misshapen, poorly built house.

The Victorian planning framework for residential development needs reform.

That is not to accept the much more dubious proposition that the planning system is a significant cause of our current housing affordability problem. However day-to-day the planning system doubtless causes frustration and costs for individual applicants, and enormous difficulties for the council planners (mostly) charged with administering it. Reforming such provisions is an intrinsic good that is worth pursuing.

I also do not believe that means sacrificing other planning outcomes (amenity protection, character outcomes, urban greening, etc) in the name of either process efficiency or overall housing supply. Hard choices between system efficiency and policy outcomes might need to be made if the system is already optimised to achieve its intended outcomes. But where the system has obvious deficiencies, we can focus on remedying those before evaluating the need for more radical changes.

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Visualising Deemed-to-Comply ResCode

On 22 September 2023 all planning schemes in Victoria were changed to make a range of the ResCode Standards (which apply to single houses, and medium density housing up to four storeys) deemed-to-comply. This is a change that has been suggested for a while, and which I have long argued against (I wrote a long post about it here, which goes into the long messy history of this issue).

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Loosening Your Belt to Cure Obesity: Rethinking Standard Vehicle Sizes

Diagram showing the current B85 dimensions for a car space.

Standards Australia are currently revising AS/NZS 2890.1:2004 – Parking Facilities – Part 1: Off-street car parking, the standard that underpins the design of most vehicle circulation spaces other than roads. (The consultation closes November 9). The proposed amendments include enlarged standard car park sizes, reflecting underlying shifts in the so-called B85 and B99 design vehicles. These are vehicles that are supposed to represent the 85th and 99th percentile vehicles on Australian roads – in other words, 85 percent of vehicles are below the B85 size, and 99 percent are below the 99 size. The B85 vehicle, in particular, is the standard vehicle around which buildings and car parking structures are designed.

However cars have been getting bigger, particularly with the popularity of SUVs and large dual cab utes, and the standard now proposes to reflect this with larger design vehicles and parking spaces.

This has, gratifyingly, received some media attention and pushback; there are dozens of comments on the draft new standard arguing against the change. Lewis Mumford famously compared adding lanes to roads to trying to solve an obesity problem by loosening your belt. As apt as that metaphor was – arguable fat-shaming aside – it is even more appropriate for car parking spaces. Increasing the size of car parking spaces to accommodate ever-larger vehicles is an exercise in futility, and is terrible public policy. It will exacerbate the tendency to car-dominated built form, and loosen one of the few disincentives to the purchase of over-size vehicles.

But how does this play out when what is being changed is a technical standard?

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Integrity in the Planning System: Lessons from Sandon

Image of me presenting at the 2023 VPELA conference in front of a slide reading "Do we have a planning system that leads to integrity."

The Operation Sandon Special Report, released in July by the Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission, is vital reading for all Victorian planners and allied professionals. This is not so much for its findings about the matters at Casey that prompted the investigation, but instead for its timely centring of the issue of integrity in the discussion of planning system reform.  

Planning system reform is frequently framed primarily through a lens of red-tape reduction that sees increased system efficiency as its primary goal. However more balanced system reviews have also recognised that it is vital to maintain system effectiveness – after all, no level of regulatory burden is warranted if the planning system is not achieving the policy outcomes it is there to achieve. 

However the Sandon report is an important reminder of the third key pillar of any balanced system reform package: transparency and integrity. While some system reviews have commendably highlighted this as a key focus – notably 2003’s Better Decisions Faster and the 2017 review of the Victorian Planning system by the Auditor-General – too often this aspect of system design has passed unremarked. 

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Planning Integrity Reforms Must Not be a Power-Grab

Cover of the Sandon special report.

IBAC’s Operation Sandon report into planning decision-making in the City of Casey, released last Thursday, has further fuelled expectations of a major shakeup of the planning system. It has long been rumoured that the state government is eager to make major changes to Victoria’s planning regime, and the report provides an opportunity to add governance and integrity justifications to those reforms.

The commission’s most dramatic recommendation is that statutory planning powers – essentially, the deciding of planning permits – be removed from elected local councillors and instead be given to independent decision-making panels. This raises the spectre of a major dilution of community input to the planning process.

This prospect was reinforced by Premier Daniel Andrews’ comment, in responding to the findings, that it was the government’s view that “the role of local councils in significant planning decisions should be reduced.”

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Out now!

Front cover of the book The Victorian Planning System (second edition)

The new edition of my second book, The Victorian Planning System: Practice, Problems, and Prospects, is out now.

The book has been comprehensively revised, with factual updates throughout. It has also been thoroughly re-theorised, drawing more on literature about regulatory design, and more carefully drawing put principles of good decision-making and good system design. As a result its critique of the operation of the system has been considerably sharpened. I think I’m much clearer now than I was in 2017 about why the Victorian system – which seems so sound in theory – has performed so disappointingly over recent decades. I also try to outline an alternate approach to system design that I argue can lead us away from the repeated cycle of unhelpful or counterproductive reform that we have seen over the last two decades.

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Coming Soon…

The new edition of The Victorian Planning System: Practice, Problems and Prospects is now available for pre-order from the publisher’s page, with an expected publication date of April June.

I’m really pleased with this new edition, which is very thoroughly rewritten, including a thorough review of the concepts about system design and decision-making. My aim has been to write a book every Victorian planner feels they should own.

More will follow soon, but for now, here’s the blurb:

The Victorian Planning System: Practice, Problems and Prospects is an accessible introduction for all those who use the Victorian planning system, including planners, lawyers, councillors, developers, design professionals and community advocates. It explains key terminology and processes in simple terms and explores how the planning system is used to pursue policy goals. This discussion is contextualised through examination of a variety of planning policy challenges, including housing affordability, activity centre planning, and climate change.

This second edition has been comprehensively revised and updated to address changes since 2017. These include the finalised Plan Melbourne 2017-2050, the “Smart Planning” program, integrated Planning Policy Framework, revisions to residential development provisions (including the Better Apartments Design Standards), and the new Environment Protection Act, among others. Other new or heavily revised content includes discussion of planning in growth areas, biodiversity offsetting for native vegetation removal, and Aboriginal heritage.

This edition also includes reconceived discussion of decision-making and regulatory design. It reviews the history of planning system reform in Victoria and explores why the system is still not as effective, efficient or transparent as it should be. In response, the book outlines a vision of a new planning paradigm that is more capable of achieving bold policy goals. It is essential reading for all Victorian planning professionals.

The publisher’s page is here.

Does VicSmart Work?

Anyone who has read my book about the Victorian planning system (amongst many other things I’ve written) will know I’m not a fan of the VicSmart system of fast-track permit applications. I have long argued that it has made the system more complex to administer, and creates a punishing, staff-burning grind at councils without providing any notable tools to help them assess applications. The system has contributed to system bloat – it is a big part of why the General Residential Zone has increased from its simple and clearly-structured six-and-half pages in 2013 to a much more complex 12-and-a-bit now, for example – and led to some clearly poor outcomes, such as preventing the consideration of sustainability issues on applications for solar panels.

However I was interested in what we can see from the data about whether VicSmart is achieving its objectives, considered on its own terms purely as a fast-track mechanism. I came up with the following three graphs from DELWP’s PPARS permit activity data.

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