Urban planning expert Kevin O’Leary has spoken out in the Advertiser this week.  You can hear what Kevin and other experts from the community have to say about the Government’s planning reforms at our public forum on 21st October (see the post “South Australia is Our Backyard”).

For the article by Kevin O’Leary

IMPLEMENTATION of the South Australian Government’s proposed planning reforms would be waste of taxpayers’ money.

There’ve been a number of undesirable consequences from the lack of exposure given to the shortcomings of the State Government in operating and managing the planning system for over a decade.

First, much of the blame for the planning system failures has been unfairly directed at local councils. Second, a whole range of questionable new bureaucracies and processes are now being proposed, and third, there are few effective solutions being proposed to the main problem areas.

These include:

1). Current complexity of the system. Although the number of planning zones will be reduced there will still be myriad planning control instruments including a planning design code (with local variations), policies, objectives, principles, rules, urban design frameworks, structure plans, master plans, design standards, overlays, precinct plans, and more. These instruments should be rolled into just one instrument: policies.

2). Poor quality development plans. Many policies in development plans are ambiguous, poorly researched and don’t cover key issues.

The Government’s proposing to replace development plans with a Planning and Design Code but there’s no indication that it will be any improvement on what we already have. Given its past failures in this area it needs to produce a sample code for public scrutiny before attempting to enshrine it in legislation.

3). Varying policy interpretations.It appears that major projects like the 23-storey tower proposed on the corner of Rundle St and East Terrace, have to be outrageously at variance with development plans before they’re rejected by the Government’s planning authority.

The widely diverging interpretations placed on the importance of individual planning policies by planning assessment panels are a longstanding problem that the new planning legislation just won’t fix.

The ‘‘softer’’ planning interpretations now being applied to major projects is similar to the NSW Labor government’s approach in 2006 after it stripped control of these projects from local councils. There was widespread outrage from the community and the development lobby about the planning decisions it made, with the consequence that when a Liberal Government was elected to power in March 2011, the powers were returned to councils.

4). Politicisation of planning decisions.Although Planning Minister John Rau argues that councils are too politically driven and not competent enough to assess major development proposals, this is a claim which arguably could be applied more to the State Government than local councils.

The Government’s view that new regional assessment panels which include professionals but not local councillors will provide better outcomes carries little weight.

Urban designers and architects quite often don’t agree as to what is good or bad design and many demonstrate political rather than merit aligned views on development.

To overcome these problems, more precisely worded and weighted policy directions are needed. It’s also imperative that local councillors be on development assessment panels as design professionals are notorious for completely ignoring local context.

5). Poor public consultation practices. These won’t be improved – in fact the public will have even less say on development. The Government’s view that consultation needs to be confined to policy development and not development control would be disastrous in a system where policies are still open to wide interpretation.

It’s also of concern that evidence of inappropriate/inadequate public consultation processes won’t invalidate any planning decision or process.

From an overall perspective, in fact, a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money would be wasted in implementing the proposed reforms as real solutions still have to be found to our planning system problems.

Published in the Advertiser on 16th Oct 2015.

Print copy of Kevin’s article: