This speech was delivered on 20 August 2013 in the NSW Upper House. You can read the original contribution online here.
PLANNING REFORMS
Mr DAVID SHOEBRIDGE [7.03 p.m.]: Many elected members in this Parliament will have met today with representatives of the Better Planning Network [BPN], who were here today to talk about their substantial concerns with the Government’s proposed planning reforms. The changes that the Better Planning Network has come to Parliament to discuss have been put forward by the NSW Department of Planning and Infrastructure in a green paper and then white paper over the past 12 months. In selling its reforms, the Government has talked up its level of community engagement. We have heard from the planning Minister time and again that the model they want to most closely follow is that of Vancouver, which he holds out as world’s best practice for planning.
The Vancouver model front-end loads planning laws by focusing consultation on strategic planning decisions and constraining input later down the path. In short, Vancouver residents get a say when deciding the planning rules but are frozen out when considering approvals for specific developments. Any planning model that relies on community input for strategic planning requires substantial investment in fresh ideas and money. It is unfortunate that the New South Wales planning department is not rich in either. Minister Hazzard has said that Vancouver involved one in four of its residents in its strategic planning, and he says he wants to do even better than this in New South Wales. The efforts to date by New South Wales planning are not even getting close to this goal.
In fact, only approximately 4,500 responses have been received to all stages of the green and white paper planning consultation to date, which works out to be only a tiny fraction—0.06 per cent of the population of New South Wales. To be fair to the Government, some of those submissions have come from strong representative groups such as the Better Planning Network, which has many individual members. But no matter how we cut it, the O’Farrell Government’s apparent best efforts at strategic consultation in planning have paled in comparison to others throughout the world. In return for strategic engagement, the O’Farrell Government is intending to take away resident’s rights to have any say at all on 80 per cent of all individual developments.
To give some context, the Council of the City of Sydney alone determines approximately 3,000 development approvals a year, all of which are the subject of community consultation. That is matched by councils throughout the State which daily engage with thousands of people about the size, impact and suitability of proposed developments in their local areas. But consultation slows down development approvals. It can take 42 days or more to engage with the community, and all this democracy in planning is too much for Minister Hazzard and the State’s big developer lobby groups. Their plan is to take away this real and valued right for people to make submissions to local developments that impact on their neighbourhoods and replace it with a far less valuable right of token consultation on strategic planning.
More through coincidence than good planning, recently I visited Vancouver and took some time out from a family holiday to meet with city hall and speak to community members about their experiences with planning. Unsurprisingly, even when strategic planning is done well, locking the community out of other decisions further down the line causes significant community unrest. Vancouver has connected with many people in setting its new planning rules. It is laudably moving towards carbon neutral buildings by 2030 and is reducing energy and water use in all major new developments. In achieving these goals it is approving the wholesale demolition of large sections of downtown Vancouver. Many of the charming two-storey wooden cottages that gave Vancouver its sense of history and place have been lost and replaced by architecturally challenged unit blocks that would be as comfortable in Hong Kong or Singapore as western Canada.
These developments are routinely approved by city hall planners, who almost exclusively speak with developer proponents. In response, Vancouver has a number of residents groups that have been formed in an endeavour to give ordinary people some kind of say. One of those is City Hall Watch. Its website has posted a guide to Vancouver city planning doublespeak. I cite a couple of examples. For “Protected View”, they say its regular meaning is, “A critical and precious public view that is protected for public enjoyment”, but the meaning used by Vancouver city planners is, “The small section of sky or mountains indicated is protected from encroachment by new buildings, but everything else is up for grabs.” The flip side of “protecting” a miniscule view is implicit permission to destroy all that is not “protected”. On “Discretionary Height” they cite the regular meaning as, “The greatest height permitted after applying ‘discretion’.” The meaning that is used by the Vancouver planning department is, “The starting point for negotiations between the city and a developer.”
Another group that has risen up against Vancouver’s top-down planning laws is West End Neighbours. In 2011 they gathered more than 12,000 signatures to a petition calling on city hall to stop pro-developer rezonings in their neighbourhood until the city was willing to engage, in their words, in “meaningful consultation with residents, protect existing neighbourhood liveability, and respect-maintain the character of the neighbourhood.” To date, that has been ignored by the Vancouver city planners. When looking to Vancouver to give us ideas on how to do planning in New South Wales, we need to learn the whole lesson. Brad Hazzard and his department have failed in this task. Not only is their community consultation seriously lacking, but by being wilfully ignorant of the real situation in Vancouver they are taking New South Wales down a seriously flawed path. But it is not too late. The flawed proposals should be withdrawn and the Minister and this Government should go back to the drawing board.