There has been a lot of gloom around town since the change of Government.
Senior bureaucrats moped around the Turner exhibition bemoaning the sea change, oblivious in the works behind them of the wonders a real sea change can inspire. The gloom is generated by the belief that Labor was good for Canberra and the Coalition is not. But this is an enthymeme … an argument with some unstated premises.
The full argument would run something like: Labor believes the state should take a more active role; Labor is more centrist; the first requires more bureaucrats; the second requires that they be in Canberra; having more federal bureaucrats is good for Canberra. But saying that what is good for the bureaucracy is good for Canberra can be as mistaken as saying what is for General Motors is good for America. Witness the oil crisis.
Let’s look at the big ticket items. Hawke may have opened new Parliament House, but Fraser got the thing off the ground and ensured the project was an inspired one. Menzies made Canberra permanent. After depression and war, the thing could have been abandoned or let languish. Menzies had to force the bureaucracy to move from Melbourne; create the NCDC and make the lake.
The National Gallery of Australia, the High Court and the National Library came from Liberal Governments. Fraser gave us the Institute of Sport. Labor failed on its one big-ticket national project making a statement of national identity … the national museum. (The Japanese financed the National Science and Technology Centre.)
Labor gave us the bureaucratic buildings: Social Security in Tuggeranong; Tax in Belconnen and the Department of Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs would have been excellent in Gungahlin, but in its present position it is incongruous because it has no design symmetry with Parliament.
We got self-government under Labor, not because of any philosophic commitment to democracy, but to make it easier to inflict cost-cutting. Self-government was not necessarily a bad thing, but Labor failed to maintain strong national standards in the capital. The two Labor ministers who had responsibility for the national elements of Canberra were allowed to treat the National Capital Planning Authority as they pleased. First, Ros Kelly did everything in her power to circumvent and down grade it because it was an impediment to local commercial projects that were important to her electorally as a local member and important to the people in her circle of mutual support.
Then Brian Howe treated the NCPA as a branch office of his pet project, the Better Cities program, which pumped huge amounts of taxpayers money into pet urban renewal projects which were invariably in Labor electorates around the country. At least Howe did not have a white board and was sensible enough to cross all his bureaucratic Ts and dot all his parliamentary Is.
It is fairly damning of Labor’s administration of Canberra that while it used the NCPA as a Better Cities branch office, the city that the NCPA should have been looking after became a Worse City project. Witness Gungahlin, Old Red Hill, dual occupancies on postage stamps in Banks and so on. (And it is not excuse to say they are local matters.)
Labor stands for looking after people and collectivity. That has merit and a downside. Mateship can easily translate into mutual favours. Helping the less fortunate can result in bureaucracies and inefficiencies that prevent the economic boom that might help them. In town planning it can result in mass taste, resources priorities to cheap and nasty housing for all, and a consequent loss of individualism and vision and the economic power to execute it.
The growing bureaucracy which is supposed to have sustained Canberra’s fortunes over the past 13 years has not been as good for the city as the teeth-gnashers of the past fortnight have been making out.
We now have seven centres of state-sponsored power engaged in the planning and building of Canberra: the federal minister, parliamentary committee and statutory planning authority; the territory minister, parliamentary committee and statutory planning authority; and the local area planning advisory committees.
Rather than gnashing teeth, the change of government should be seen as a chance to prevent the spoiling of the broth.