planning news

One of the most dispiriting things about day-to-day statutory planning is the paper warfare. Consultant planners prepare a report justifying their proposal; given the length and repetitiveness of planning schemes, that might be twenty or more pages long. Council officers then prepare their own assessment, but for various reasons they tend not to rely a great deal on the applicant’s report. Apart form the description of the proposal – the bit that applicants know a Council planner will always read – many consultants’ reports are not especially useful as the starting point for Council’s assessment. I suspect most planners will know the kind of report I mean: huge slabs of text cut and pasted from the scheme; permit triggers incorrect, incomplete, or scattered through the text; glib and formulaic non-responses to the real issues of merit; and so on.

There’s a cycle here, in that the less Council officers rely on application reports, the more sketchily they are done, reinforcing the tendency of local government planners to give them fleeting attention. Meanwhile, Councils have traditionally tried to encourage better documentation through the issuing of extensive application checklists listing every last thing to think about. This increases regulatory burden, and further reinforces the trend towards over-documented but under-thought applications. And when Council officers finally come to assess the application, they largely start from scratch, duplicating work that in many cases has been – or should have been – done by the permit applicant. The whole process sees a lot of paper exchanged, but too little communication and co-operation between Council and consultant planners in getting applications across the line.

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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 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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