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The Big Government vision

By John Carrigan - posted Wednesday, 12 September 2007


This is significant because new forms of governance are emerging to fill service and other gaps left by the retreating state.

For example, more use is being made of community and other forms of property title. In their most visible form, they include gated communities and strata-based bodies corporate. However, others bring people with a similar worldview or interest together. Many cluster around the sharing of recreational or other facilities. Swimming pools. Community “club houses”. The sorts of facilities that governments once used to provide.

Buyers seem to like them. And they have an understandable allure for local and state governments which struggle to meet communities’ expectations of even basic services.

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Community title creates associations of individual lot-holders with the power to make by-laws on virtually any matter. The exclusions are few. But they also allow roadways, rubbish collection and other “garden variety” infrastructure to be built and maintained by residents.

And new forms of title cover not just homes. The New Rouse Hill Regional Centre in Sydney’s northwest is being developed under community title. The mixed-use retail and residential development at the heart of the development will be the regional centre for over 300,000 people when the adjacent Growth Centre is complete.

The New Rouse Hill is not your usual “shop in a box”. It has been designed with great care, to recreate the feeling of a “traditional” town centre. There are streets. Awnings. Blue sky. The developers have set aside substantial amounts of floor space to community and learning uses.

The management of open space in the New Rouse Hill will be governed by a Publicly Accessible Areas Management Plan (PAAMP), endorsed by the local Council. It only covers formal uses of that open space such as applications to busk, to hold fundraising activities or stage commercial promotions.

However the accountability mechanisms of that plan are problematic. There is, for example, an Appeals Committee. But membership of that committee includes the Centre Management - the agency whose decisions the applicant is appealing against.

Moreover the committee has the power to make orders of costs if legal representation is required and an appeal is deemed to be “frivolous, vexatious, misconceived or lacking in substance”. The power to make such orders is not clearly established and constitutes a legal puzzle.

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There are limited protections. But none address the fundamental issue: that responsibility for public order has been delegated to an agency which is not public and not publicly accountable in ways that are commonly understood.

Nor does the PAAMP address the issue of individual or group behaviour which is the greater challenge for managing public order. But those wider, more problematic applications were easily understood by locals who wrote in support of the plan.

One was quoted in council papers on the plan as writing “… we would not see the proposed Management Plan to be onerous and would welcome tight security as a protection against unwanted visitations by undesirable people”.

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About the Author

John Carrigan is Manager of Community Resource Network Inc. which works to support small non-government human services organisations in Blacktown and outer-Western Sydney.

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All articles by John Carrigan

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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