Victories and disasters in planning.

Meanwhile in Melbourne the Metropolitan Planning Scheme was released in 1954. The Dictionary of Melbourne summarised it thus: a “cautious, practical response to problems of low-density sprawl, the need to decentralise industrial employment, traffic congestion, use zoning, and Cold War concern about 'protection of the population from the effects of aerial warfare'”. (It did not predict the rise of shopping centres.)

The Cumberland plan was scuppered by former Lord Mayor now minister Pat Hills in 1959. He released much more of the Green Belt and announced the Warringah Expressway and Western Distributor and other massive works. He was warm in the arms of the Department of Main Roads and their US consultants, all of whom had moved away from the CCC.

The County Council’s legendary planner Rod Fraser counter-attacked with a public transport plan but this went nowhere. The same applied to several strategic plans written by Rob Caldwell in the mid-1960s and Jim Colman’s “A Plan for Sydney” in 1967 on behalf of the Civic Reform Association. The government’s Sydney Region Outline Plan of 1967 was a door to faster growth - let it happen, develop along road and rail corridors, more houses on the outer.

The Sydney Area Transportation Study (1974) had been a massive attempt to dress up the roads and balance them with railway, tram and cycle projects. The Whitlam Government inherited the sewerage backlog. This was a national disgrace. Many of the freeway works announced by Hills and incorporated in SATS and in Melbourne were rejected by the national government, saving inner western and northern suburbs.

The new Wran Government endorsed the URTAC Report (1976) which tailored project schedules to available funds, for example by deleting the extension of the Warringah Freeway; and several outer rail extensions were approved. Wran re-commenced the foreshortened Eastern Suburbs line which had been dormant from 1952 until 1967. It finally opened in 1979, representing a similar period of quietude to the completion of the inner rail loop (1932 to 1956). The ESR survived due to its notorious “holes in the ground”; whereas the Doncaster line in Melbourne that had been planned since the 1890s, commenced in 1974 but had its hole filled in two years later, remains to be built.

The Greiner/Fahey Government battled with the substantial infrastructure gaps on the fringe and finally released its Integrated Transport Strategy (1995). ITS had no measures against accepted economic, financial and like criteria; and two of the projects were the first modern PPP crises.

Planning to deceive

The UK government had made major progress in developing PPP frameworks and it was expected that greater confidence would be generated. The framework included transparency in performance indicators and inclusion of all stakeholders.

Fahey won the right to hold the 2000 Olympics which regenerated enthusiasm in infrastructure at all levels of government and society.

The Carr Government from 1995 conducted the Olympics but got into progressively deeper mire over train, bus, ferry and road performance. Wran/Unsworth had released a series of strategic plans; this accelerated under Carr to the point that re-announcements, cancellations, deferrals and modifications attracted adverse press comments and measurable community discontent.

In not one document were outcome indicators stated; contract details became “commercial in confidence”; and indeed most announcements were in the form of press releases which disappeared from ministerial websites. Several local government reviews were conducted (structures as well as planning processes) but none produced appreciable results and one, the attempt to return the City to Labor hands, backfired spectacularly. The Chatswood to Epping rail link was a PR disaster with cost over-runs and performance issues.

Several “missing links” in the road network were approved as PPP tunnels but both failed in every way - investors’ money was lost, tolls were high, there were construction mishaps, and the strangulation of alternative routes was resented. Journalists accused planners of milking fees up-front, leaving investors with soggy results.

The need for substantial investment in the major public transport networks excited the private sector lobbies as well as unions and the press.