THE Industry and Trade Practices Commissions have conducted half a dozen major inquiries over the past few years. Nearly all of them have been into the people we love to hate: oil companies, real-estate agents and lawyers for example.
(Journalists, among those Stuart Littlemore and others love to hate, incidentally, have rightly escaped their attention, for we have a fairly open profession. Ring-ins like John Howard and Bill Mandle are permitted.)
The commissions is out to get monopolies. They hate laws which give the professions exclusive practice rights, high entry requirements and expensive in-club practices.
Indeed, it is now at a stage that I cannot see why the commissions should bother with expensive inquiries inthe future. You can be reasonably confident of what their findings will be on any topic well beforehand: repeal all special laws pertaining to that industry or profession, allow others in to do at least some of the work, lower professional entry standards, insist on uniform professional standards across the states, allow practitioners to move between states without hassle and to rely on general trade-practices provisions to ensure competition, truthful advertising and consumer protection.
All very commendable stuff.
But it can be taken too far. And there is another side of the coin. Sometimes, the legislature says people have to be protected from themselves. Thus backyard appendectomies are frowned upon. Sometimes, the legislature says people have to be protected from each other. Thus only a certified mechanic can pass a car for registration.
And conditions can change. A professional monopoly justified yesterday might be no longer justifiable today. Equally, where no professional monopoly was required yesterday, it might be today.
Technology gets easier to use, so a dental technician can whip up a set of false teeth without six years of dentistry training. Property-law simplification and computer title-searching make it unnecessary fora conveyancer to have five years legal training.
The point of this column is to argue that conditions in town planning have got to a stage that it is time to impose some sort of architectural standards upon people wanting to build within the city limits.
The common law has always been that a man (and last century it invariably was a man) could do what he liked with his own land: build as high as he liked; dig as deep as he liked. In a land like Australia it seemed not to matter what people did with their land. Now, however, the population has grown and governments do not seem to have any population policy to stop it.
More and more people are living in smaller spaces, especially in the cities, and governments are encouraging it. People are living closer to each other. This means the buildings they are in have to be designed better to avoid noise, sight and other impacts from close neighbours. It also means that if government permit extra building within the old 1960s quarter-acre-block areas, neighbours can be profoundly affected.
Canberra’s present in-fill argument is not so-much about in-fill per se, but about the quality of the in-fill.
The trouble is, builders are getting drafters to do the design, or worse are doing themselves. A builder might be an excellent constructer. The building might never fall down, but that is a different skill from design. Moreover, bad design does not just affect the person doing the extension, or dual occupancy or the people who chose to buy a new townhouse in a redevelopment zone. It affects all the neighbours.
People have to be protected from their neighbours’ bad design, and perhaps their own bad design.
Perhaps it is time to look at compulsory architecture: no planning approval without plans being signed off by an architect. Or if not signed off, planning authorities should make it clear the plans will be scrutinised in detail and rejected if badly designed.
Sure, some architects are lousy, but most architects are better at architecture than most builders. The result can only be an improvement.
And in the long run it may be cheaper. The savings in energy and social costs of cramming people into badly designed dwellings would more than pay for the architecture.
But don’t tell the Industry and Trade Practices Commissions.