Are we witnessing the gradual development of a national planning policy from Australia’s Federal Labor government? The past few months of political contestation have witnessed the perceptible convergence of policy across multiple Federal portfolios. In early-2010 a brief commentary on the future size of Australia’s population and its rate of growth in a Treasury report sparked an energetic debate about the nation’s long term prospects. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared he was comfortable with a ‘big Australia’ and the role of immigration in supporting national prosperity became a matter of voluble discussion.
The population debate has also spurred Australia’s state governments to contemplate their own obligations keeping a rein on galloping urban growth. The Queensland government is already facing a fractious task in managing the rampant population expansion that is stretching the seams of the state’s urbanised South East. Premier Bligh in early 2010 responded with a Growth Management Summit which brought together a mix of politicians, officials, miscellaneous experts and community members to debate approaches to accommodating and methods for managing new growth. Similar albeit less deliberately shepherded debates have arced across the public sphere in other states.
Shortly after the Queensland growth management summit the Prime Minister announced the appointment of Federal Agriculture Minister Tony Burke to a new portfolio of Population Minister. Among the duties of the new Minister will be to:
“…consider the likely trajectory of population growth and the challenges and opportunities this will create. Minister Burke will also be tasked with developing the cross government frameworks that will be required to make the most of the opportunities, and minimise the risks, associated with population growth.”[1]
Among the portfolio areas that the new Minister will address are infrastructure, housing, regional towns, service delivery mechanisms and roads, as well as environment, water and urban congestion.
Regrettably the media reportage of the new portfolio gave only cursory attention to substantial program focus and instead was distracted by the airier numerical projections of the population figures accompanied by some treble toned environmental anxieties over sustainable capacity. From some stalls even came compostable claims that Labor’s motivation for the new population ministry lay within the party’s unsettled policy on maritime refugee arrivals.
For urbanists there are more portentous grounds on which to register the appointment of a Population Minister than really big numbers or hapless refuge seekers. While population might be a largely abstract point of departure the destination suggests it could involve a more sustained planning approach to Federal policy at the Federal scale. Many of the ingredients for national planning intervention are already in the policy mix. These include various background and policy documents as well as formal investment programs. Treasury’s Intergenerational Report series has already begun to resonate in some respects the historical ambit of the former Indicative Planning Council, especially if viewed in juxtaposition with the work of the National Housing Supply Council. If the priorities assessment capacity within Infrastructure Australia and the Major Cities Unit’s State of Australian Cities reporting are also counted then population, housing, infrastructure and wider urban questions are already the subject of the most robust Federal analytical capability for some decades.
Urban planning has also been a surprisingly central focus of this recent Federal activity. Strategic planning and development appraisal systems are to be harmonised under the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) and subordinated to a new set of nationally agreed principles about planning processes. COAG is to instil an unprecedented level of conformity among metropolitan plans for Australia’s state and territory capitals. The most recent COAG meeting was distinctive for the re-arrangements of the health system but also contained the first Federal attempt in nearly thirty-five years to link housing policy and with urban planning via a mooted review of state zoning systems. This review will require the Productivity Commission to actively engage with urban questions.
Could this effort be translated into a coherent Federal urban policy formation? A number of current Federal schemes that could be comparatively readily folded into a national planning program include Infrastructure Australia’s investment portfolio or the National Rental Affordability Scheme and associated housing and homelessness programs. But if Federal policy is to address population growth in a more effective and sustained way it will need to widen and strengthen the scope of its ambition beyond guidance and directive funding to a more concerted engagement with cities. The current spread of urban policy effort risks producing a coincidence of dispersed activity than a coherent program to improve the economic and environmental performance of Australian cities. While many of the key Federal components of a national planning program are now established they require much greater coordination and alignment if they are to go beyond observation and indicative analysis to urban transformation.
The vast potential scope of progressive urban structural reform in Australian cities is almost unrecognised in current policy discussion. Labor appears intrigued by the potential of urban policy but also seems wary of the past forays of Whitlam’s 1972-1975 renowned Department of Urban and Regional Development and Keating’s 1991-1996 Better Cities Program. Both had their weaknesses and only the Whitlam schemes achieved appreciable long run structural change. An engaged and active national planning policy might also provoke considerable State consternation interference in their traditional domain.
Treasury may be the crucial conceptual advocate – the 2010/2011 budget contained a long musing on the structural questions facing Australia in absorbing a long run flow of resource income. Much of this capital influx will be urbanised posing a plethora of challenges for cities, including potential further inflation of asset prices. The recently announced Resource Super Profits Tax looks set to offer a degree of federal control of the capital influx, initially through infrastructure. Infrastructure alone cannot resolve the contradictions of contemporary urbanisation and a wider suite of engaged policy will be essential to the task of managing not just the growth of Australia’s cities but their wide transformation. The Labor Federal government certainly possesses the incipient capacity for a national urban policy but it may not yet be seized of the necessary audacity to realize this wider agenda.
[1] Rudd, K. (2010) New Minister for Population, Media Release, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, 3 April.