Originally published as an editorial under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 35, no. 2 (March 2009): 4.
The big planning challenge for the government this year is to get runs on the board. Disenchantment normally advances slowly, like old age, but the release of Melbourne @ 5 Million (M@5M) late last year will likely be remembered as a defining moment in which disillusionment made a bold and striking advance. Neither the Minister nor Melbourne 2030 are new any more, and if we are to maintain our faith in both, 2009 needs to see less spin by the government, more honest acknowledgement of problems, and more tangible progress towards planning goals. We are too far into the life of Melbourne 2030 to still be polishing our implementation measures.
A big part of that equation is speed, and we need to recognise the impediments to doing things quickly in our system. There has for some time been a mantra-like insistence from various reviews – such as Making Local Policy Stronger and last year’s Auditor General’s report – that our current system is basically functioning well and needs only minor tweaking. This is not the case. The unfortunate truth is that the Act and the VPPs as they have evolved are not terribly good fits for each other, with the theoretically laudable traits of each combining to create gridlock. The first trait is the emphasis in the Act upon consultation and notification when preparing planning scheme amendments. The second trait is the VPPs’ emphasis on statements of strategy, spurning prescriptive scheme controls in favour of performance-based assessment. Both principles are fine, in theory.
Unfortunately, in practice the former trait has resulted in amendments being exceptionally arduous and difficult: it takes an atomic bomb to blast a line of text into or out of a planning scheme. There are no appeal rights for applicants, and no timeframes other than the two year ‘sorry, start over’ lapse date. Notice provisions are extensive and inflexible, and the panel process for considering submissions is overkill in many cases. The sharing of responsibility between the Minister / DPCD and Councils disperses any ‘ownership’ of overall time frames. Little wonder that it averages 22 months to make a change to the scheme.
Meanwhile, the prevailing culture about how to write VPP schemes has led them to devolve into endless statements of broad principle: ‘hooray for everything’ provisions. Hooray for heritage! Hooray for sustainability! Hooray for housing choice! Hooray for neighbourhood character! Hooray for everything, in fact, except detailed and specific guidance about what might be acceptable, or how to resolve such competing imperatives. The nature of the Act reinforces this institutionalised timidity, because everyone knows that once approved, it will be extremely hard to revisit a control. So better to keep scheme guidance general, trigger lots of planning permits, and let someone sort it out later. Arguments that should be settled on a state or locality-wide basis become a series of site-by-site battles in permit processes, with varying answers depending on which council officer, councillor, or VCAT member ends up making the decision. This results in inconsistent decision-making that frustrates and stifles development, scares the community, and stymies any attempt at an ordered or harmonious built form.
Robin Goodman’s article in last month’s Planning News highlighted the problem of policy back downs such as the movement of the urban growth boundary in M@5M. Yet that problem occurs only at the high level strategic documents that can be modified on a whim. The great body of controls that flow from those high level documents cannot be so easily changed. So we have a variable and apparently negotiable strategic blueprint, with a scheme structure below that is set in stone and difficult to change. This is the opposite of what should occur. We should have a firmly set overall strategic vision along the Melbourne 2030 model, as Goodman argued, but under this we need a more malleable structure that can respond to evolving circumstances and challenges. How can we ever get low-level planning controls that reflect our strategic goals if those goals change more quickly than we can put in place the implementation measures?
The recently released draft residential zones show the results of these problems. They are clearly the result of a backlash against the usual vague performance-based controls, but they adopt prescription in the bluntest way possible. 9m height limits will prevail nearly everywhere (Residential 3 is the new black, apparently), except in areas where we want substantial change: they get an extra 4.5m. An ‘out’ is allowed through the use of schedules, but this is where we fall foul of the realities of the amendment process. The height-modifying schedules might work if amendments could be done quickly and simply, but they can’t. How much time will it take to localise all those controls? How many Councils will devote the extensive resources needed to amend the standard heights? Probably about the same number who got rid of bothersome parking controls through the similar “out” clause in the car parking provisions. In other words, hardly any.
So here’s some vision for the Act Review: drastically streamline the amendment process. Get rid of authorisation and certification. Make the notice provisions more flexible. Give the amendment process some time limits and circuit-breaking appeal rights, along the lines that exist for the permit process. At the same, rethink the way Scheme controls are written. Let policy be strong and specific, rather than pretending a zone rewrite somehow does this job. Make it easier to work out solutions (be it for parking rates, heights, densities, or whatever) for whole areas and get them into the scheme. Relax about well-justified prescriptive controls, and use them to eliminate permit requirements and increase certainty. Shift to a system where more resources are devoted to developing targeted and responsive scheme controls, and less to keeping an army of statutory planners haggling over what the policy might mean for individual proposals.
At the moment we agonise about every introduction to the scheme, but allow existing dysfunctional provisions to do damage for year after year. We need to loosen up about changing schemes, but be more rigorous in monitoring their performance. That way schemes can evolve and progress, rather than ossify. As we face enormous challenges from the big policy fights such as sprawl and climate change, as well as unexpected emergencies such as February’s catastrophic bushfires, it is vital that the system be able to respond quickly. We need to take the handbrake off.