Planning for a City
September, 2020
ONCE KNOWN FOR ITS PLANNING PROWESS
Planning should improve the quality of life of where people live, work, and enjoy their local environs. How it is that with adroit incremental creep, we are now faced with a planning system failingly full of ‘experts’ yet devoid of local participation and locals who have no substantive rights to be heard? Why is ‘planning’ diminishing local character and devaluing the conservation of heritage and streetscapes? What use is vague language that speaks with uncertainty and unaccountable discretion? These are questions for previous governments and their bureaucracies. The question today is not how to ‘turn the clock back’, rather how to ‘make the clock work’ again. That requires the insertion of local voices ‘with teeth’ that can develop planning in tune with local needs to support and improve local character. Planning should be for people and about people, not just for ‘experts’ or those in the business of development or planning. Let create something better than planned imbalance and planning without balance.
The Society provided a submission (thank you Geoff Goode!) during the consultation about the new Planning and Design Code that was being rushed into error.
The multitude of voices – an unusually united chorus of individuals, community groups, local councils, and special interest groups – and a new Minister, has paused the perfunctory adoption of the complex and largely unwanted Code, presumably pending more serious reflection and review, and meaningful consultation.
A large petition presented to the Legislative Council resulted in the Legislative Review Committee inviting submissions about issues raised in the petition.
The Society lodged a submission that opined:
‘It is not too late to bring the planning system back to life and inject it with the human values of living (and working) in the City, our suburbs, and our State.
That requires what is presently missing, namely the substantive participation of residents and businesses in the planning process, both in the interests of where they live or work, and the character, heritage and future development of their local precincts and communities.’
The Society’s submission made 4 key points.
Amend the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Act 2016 to prescribe equality of procedural and substantive rights of representation, comment and appeal as between applicants and representors (i.e. all participants (residents, businesses and communities) with a contiguous, adjacent or locale interest), save that if an application is non-complying, … an applicant should have no appeal right. (Impact of the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Act 2016)
Amend the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Act 2016 to ensure local decision-making; and that all levels of formal decision-making operate publicly with transparency and objectivity; with suitable breadth of participation (local community and expertise based) and membership (incl. gender); and without persons who are actively engaged, … , in development as a business or represent developer interests. (Governance … in planning institutions)
Revise and recast the proposed planning and design requirements to improve clarity for assessment (i.e. fewer vagaries, e.g. ‘substantial compliance’, ‘not at significant variance’, ‘performance assessed’); to provide primacy to the desired qualitative local character of localities, and to character enhancement and streetscape and heritage conservation; and that the design code be revised to ensure … desired character and enable qualitative … design [for] sustainable environments for individual and community living …. (Planning and Design Code provisions)
That the consultation process be acknowledged as flawed. That it ought to have been scalable to not be so overwhelming huge as to be beyond the reasonable time capacity of individuals or communities to become informed and engaged … with the plethora of changes and propositions. Genuine consultation requires a modicum of opportunity to [address issues and impacts]. It should be incremental rather than monumental, and … [create] consensus with local residents, communities, and businesses. (Planning and Design Code consultation)
Just as all politics is local, so too is all planning. People residing and conducting businesses in precincts should not be silenced by one-sided planning that mutes local voices and has little regard for local character.