Community Alliance Party

COMMUNITY ALLIANCE PARTY
OFFICIAL LAUNCH - 2008 ACT ELECTION CAMPAIGN
Thursday June 12th, 2008
Albert Hall 7.30pm

Opening Address
BETTER GOVERNMENT

TONY POWELL, AO

Introduction

We need - and as a community we deserve - better government.

We need to reinvigorate the 'national capital' idea.

We need to replace party-political values with community-based values.

What follows is a town planner's “thirteen point” program of electoral responsibility.

Realities

1. National Capital Governance is not sustainable: The current system of National Capital governance is unsustainable, firstly because it is not possible for the ratepayers of the ACT to fund the ongoing development and maintenance of the National Capital, secondly because land sales are an important source of revenue for the ACT government but are a depleting resource and, thirdly, because it is only a question of time before the Commonwealth will have to take back financial responsibility for the key land use elements of the National Capital that are already in various stages of decline:

• Central National Area
• Metropolitan Parkway Network
• National Capital Open Space System
• National Capital Institutions Sites and Settings.

2. ACT Government needs to re-negotiate 1988 Obligations: There is accordingly a pressing need for the ACT Government to re-negotiate fiscal, land management and urban planning and development responsibilities with the Commonwealth. This is particularly the case in relation to the obligations assigned to the Territory in 1988 (without prior agreement) in accordance with the provisions of the ACT (Planning & Land Management) Act, on the grounds that current sharing arrangements are inimical to the legitimate interests of ACT residents, in addition to being inadequate to maintain the special qualities of the National Capital as envisaged by the framers of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution in 1901.

3. Critical Need to re-invigorate the “National Capital Idea”: Since the 1988 abandonment by the Commonwealth of its constitutional responsibility to establish and maintain a national capital, ostensibly in favour of Territory self-government, the image and status of Canberra as Australia's national capital has declined. The quality of Canberra as a planned city is likewise deteriorating. Unfortunately an unwitting process of 'normalisation' has been at work over the last 20 years that threatens the whole idea of Australia's national capital being a unique city. Also Canberra is becoming noticeably less efficient in terms of ease of access to the national parliament and seat of federal government offices and national institutions and it continues to fall far short of being the preferred place for the Commonwealth to host visits by foreign heads of government and the conduct of national and international meetings and conferences. There is accordingly a need to re-invigorate the “National Capital Idea”. There is also a need for the ACT Government to accept that its role is to act as the agent of the Commonwealth in relation land planning and management and that it does not possess the powers of a state government nor would it be in the interests of the Territory for it to do so. There is a need for the Commonwealth to resume responsibility for national capital planning as well as for the development and management of national capital facilities as outlined above, otherwise the slow degradation of national capital aspects of the city will continue.

4. The Neighbourhood is under threat: The “Garden City Character” of Canberra is being destroyed because of inadequacies in the policies and development control provisions of the Territory Plan. This situation is made worse by insufficient budget and professional resources within ACTPLA and the fragmentation of urban planning responsibilities throughout five different agencies and three ACT ministries. From a community standpoint, last year's amendments to the Territory Plan have severely curtailed the scope for public consultation and rights of objection and appeal in relation to potentially adverse development applications. Environmental as well as planning and design standards have been lowered, supposedly to streamline ACTPLA's development assessment procedures, however, the opposite effect is already markedly evident while at the same time the amenity of residential areas everywhere is under serious threat, as are all the facilities and services that local communities value as being fundamental to the concept of the “neighbourhood unit” as Canberra's basic building block.

Key Issues

5. Transport: The greatest threat today to the economic and social progress of the ACT is the chronic under-funding of transport infrastructure:

• Parkway Network. The eight-year, $120 million plus Gungahlin Drive, Stage One and Glenloch Interchange project is an unmitigated disaster, not only in terms of time and cost parameters but also because of the clumsiness of its planning and design. It is obvious that the initial two carriageways do not have sufficient capacity to cope with current levels of peak-hour traffic demand, much less future growth. This means that construction of the remaining carriageways is already a necessity, which might well take a further 3 years and $100 million to complete. The Stanhope Government seems to have no appreciation of when all of the designated elements of the metropolitan parkway network ought to be in place nor the amount of money involved. The intention of the 1984 Y-Plan (on which the original Territory Plan was based) was that by the time Canberra's population was approaching 350,000-400,000, both the eastern and western parkways would be in place plus the Parkes Way/Airport freeway upgrade and the Monash Drive/Wakefield Ave CBD by-pass. At current rates of population growth for Canberra and Queanbeyan, these works will need to be completed by not later than 2020 and will probably cost in excess of $500 million.
  
• Public Transport. The ACT Government acknowledges that in order to meet desirable standards of reliability, comfort and convenience, the capacity of the ACTION fleet needs to be increased substantially and the associated network infrastructure also needs to be improved and modernised. The current rapid increase in fuel prices is causing a dramatic shift from private to public transport in all Australian cities, which means that in Canberra's case - where there is already a 30% backlog - the need for such improvements is certainly pressing, however, there is no sign that the ACT Government has any sort of plan or capital investment program in relation to how these challenges are going to be met.
  
• Public Parking. Despite warnings from the property industry and business groups during most of the past decade, the Stanhope Government has been blithely selling off public parking sites in Civic and the Town Centres without any strategy or program for replacement, much less expansion. This is part of an ingrained tendency on the Government's part to treat income from land sales as though they were “net profits” and therefore available to fund other parts of the budget. The result is a dearth of funding for related infrastructure and, in the case of Civic, an unsightly accretion of hundreds of cars being parked literally on the foreshores of Lake Burley Griffin. The Government seems to be quite incapable of implementing a metropolitan public parking strategy of any kind with the result that parking blight is proliferating and is becoming increasingly widespread, to the detriment of residential areas and public open spaces.
  

6. National Capital Plan/Territory Plan: The National Capital Plan has remained virtually unchanged since its initial adoption in 1990 and has become seriously out-of-date because it does not reflect, and is unable to respond to, today's needs and conditions. The Territory Plan, on the other hand, has been repeatedly fiddled about with, to the extent that in 2007 it was largely gutted of its metropolitan planning policies and principles so as to become basically a zoning and development control instrument. It is no longer a statement of the ACT Government's long term spatial strategies, development objectives and underlying town planning principles on which the future development of Canberra will be based, that role being left to the National Capital Plan and the National Capital Authority to now take on board. There is accordingly a need for a major revision of the National Capital Plan and for the National Capital Authority to be given increased resources and funding by the Commonwealth, ironically at a time when the Senate Committee under the chairmanship of Kate Lundy inquiring into the role of the NCA, appears to be aiming to bring about the opposite effect.
 
7. Public Housing: The quality and effectiveness of public housing in the ACT leaves a lot to be desired. The existing government housing stock in the inner suburbs is all too frequently in poor condition, insufficient in quantity and prone to disturbance by fractious tenants. In the case of multi-unit housing particularly, ACT Housing appears to be incapable of managing such properties with their significant numbers of disruptive tenants engaging in alcohol and drug-related criminal activity that poses constant threats to the safety and wellbeing of responsible tenants. This is a long-standing situation yet the Stanhope Government can find $120 million to build a new prison and $40 million a year to run it, as though this was somehow an obviously more important social priority. The whole issue of affordable housing is a 'black hole' in the sense that there is no obvious strategy, and hence not much in the way of active public programs, to meet the rising demand for accommodation from homeless youth and similar destitute groups in what is by any standard an affluent city. When one looks at the Government's adopted priorities, such as the prison, the international arboretum, a million-dollar Northbourne Avenue sculpture, football subsidies and anything else that manages to attract the Chief Minister's sympathies, then it becomes apparent that there is no rigorous procedure for assessing socio-economic needs and assigning priorities in the budget context.

8. Civic and the Town Centres: The Government has no coherent plans for the ongoing development of Civic and the Town Centres which, when coupled with hopelessly ineffective municipal administration, means that beyond the confines of the shopping malls they are all becoming increasingly dilapidated and unattractive. The Government's only interest seems to be the sale of vacant sites and the approval of any redevelopment, regardless of the lack of intrinsic merit, which might enhance its 'betterment' income. As a general rule during the last two decades no Territory Government has managed to make significant improvements by way of new cultural and recreational facilities as a counterbalance to rank commercialism, which means that in the particular case of Civic, it has nothing to offer as a tourist drawcard to complement the city's national capital attractions. The truth is that Canberra's commercial centres generally are not as well maintained or as attractive to tourists as are the centres of most regional Australian towns, such as Bairnsdale, Bendigo, Orange or Warwick, for example. This is essentially a failure of municipal administration and testifies to a lack of imagination on the Stanhope Government's part.

9. Gungahlin and Molonglo: Over a period of more than fifty years, commencing with the establishment of “Garden City” principles by Sir John Sulman in the 1920's as the basis on which Canberra's development should proceed, Canberra has been planned and developed as an 'Ideal City” by successive Commonwealth administrations. With Gungahlin being the first new town to be planned and developed by Territory government, it seems that all of the lessons of the preceding decades have been forgotten or deliberately put aside. In Gungahlin, all of the urban development standards have been pared back - street, verge and footpath widths have been made much narrower, lot sizes are smaller and backyards have virtually disappeared. Access to sunlight has been reduced to a statutory maximum of 2 hours, as measured on the day of the winter solstice. There is little scope for tree planting in household gardens or in street verges to the extent that for many households it will be necessary to rely on artificial heating and cooling, especially in the case of medium density housing. The principle of providing accessible public open space within 600-800 metres walking distance of each residence is no longer a mandatory requirement. The worst excesses of these policies can be seen in Harrison, for example, where some of the medium density housing and street development near the town centre is worse than the by-law housing in the industrial cities of 19th century England that gave rise to the need for statutory town planning in the first place. These practices seem designed to maximise the development potential of the land and the profitability to the Government, in the first instance, and for the benefit of the developer ultimately. It augurs ill for Molonglo that, on the face of it, what the Government proposes to achieve will be left largely to the discretion of private enterprise to exploit in whatever ways the market determines.

Governance

10. Restoring the “National Capital Idea”: Canberra's image as Australia's National Capital has unquestionably been diminished as a consequence of self-government. The quality of the city as a planned built environment has been and is continuing to be degraded, partly due to the withdrawal of fiscal support from the Commonwealth and partly by the failure of successive Territory governments since 1988 to maintain the high standards of planning, construction and development that were achieved during the previous 70 years or so of Commonwealth administration. The future of Canberra depends fundamentally on its success as a national capital. The city exists for this and for no other reason, a reality that Territory governments ignore at their peril and to the fatal disadvantage of the electorate. The experience of other federal capital cities worldwide shows that Canberra is unlikely to ever become an important centre of commerce or industry and that the interests of residents and business in the ACT will always be best served by the Territory Government constantly striving for the active involvement of the Prime Minister and the Commonwealth in the affairs of the Territory so as to keep the “idea of the national capital” alive and material, which the Stanhope Government is certainly not doing. In fact the Chief Mister seemed to go out of his way to antagonise the previous Prime Minister and appears to be similarly inclined in relation to Mr Rudd.

11. Fragmented Planning Administration: Responsibility for urban planning, land development and transport planning has become hopelessly divided under Chief Minister Stanhope, spread as they are between five different ACT government departments and agencies to the serious detriment of both the natural and the built environment as well as to the social and economic efficiency of the Territory generally. There is accordingly a need to establish a department or statutory authority under the title of “Planning, Development and Public Works” responsible for the integration of land use/transportation planning and land development and coupled with municipal engineering services not currently administered by ACTEW. The ACT public service needs to re-equip itself with a cadre of professional engineers and municipal managers in order to significantly upgrade the Government's ability to provide a more satisfactory level of local government services.

12. The Role of the Assembly: There is something obviously wrong with a system in which five Assembly Members who are ministers are manifestly over-worked while the remaining 14 Members are only required to turn up on 60-odd days a year to attend Assembly hearings. Given that the most important role of the Territory Government is the supply of efficient and reliable municipal services, then a 'Brisbane City Council' arrangement would surely be much more suitable than what we have got at the moment. In other words, we need a system in which elected members are involved in the review and determination of how the provision of essential government facilities and services should be supplied and the subsequent monitoring of program performance. Under the current system, ACT departments and government agencies are subject to far too much unwarranted intervention by Ministers and their advisers at the cost of efficiency and expeditiousness. From the community's standpoint there is frequent obfuscation as to project and services performance and a clouding of where executive responsibility actually lies. This means that public sector CEO's are not able to be held accountable for the performance of their agencies and cannot be fairly penalised for poor performance on the part of either themselves or their agencies, which means that even in extreme circumstances they rarely lose their jobs, their salaries or their perquisites. It is no wonder, therefore, that hardly a week goes by when there is not an adverse report or comparison about the Territory's ability to provide efficient and effective public services.

13. Enhancing and Empowering the ACT Public Service: The balance of human resources  skills in the ACT public service needs to be altered. The Territory service is structured along similar lines to that of the Commonwealth public service wherein much of the work to be carried out has a distinct 'policy' emphasis, however, in the ACT the demand is mainly for the direct delivery of material facilities and services. This means that policy-type work ought to be de-emphasised in favour of more and better-trained people being assigned to program management and the provision of tangible services at the 'coalface' as it were. The ACT public service also suffers from an over-reliance on the use of ad hoc consultancies. These as a general rule fail to recognise the principle that even the best work by consultants is only as good as the public servants who formulate the briefs and ultimately have to deliver the policy and program outcomes. Similarly, in the area of municipal services there is too much use of external contractors by the Territory Government. Such people can never have a sense of ownership of a precinct like Civic, for example. They will not muster the sense of corporate pride that is the sine qua non of creating and maintaining attractive urban centres whether it be in Canberra, Paris or Washington. The ACT is severely handicapped generally in its ability to attract good quality staff, largely because successive Territory governments have allocated so little care and attention to building a modern and well-resourced public service, especially one that is tailored to the unique and complex difficulties of maintaining a city that is both a metropolis and a national capital.

AJP
7.6.08