Less is more

The UDIA recently released a paper "Planning for Queensland's Future," the first recommendation of which said pretty much that:

"Recommendation 1 – Front load community consultation at the point of plan making and remove impact assessment for all Class 1a (single detached home, row house, terrace house, town house, villa) and Class 2 buildings (units) where those uses are encouraged under a planning scheme."

This might sound to some like a great leap backwards to the sort of regulatory environment that prevailed in the late 1980s to early 1990s. But surely, if you've just gone through 10 or 15 years or so of the dead hand of bureaucracy and find yourself with an unworkable, expensive and hopelessly cumbersome system that isn't producing better outcomes, why not revert to something that actually worked better? It could be as simple as dusting off copies of the old State legislation at the time, and local government planning instruments of the time, and using these as guides for designing a more workable system.

But taking away this sense of entitlement that the community has been led to believe is theirs in terms of objecting to pretty much anything (they call them BANANAs - 'build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything') is going to hurt. The NIMBYs won't like it. The anti-progress, neophobic preservationists who seem to think the current urban form is nirvana and nothing should change (neither grow, nor shrink but just stay as it is) will protest. They'll argue their 'rights' to have a say over what someone else can do on their own property have been taken away. There'd be vocal protests about 'rampant development' and 'environmental destruction' and 'attacks on democracy' - all bywords for self interest.

Protests may also come from the legion of planning bureaucrats and policy makers who have slowly but inexorably grown attached to the current system and feed handsomely off its processes. For example, the 270 (approximately) staff of the Sunshine Coast Planning and Development Directorate (who evidently outnumber the ratio of doctors to the general population), might have less to do if the process became much simpler. There might only be a need for 50 of them along with a number of building inspectors. Jobs would be lost.

This sort of thing is the inevitable outcome of cutting red tape. Less red tape must mean fewer bureaucrats administering it. It must logically mean fewer processes, fewer opportunities to 'have your say' at every step of a process; fewer opportunities for political or protestor interference in perfectly legitimate developments. It also means that any new systems put in place needs to be vastly more efficient, transparent, and accountable. (Despite the labyrinthine processes of the current approach, you could never accuse it of being either transparent or accountable, and certainly not efficient).

Plain English plan making and community consultation at the plan making stage will mean using a language the community understands – something which might prove difficult for a generation trained in the language of obscurity. (Mark Twain allegedly once wrote: "I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead.")

It might mean moving (finally) to more visual and sensory platforms for plan making, reducing previously complex arrangements to simple, transparent and readily understood plans. Simply knowing what can and can't be done on particular blocks of land can't be too much to expect?

Footnote. I was recently swapping notes on this subject with some contacts spread around the globe. I asked if anyone could actually identify a jurisdiction where the burden of overly complex regulatory environments had been collapsed, and where markets had responded and the economy expanded. Their answer? 'How about the former Soviet Union?' they said. How's that for a comment about the command and control environment we now live in - that it's seen as comparable to the sorts of excessive controls that existed before perestroika.