Simon Corbell has a lot of skittles in the air at the moment.
Corbell is the Minister for the Where and How We Live (Planning) and the Minister for Whether We Live (Health).
That in itself is an argument for a bigger assembly and more ministries. Even people in foreign aid these days recognise that extra money spent on administration is better than sending the wrong trucks with the wrong sort of food to places where people are well-fed.
But health and the size of the ministry aside, a huge amount is going on in planning which will directly affect the way people in Canberra live.
A week ago we had the workshop on Canberra’s Spatial Plan – fancy words for where the next batch of development will go. This is the macro stuff.
A few days ago the most radical change to the Territory Plan came into force – Variation 200. This sets the rules on the size, shape and placing of dwellings you can build.
A month ago a new requirement for building approval came into force called High Quality Sustainable Development.
And in the past year, the Government has been slowly getting back into the land development business.
These last three are the micro stuff.
And in a week’s time, the new planning bureaucratic arrangements will come into force. This bureaucracy determines whether what you propose to build meets the rules and also looks at the big picture. This is macro and micro stuff.
All of these well-intentioned changes have the potential to improve people’s lives. But on a macro and micro level ugly economics and market forces are likely to have a more profound effect on things than the planners might realise.
Outside Corbell’s ministerial bailiwick we have an economic plan, a social plan and transport options for Canberra. And crucial fiscal decisions affecting land have been made by the Treasurer – increases to stamp duty, creeping land tax and an as-yet unresolved question about the rates system.
The spatial plan is a fairly sensible idea to look at where Canberra should house its projected population growth. Should it be greenfields development within the ACT’s borders; consolidation of high density housing around town centres; greenfields development over the border; or should we continue the present mix with Gungahlin and some in-fill. Or should it be a mix of these?
It has to go beyond a wish list of “I like quarter-acre development with its space and trees” or “I like the cosmopolitan city that comes with high-density development around town centres”. It has to be an informed wish list. The spatial plan has to go hand-in-hand with the economic plan. Corbell says that the planners are working with the economic, transport and social planners.
Even so, the people being asked to comment on the spatial plan need to have a more detailed idea of the infrastructure costs of each of the options. And they have to be balanced against the environmental costs of greenfields and the social costs of higher density living.
In the past, the ACT has allowed environmental considerations to stop development of large tracts of land quite close to the city centre and town centres – in Jerrabomberra, North Watson, West Murrumbidgee, for example. The Government is still rejecting development at Jerrabomberra (the land to the south of Hindmarsh Drive (on the right as you travel to Fyshwick), but West Murrumbidgee, the Molonglo corridor, including Stromlo, are now in the equation.
Corbell has been accused of not releasing enough land so driving prices up. But he argues, quite reasonably, that he is not prepared to allow the bull-dozers in willy-nilly. He has only been in office two years and it takes two or three years to put together the macro planning to create a workable, livable sustainable city.
In the meantime, people have been looking across the border. Queanbeyan’s growth has been more than double Canberra’s in the past decade. Even the Federal Government has proposed new defence infrastructure over the border.
Cross-border questions are important. The Government has rejected any idea of extending the ACT’s borders for the obvious reason that NSW will not permit it. So the actions of Yass, Yarrowlumla and Queanbeyan Councils will have an impact on the ACT. Aside from land shortages, charges like rates, land tax and stamp duty can drive investment over the border. The ACT can use water as a lever. It is required to supply water to Queanbeyan under a multi-government arrangement, but it can put a brake on cross-border development in Yass and Yarrowlumla, by not providing water from the ACT catchment.
Even so, the cross-border element puts a discipline on the ACT to provide affordable land. That will hover over the spatial plan. It will be a question for the new ACT Land Development Agency which begins on July 1. The Authority will oversee the ACT Government’s return to land development. It will develop and sell land.
The Opposition has argued this puts the Territory at unnecessary commercial risk. Industry argues they can do it cheaper and more efficiently. Corbell argues that commercial developers cram too many houses together and generally do not plan well for public spaces and do not give individuals the chance to buy a single block to build their dream home on. The demand for the latter, incidentally, has been shown by the huge prices obtained for single blocks in the bushfire areas. Industry argues that the Government can set whatever planning standards it wants and demand single blocks be made available and still the private sector would develop land more cheaply.
Land is one question. Building on it is another.
On July 1 the ACT Planning and Land Authority, will replace Planning and Land Management (PALM) taking over planning, leasing, land administration, development assessment and building control functions. The authority will have the power to make development decisions in its own right — taking over the functions of the Commissioner for Land and Planning — and will be able to reconsider decisions. A Planning and Land Council will give the Minister expert advice.
The formal bureaucratic changes, however, will not matter a jot if the ground rules are bad; the staff who implement them are too few or too poorly trained; or the people proposing to build are ill-informed.
The conflict is between those who say they ought to be able to do what they like on their own land and those who are directly and indirectly affected by that.
Variation 200 looks like a major improvement for those directly affected by nearby development. The High Quality Sustainable Development regime is in its infancy. If it becomes a tick-a-box exercise it will defeat its purpose. A lot is going to depend on the quality and quantity of the staff at the new authority to educate people about the value of intelligent design which can save them thousands of dollars over a few years and improve their living conditions for not many extra dollars.
It is a good start, as HQSD requires, to make people talk to neighbours and authority staff before they start putting lines on paper and getting locked into a poor design.
Somehow, some wider education on the value of good design has to be done.
The market for dwellings is an ill-informed and inexperienced one. Many people spend less time choosing a dwelling than a washing machine. They only do it two or three times in a lifetime. Many people are poorly educated about the use of space, sound-proofing, landscape, solar light and heat, orientation and so on. They often buy on the location and price of the land and the poor-quality dwelling comes with it. And when they renovate or extend they fall into a market where innovation and competition (on anything other than price) is virtually absent.
It is so depressing to drive into new suburbs and see the houses still oriented to the street front and not the sun; to see so little glass in the north-facing walls, if they have them; to see the same brick-veneer constructions with small single-glazed windows as were used in the 1970s; and worst of all to see design go backwards with people saving a few pennies by removing eaves only to find they need to install expensive air-conditioning as the summer sun belts on their walls. And yet for so little extra money at construction time the dwelling could be made so much more livable and cheaper to run.
Few other items of human manufacture have performed as poorly as dwellings in the past 30 years. All around us the inflation-adjusted price of things comes down and the quality goes up – cars, telephones, computers and electronic gadgets of all sorts, vacuum cleaners, toys, tools and so on. Yet despite better materials technology and better labour-saving tools, the inflation-adjusted cost of the average dwelling goes up and the quality has not hugely advanced.
The poor design costs us all because it consumes resources that could be used elsewhere – in Corbell’s health ministry, for example.
This is the real test for Corbell – to convince people that good design, good residential amenity and private and public open space are worth the initial extra cost for the longer term gain.
Without that education and convincing, people will put up with appalling construction, and developers will be able to argue that this is what the market wants so it must be right. But if the market does not know any different, what hope have we got.