The Ernst and Young review of the ACT’s Planning and Land Management misses the point. It talks about customers, clients and stakeholders. It talks about efficiency and being customer-focused. There is a brief reference to sustainable development, but the whole tone of the report is to get PALM to bang out development applications as quickly as possible with as little fuss as possible and with a few people and as little expenditure of money as possible. And the Government has committed itself to this approach.
And who are these clients, customers and stakeholders? There seems to be precious little reference to existing and future residents or to the Australian public who own the capital.
The report stresses meeting customers’ needs and maintaining close relationships with clients (ie, developers). This is precisely what the public does NOT want in a planning and land management body. The public wants distance and impartiality and an eye to the public interest.
The territory needs development and urban renewal. But it also needs to balance that against the amenity of existing residents and the overall aim of maintaining a beautiful functional city. These things cannot be “”bench-marked”. They do not conveniently fit into the mostly meaningless jargon of the management consultants.
Existing residents and the other great stakeholder in Canberra — the people of Australia — want PALM to serve them. They do not want PALM to develop “”an organisational culture of clearly meeting customers [developers’] needs”. Rather they want expert planners and land managers to assess the impact of a development in the context of the rest of the city. The developer, on the other hand, mostly sees the development in the context of his bottom line and the land use his client wants.
It really should not be necessary to have the number and strength of almost vigilante residents’ groups in Canberra. Canberrans should have by and large been able to entrust the balanced development and urban renewal to public administrations, territory and national. Alas, it has not been the case, and for very good reason. The Territory administration has virtually abandoned statutory planning as a philosophy. In abandoning the overall vision and very little concern for it by many developers, it is small wonder that individual PALM officers have had to resort to the detail of regulations to obtain some restraint in individual cases.
Ernst and Young pleads for PALM to “”create an environment where staff have the appropriate skills and the authority to take decisions”. But Ernst and Young’s idea of making decisions means saying “”Yes” despite the rules, rather than saying “”No” to inappropriate development and making developers rework their proposals more sensitively. Ernst and Young wants PALM staff to be less bureaucratic. Does that mean throwing out the rule of law to serve customers’ (developers’) needs?
PALM is in no condition to take over the federal elements of planning Canberra as suggested by Ernst and Young.
The Government should ignore the Ernst and Young report and strengthen PALM’s ability to look after the public interest first. Rather than changing PALM’s culture to suit developers, the Government should strive to change the developers’ culture which seems to maximise profit and floor area at the expense of amenity, aesthetics and ambience environmental excellence. It is these that we want a planning body for, not to rubber stamp whatever developers want.