vpp reform

34 posts

Did the Minister Tip His Hand on Activity Centres in the Regional Press?

Urban Planning

City Nightlife

Looking through the DPCD’s proposed new zones you can draw a number of conclusions about what the strategic beliefs underpinning them are, even where those beliefs aren’t really spelt out in the material released by DPCD (as I noted the other day, the material accompanying the review is a little thin, to put it mildly).

One of the underlying assumptions seems to be that we don’t need to worry about activity centres so much. The Minister has already moved to allow more kinds of big-box retail to move to industrial land outside of centres (which I talked about here and here); these new changes would allow small supermarkets and offices to join that exodus.

There isn’t a very clear statement in the material about where this leaves traditional activity centre policy. However, speaking to a regional paper, the Minister has given more idea of what his thinking on the issue is.

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Matthew Guy Engages with the Planning Profession

Urban Planning


The above was Matthew Guy’s response yesterday morning to Michael Buxton’s opinion piece in The Age about the announcement of new zones.

Buxton’s article was perhaps a little extreme, if only because we lack the detail to confidently make some of these charges. But if people are leaping to assumptions, Guy needs to accept the blame for that, since he is the one who has decided to announce the zones without releasing any meaningful supporting information. And whatever arguments you might have with Buxton, this isn’t an appropriate way for the planning Minister to engage with legitimate criticism of his policies by one of the state’s leading planning academics.

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Don’t Call it the Underwood Review

Urban Planning

sunstorm

The first instalment of the long-awaited Underwood Review of the Victorian planning system (which we’re supposed to call the “Victorian Planning System Ministerial Advisory Committee”) was released on Friday and makes for interesting reading. The full report is here, and the government’s response is here.

The paper is structured partly as a review and partly as discussion paper: at certain points it’s making quite specific recommendations, at other points it’s just kicking ideas around. This is actually one of its strengths: it certainly gives a sense that the Committee was legitimately interested in hearing people’s views. There is a much more genuine sense of community engagement in this paper than in, say, the previous government’s review of the Planning & Environment Act. To glance through the submissions received by the Committee (on the DPCD website here) is to get a sense of what an achievement that was. Extracting value from those submissions – most of which are either disgruntled objectors saying the system is too developer-friendly, or industry objections saying the system is too objector-friendly – is no mean feat. (For what it’s worth my submission – which I was flattered to see the Committee quote at a couple of points – is here).

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Fixing the Victorian Planning System: Six Key Issues

Urban Planning

building the new city

What follows is a slightly edited version of my submission to the Underwood review into the operation of the Victorian Planning System (I wrote about that review back in June). With the committee due to report back early in the new year, I thought it would be timely to post it here since it’s one of the longer pieces I’ve written about the systemic problems with the Victorian planning system. A couple of points have been altered slightly to make it read better in this context, but mostly it’s as submitted.

I took a long time to post it as I have some reservations about it. I would have liked to have covered more nitty-gritty issues, which would have allowed me to be more specific and hence more constructive. Unfortunately time – and more particularly, a disillusioned sense that I wasting mine – got the better of me, so it ended up tackling just a few of the higher level systemic issues, rather than delving into detail. A more comprehensive overview of my take on the problems with the system would be gleaned by taking this in combination with the article Building a Better System that I co-wrote for Planning News (from which parts of this are cribbed), as well as my submission to the review of the Planning & Environment Act.

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The Victorian Car Parking Review: Why it Matters and What Should Happen Now

Urban Planning

God's Abacus

There was movement on one of the most long-awaited planning reviews going around last week, with the announcement that a new Advisory Committee will examine draft car parking controls and prepare a further report.

The car parking controls have become the bad joke of Victorian planning. The current review recently passed its seven year anniversary, having been initiated in May of 2004. The original terms of reference for that review made it clear it was building on earlier work conducted by Hansen Partnership in 1999, and then-Planning Minister Robert Maclellan was telling Planning News that a review was imminent back in the mid 1990s. The draft Advisory Committee report was released in 2007, but a long silence followed: we were already making fun of the former government’s inaction on the topic in Planning News back in May of 2008. The change of government had only deepened the suspicion that we might never see action on this front.

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The Small Lot Housing Code: Is it Ready to Use?

Urban Planning

artifact
The Growth Area Authority have released their Small Lot Housing Code, following the Planning Minister’s announcement of it last week. It’s a strange beast, worthy of some comment both for its importance (this is potentially a major shake-up of how housing is to be delivered in Victoria) and for the nature and content of the document itself.

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Starting Over

Urban Planning

like clockwork

So the Victorian Planning Minister, Matthew Guy, has established an Advisory Committee to “overhaul” the Victorian planning system. Talk about a mixture of feelings.

It’s worth reflecting on how many reviews there have been into the functioning of the Victorian system since the major overhaul in the 1990s that produced the VPPs. In terms of reviews or audits of either the overall operation of the system, or very substantial parts of it, we have the following:

  • Better Decisions Faster: Opportunities to Improve the Planning System in Victoria (August 2003)
  • Cutting Red Tape in Planning (August 2006)
  • Making Local Policy Stronger – Report of the Ministerial Working Group on Local Planning Policy (June 2007)
  • Melbourne 2030: Audit Expert Group Report (March 2008)
  • Victoria’s Planning Framework for Land Use and Development (May 2008)
  • Modernising Victoria’s Planning Act (various discussion papers throughout 2009)

It’s a bit shocking just putting the list together. That doesn’t include the various reports into particular bits of the system, such as the smaller system reviews still noted as active (as I write, this includes the controls for advertising signs, home based business, the residential zones, parking provisions, retail policy, and the State Planning Policy Framework) and a few others that seem to have gone AWOL (such as the review of the heritage overlays, or the functioning of Section 173 Agreements).

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Logjam

Urban Planning

October 2010Originally published as an editorial in Planning News 36, no. 9 (October 2010), under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda di Vincenzo.

In his recorded video presentation to this year’s State Planning Conference at the start of September, the Planning Minister announced that the review of the Planning & Environment Act would be referred to a working group of industry representatives to resolve the outstanding issues “before the end of the year.”1 The Act Review was last sighted in draft Bill form in December 2009, but the outstanding issues, apparently, are the proposed proponent-initiated amendments, the proposed fast track / code-assess permit process, and the assessment process for State significant development. The resolution of these issues, the Minister claimed, would allow other reforms to start to flow.

The significance of this latter point was perhaps easily lost in the context of an announcement ostensibly about the Act Review. Yet in the Minister’s interview with Planning News published in this issue, it is clearer exactly how widespread a policy logjam is occurring here. Asked about the various outstanding VPP reviews – of the Residential Zones, heritage overlays, car parking controls, advertising signs, and so on – the Minister has reiterated that these are waiting on the Act Review. What’s more, he suggests that the working group for that review may even play a part in forging some consensus as to the best a way ahead on these VPP initiatives. Everything, therefore, is now waiting on the Act.

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