planning in victoria – Page 7

Us, Them, and Reform

Urban Planning

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.

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The New Naivety

Urban Planning

Originally published as an editorial under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 34, no. 9 (October 2008): 4.

Coming out and calling for the government to spend up big on public transport can seem a little naïve. “More trains! More trams!” Such calls are seen as the business of lobbyists, not professional planners, who must face up to infrastructure costs and political realities. Two contributions to Planning News in the last 12 months, for example, have made valid criticisms of pie-in-the-sky transport advocacy. In the December 2007 issue, Gavin Alford wrote of the difficulties planners face in avoiding simply delivering wish-lists of proposals that are unlikely to be delivered. A related thought was expressed by Peter Jewell in March 2008, when he reminded planners that “public transport is not a panacea,” and questioned how much public transport improvements could realistically be expected to achieve. These comments pinpoint a real difficulty in talking about public transport. Demanding better infrastructure can become a cop-out: unless we’re the Premier or Transport Minister, it’s somebody else’s problem. At the level of day-to-day practice, Alford and Jewell are right to warn us off such an approach.

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The Melbourne 2030 Audit and the Urgency of Debate

Urban Planning

Originally published as an editorial under a joint by line with Tim Westcott and Gida Di Vincenzo in Planning News 34, no. 6 (July 2008): 4.

It is a busy time in planning. The government’s announcement last month of new “Development Assessment Committees” (DACs) to make planning decisions in Melbourne 2030’s Principal Activity Centres (and other – as yet unspecified – sites of metropolitan significance) is just one aspect of a fast-changing planning environment. It occurs alongside the potentially game-changing review of the residential zones; the introduction of the Urban Growth Zone; the fallout from the Eddington Report; and with the still-mysterious review of the Act looming on the horizon.

In this context, it’s a shame that the kerfuffle over the proposed DACs largely overshadowed one of the most important recent attempts to pause and take stock. The report of the Melbourne 2030 Audit Expert Group (AEG) was released simultaneously with the government’s response to it, and it was overshadowed by the story of the DACs and their implicit threat to the role of local government. This is unfortunate, as the AEG report is a solid, well-considered stock take of where we now stand. It mounts a spirited defence of the core ideas of Melbourne 2030, but is also admirably clear in spelling out how its implementation has fallen short.

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The Auditor-General’s Report: Beyond the Headlines

Urban Planning

The tabling in Parliament on 7 May of the Victorian Auditor-General’s report into the functioning of Victoria’s Planning Land Use and Development Framework on was accompanied by a splash of media headlines that picked up on the most alarming of its findings. Subsequent events have only increased the timeliness of the report, since its negative findings about the performance of local government have no doubt helped to support – in popular perception, even if not by design – the government’s recent decision to strip some planning control over activity centres from councils. The popular media reports on the audit strongly picked up on the theme of serous dysfunction at local government level presented in the report’s findings. This was an important aspect of the Auditor-General’s conclusions, but the audit also turned up some other interesting nuggets.

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Car Parking Controls Given Heritage Listing

Urban Planning

Plans to reform the parking controls in the Planning Scheme have been thrown into disarray following the extension of the heritage controls to cover Clause 52.06 of Victorian Planning Schemes.

The heritage protection comes after the objectives of the heritage overlay were extended to cover issues of natural, cultural, architectural, social and bureaucratic significance. It represents a win for proponents of the emerging field of administrative heritage.

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Building a Better System

Urban Planning

This article originally appeared under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 34, no. 3 (April 2008): 8-13. I was the lead author but incorporated some material from my co-editors.

Back in December last year, after the release of the poor results on the PIA planning report card, we noted that such a negative self-assessment was not a luxury that the planning profession could afford. We argued that in order to justify our continued existence, planners need to make sure that the planning system dramatically improves. We argued that such improvement needed to achieve two broad objectives:

The system has to be able to deliver better outcomes; and
It has to do so while imposing less burden on the community.

The following discussion outlines some of the ways that might be achieved. It is based on suggestions garnered from our calls for contributions over recent months, our own experiences, and countless informal discussions with frustrated colleagues over the years. What follows is by no means definitive: it is hoped that by collating some of these ideas (many of which are familiar old chestnuts) in one place, we can prompt both further discussion and an increased sense of purpose and urgency in the move for planning system reform.

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New Tunnel to Link Eastern Freeway with Kingdom of the Mole Men

Urban Planning

Roads Minister Tim Pallas has announced that studies will continue to assess the viability of linking the Eastern Freeway with CityLink via a proposed tunnel. The tunnel will run from Collingwood to Flemington, under the Melbourne General Cemetery and via a lost underground civilization of cave-dwelling mole men.

“This is a practical, real-world solution to Melbourne’s traffic problems,” declared Pallas. “There are a lot of people out there who would like to see us pursue all sorts of fantasy-land proposals, like train lines to Cranbourne East and South Morang, or peak hour trains less than 20 minutes apart on the Upfield Line. But we aren’t interested in dreams. We are interested in feasible solutions, like the Collingwood – Moletopia – Flemington link.”

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