integrity and accountability

Integrity in the Planning System: Lessons from Sandon

Urban Planning

Image of me presenting at the 2023 VPELA conference in front of a slide reading "Do we have a planning system that leads to integrity."

The Operation Sandon Special Report, released in July by the Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission, is vital reading for all Victorian planners and allied professionals. This is not so much for its findings about the matters at Casey that prompted the investigation, but instead for its timely centring of the issue of integrity in the discussion of planning system reform.

Planning system reform is frequently framed primarily through a lens of red-tape reduction that sees increased system efficiency as its primary goal. However more balanced system reviews have also recognised that it is vital to maintain system effectiveness – after all, no level of regulatory burden is warranted if the planning system is not achieving the policy outcomes it is there to achieve.

However the Sandon report is an important reminder of the third key pillar of any balanced system reform package: transparency and integrity. While some system reviews have commendably highlighted this as a key focus – notably 2003’s Better Decisions Faster and the 2017 review of the Victorian Planning system by the Auditor-General – too often this aspect of system design has passed unremarked.

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Planning Integrity Reforms Must Not be a Power-Grab

Urban Planning

IBAC’s Operation Sandon report into planning decision-making in the City of Casey, released last Thursday, has further fuelled expectations of a major shakeup of the planning system. It has long been rumoured that the state government is eager to make major changes to Victoria’s planning regime, and the report provides an opportunity to add governance and integrity justifications to those reforms.

The commission’s most dramatic recommendation is that statutory planning powers – essentially, the deciding of planning permits – be removed from elected local councillors and instead be given to independent decision-making panels. This raises the spectre of a major dilution of community input to the planning process.

This prospect was reinforced by Premier Daniel Andrews’ comment, in responding to the findings, that it was the government’s view that “the role of local councils in significant planning decisions should be reduced.”

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Matthew Guy’s Ventnor Advice

Urban Planning

I don’t have time for a detailed post about Matthew Guy’s extraordinary decision to tell DPCD to change its advice to him about the Ventnor rezoning. But then, who needs one? Thanks to the good work of the opposition and The Age, the facts are now out in the open, and they speak for themselves. You wonder why he couldn’t just disregard the advice, rather than seeking for it to be changed… But then this kind of stuff, like Madden’s Windsor debacle before it, defies explanation. As I said then, good governance would actually be the canny political strategy in these instances.

I did, however, want to make one quick point about Guy’s conduct here that I haven’t seen made anywhere else, and that’s the contrast between the approach of the state government versus local government in a situation such as this. At state government level, the Minister can direct the Department to change its advice and top bureaucrats will acquiesce. In considering how bad a piece of behaviour that is by the Minister, it is worth considering that if he had been a councillor in local government, his request would have been not just poor governance, but actually illegal.

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Sham Sandwich

Urban Planning

Originally published as an editorial under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 36, no. 3 (April 2010): 4.

“I am a bit tired,” was the Planning Minister’s explanation in the midst of his cringe-inducing interview with Neil Mitchell after the release of the now-infamous Windsor Hotel media plan; the same protest slipped out during the Minister’s subsequent press conference announcing that the hotel redevelopment would go ahead. On both occasions it was an unusually direct and human admission, all the more notable for the contrast with the attempts at tightly controlled media messaging that had created the problem in the first place.

There seems little doubt that regardless of what happens in this election year, the Windsor Hotel will be remembered as a low point in Justin Madden’s career. Yet what are the actual lessons to be learnt here?

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