Page 662 - Week 02 - Thursday, 6 March 2008
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currently constituted in its current role really wants them to. Its persistence in advocating a new dam on the Molonglo River is evidence of that.
ACTPLA and the LDA need to recruit suitably experienced staff and create institutional mechanisms whereby social and environmental considerations can infuse throughout the organisation—backed up by the authority necessary to carry the change in attitudes and thinking that is required if the LDA is to deliver the urban development outcomes necessary to meet the challenges of climate change, an ageing population and various other contemporary considerations that did not need to be part of the training of the planners of yesteryear and that have not been significantly apparent in the outcomes we see on the ground in various developments and new suburbs around Canberra. For example, houses are still oriented towards roads, and roads are oriented towards nothing in particular. I have been speaking about the LDA but, given the en globo development that we are going to see a lot more of, the ACTPLA regulations, the territory plan and legislation are even more important.
Considerations such as solar access, groundwater flows, pedestrian access, prevailing winds, and wildlife connectivity do not seem to have exerted much influence on the urban planning outcomes to this point in time. Good intentions do not of themselves deliver outcomes. Molonglo Valley affords a perfect opportunity to demonstrate that ACTPLA and the LDA can be trusted with the additional powers the planning reform process will deliver to them. I wish them well. This government and its planning authorities will be judged not on what they say but on what actually transpires on the ground. Derek Wrigley has pointed out a number of absurdities in the star rating system that is relied upon in the ACT to deliver energy efficiency outcomes, and shortcomings at the crucial stage of design of roads and blocks.
The new planning system strives to be hands-off and self-regulating, but I suspect that the government will come to learn once again that the free market cannot be relied upon to deliver optimal social outcomes if decision-making processes are not heavily constrained by regulatory guidance.
In this town there is a belief, and an influence from the property and development lobby, that is against more regulation around energy efficiency and other design principles, on the grounds that consumers find it too expensive and do not want it. But on Insight a week or two ago I was interested to see an AV Jennings representative begging for regulation—begging governments to regulate to mandate energy and water efficiency so that clients are obliged to demand it and builders can deliver it. Within the territory plan there is reference to those things, but I do not believe it goes far enough to provide that regulation that the more enlightened developers are calling for because then they will not have to build the energy-inefficient houses that some clients still want.
Of course, many developments rely on externalising and shifting costs onto others in order to reap maximum financial benefit at one point in time for the developer—the point of sale. If the government does not keep a close watch over future so-called affordable housing developments, it will end up creating nasty, crowded, energy-guzzling boxes on the fringes of the city which will impose greater costs on inhabitants and make a mockery of claims that they will be affordable over time. Derek Wrigley describes these as the slums of the future.
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