By David Dunstan
Metropolitan problems need metropolitan solutions, or so we are told by Roger Poole of the Committee for Melbourne (Age 7 March, 2008). He bemoans the absence of comprehensive planning for Melbourne and calls for a single planning authority.
We had one – the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works. It was done away with in the 1980s and 90s by successive efforts of the Cain and Kirner Labor and Kennett Liberal administrations.
The Board was not loved. Former Premier Henry Bolte called it ‘unwieldy’ and ‘a political forum’. Sir Henry didn’t want any political forum he couldn’t control. But the Board was a Melbourne instuition for nearly a century. It managed Melbourne’s planning and infrastructure requirements: water supply and sewerage, main drains, city planning, major parks and it would have done more if the government had let it.
The MMBW grew with Melbourne. It acquired power and money, so the Cain government discovered in the 1980s. Its ‘hollow logs’ of reserves were cleaned out, its commissioners abolished and its powers and assets (our assets) were privatised and the plethora of water companies we have today is the result.
The MMBW was the product of Melbourne’s crisis of public health in the nineteenth century. The city was wallowing in its own filth with the non-removal of human waste. Typhoid, diphtheria and preventable diseases were the result. Chronic mismanagement of the water supply system, a growing knowledge of the cause of sanitary problems and failure to build a complementary underground sewerage system forced the government’s hand.
Reluctantly, in 1891, the colonial government created the MMBW as a statutory authority on the model of London’s Board of Works to take charge of the water supply and create a proper and complementary sewerage system.
These days the city’s shit moves silently underground but we have the road toll and noisy motor traffic clogged on our roads.
It was thought the MMBW would not last long. But it gathered power by default. Townplanning powers it acquired only slowly. The recommendation of the Metropolitan Townplanning commission that produced its final report in 1929 mainly lapsed because there was no metropolitan authority to implement them. The Board finally became the metropolitan town planning authority in 1949. It produced the city’s first plan in 1954. There was no other authority to take this on. The State Government wouldn’t.
The city’s ramshackle and ineffectual system of local councils remained. But the councils nominated MMBW commissioners and so a representative link with local government and ‘democracy’ was maintained.
It was thought that Melbourne would get a Greater Melbourne Council along the lines of the greater London council (the London County Council) and a greater city government like Brisbane got in 1924. That didn’t happen despite many attempts to create an elected GMC, the last in 1951 when a bill failed in the Legislative Council by one vote.
The idea of a metropolitan authority still surfaces from time to time and it is interesting to see the idea of a metropolitan planning authority being given a push by the unelected Committee for Melbourne. The Committee is a ‘private not-for-profit member network of Melbourne leaders’ intent on encouraging ‘a competitive and innovative business culture and enhancing Melbourne’s liveability.’
But Melbourne is no longer a discrete metropolitan unit. Suburbia now stretches from Mornington and Pakenham in the east to Whittlesea in the north and Point Cook and Melton in the west, a vast distance.
Planning is the responsibility of the state Minister for Planning with responsibility devolved through to the local councils. But the councils being local, cannot do the bigger jobs.
Frequently they are a vehicle for resident and community opposition to development but developers can appeal to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) which has recourse to the planning minister’s pro-development scheme and guidelines. Developers have always got and continue to get a very good run at VCAT.
We could expect more of local government. Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett’s Local Government Commission reformed Melbourne’s local councils and amalgamated many in the 1990s. He didn’t go far enough to create proper sub-regional grouping that could take on powers of infrastructure provision and planning overall.
Incredibly, the largest and most central of them all, the Melbourne City Council was gutted. Instead of enlarging it to enable it to give a lead on planning issues it was made smaller and even more ineffectual.
A huge effort was put into reforming the City of Melbourne franchise making its electoral provisions quite different from those of any other metropolitan council. Now why would they do that? This was to neutralise the Council as a political force so as to better serve property development interests resentful of inner city residents having any say over development in Melbourne’s lucrative golden mile and inner region.
So, don’t be surprised that today Melbourne’s Lord Mayor today is a glad-handing pro-Tourism promoter who has nothing to say on urban issues of any consequence.
There are murky forces at work. Jeff Kennett was tagged and vilified for being too Melbourne centric. Of course he contributed to his own defeat but Labor under Steve Bracks’ and John Brumby’s leadership cleverly organised anti-metropolitan sentiment which led to his surprise defeat in 1999.
Labor has been careful not to undo the pro-big property interest stance of its predecessors. But it has taken the city for granted these past nine years, assuming that it can absorb the growth to 4.5 million people that will make it Australia’s biggest city by 2020. But the neglect of its infrastructure cannot be allowed to continue. Labor can no longer ignore the congestion on its roads and the appalling state of the public transport system.
It must be worried though about a revived Liberal-National coalition opposition pitching to rural and provincial interests.
Labor’s obsession with fiscal rectitude and a balanced budget, with a tight rein kept on public spending or borrowing has seen opportunities wasted. Neglect and resentment of ‘the urban’ has had equally negative effects on infrastructure planning and diminished public policy.
Labor’s phobia and fear within its closed corridors is still ‘the guilty party’ tag imposed so mercilessly by the Kennett Liberals for their financial ineptitude in the years of Joan Kirner’s premiership.
And so our infrastructure is run-down. Our ninety year old railway system is a joke. We may have newfangled European designed trams but they clogged in streets full of cars. Our metropolis has become a megalopolis overnight. There has been no forward commitment to infrastructure or to diminishing or restricting urban sprawl, as has happened with European cities. This is something that might have been done by a Board of Works or a Greater Melbourne Council…. had one existed.
But we are all to blame. The market, economic growth and get-rich-quick real estate games have been a powerful lure. We have purchased more cars, watched our property values grow and taken Melbourne’s services for granted.
But do we need the growth? What about Melbourne’s much vaunted liveability? The world’s most liveable cities are small and efficient ones like Stockholm, not sprawling ones like Melbourne. And they have forward infrastructure provision and planning. Almost any European city and many an Asian one has a better public transport system than Melbourne.
Good public transport in the form a much-needed modern railway system is light years away, beyond the life of this government. That is why it will do very little to create one.
We see that economic growth has its negative consequences in the twenty-first century as it had in the nineteenth as we grasp at quick-fix solutions to problems of housing affordability.
There are none. We need initiatives and strategies to restrict, plan and provide for a liveable city and we need to stick to them.
The Government should bring its infrastructure departments together and commit to long-term planning and stated goals wanted by the community. But the hard decisions to restrict car use, to create new railway systems and to pay for them may be just too hard.
Action by the federal government in concert with reformed local authorities controlled by the citizens may be required. An independent and apolitical power like the Reserve Bank may be needed to take the hard long-term investment and taxing decisions to fix our cities.
Melbourne’s citizens will have a small chance to record their displeasure with council elections in November. But there is no metropolitan planning authority in sight.
©David Dunstan 2008