He was always the achievement rather than anything he did. Popular, well-dressed and smiling, always ready to greet a visiting dignitary, talk up the city or promote some new promotional initiative, people liked him. Melburnians were pleased a Chinese immigrant community figurehead and prominent hospitality businessman should occupy the office. John So was a good image. He was not so good at politics or civic leadership. Politics involves solving problems, engaging with different groups and issues and laying down a vision for the future. Politics is work. Being a public figure means being accountable. John So was not available to discuss the city’s budget handed down last August or to enter into debate on Melbourne’s traffic and public transport problems. He was certainly let off lightly by the media. One wonders if he knew much at all about the issues involved. Many people thought he was good at promoting the city. But his way involved lots of media advisors and advertising expense because he was not actually much good at talking. But like the tongue-tied former Labor Premier, Steve Bracks, the public liked him for it and saw him as genuine.

John So’s amiable front over eight years saw the Council and the State government acquiescing in the central and inner city high-rise property boom that has done so much to transform the inner city and make a new class of builder developer capitalists rich. At the same time saddling many a baby boomer with dubious property investment debts but about which the long term benefits are still uncertain. What we do now know is that the city’s much vaunted liveability is under threat due to lack of creative city planning, increased traffic congestion and a grossly overburdened public transport system. You could hardly blame the City Council. Most of the powers to shape or direct city affairs have been taken from it. But we could have seen more innovation or even a raising of issues from a central public body that at the beginning of So’s reign in 2001 was blessed with an abundant surplus, a capable bureaucracy and the capacity to lead Greater Melbourne’s thirty-odd other municipalities forward. The Council’s showpiece, the environmentally friendly and innovative building Council House 2 is nothing more than that: a showpiece that stands in marked contrast to the legion of environmentally unfriendly structures that have sprung up in and around the city.

In the long lost golden days of the 1950s and 60s Melbourne’s Lord Mayors all seemed rich and influential city businessmen who wanted to “give something back” to the community. They were well connected to conservative politics and represented the “ big end of town” in property, retailing and finance especially. Among the best known and most effective was Sir Maurice Nathan who was Lord Mayor for two terms in 1961-63. As a councilor Nathan chaired the committee that got Melbourne ready for the 1956 Olympic Games. He argued for an international jetport at Tullamarine and the Melbourne underground railway loop (both of which we got). He cleverly defused political passions when, following a change of heart, he persuaded the Council to drop a controversial by-law banning the distribution of leaflets at the time of the anti-Vietnam war protests in the 1960s. Nathan was an energetic and talented businessman of the type that despite all the efforts successive Liberal and Labor administration have made to sweeten the path for them no longer covet the top job at Swanston Street.

John So appeared to fit the mould as a conservative self-made businessman prepared to serve the community, seemingly at his own expense. Maybe these city plutocrats lost interest when knighthoods ceased to be an automatic return for being Lord Mayor sometime in the 1960s. But the royal road to the Council robes really came unstuck in the 1970s and 80s when sordid politics entered the Council Chamber once ruled absolutely by the Civic Group. This was the behind the scenes political party that each year decided which well-heeled member’s turn it was to be Lord Mayor. Action by residents groups in the 1970s especially in wards based on North Melbourne and Carlton especially saw a new breed of councillor that challenged the civic plutocrats and Melbourne’s untrammeled developer ethos and produced the city’s first avowedly conservationist and women Lord Mayors in the 1980s. Conservative State government administrations watched on in dismay.

In one of its least impressive and last acts the Hamer Liberal government sacked the Council in 1979. It had served continuously since 1842. The Cain Labor government reinstated “democracy” in 1983 but the voters were unimpressed when ALP back room boys tried unsuccessfully to stack the Council with party hacks. The Cain Labor government introduced the Commonwealth electoral roll as the basis for voting, effectively disenfranchising many absentee property owners. Conservative property interests vowed revenge and got it when the Kennett government returned to power in 1993.The territory of the council was reduced, the Council again sacked and the electoral franchise fiddled with endlessly to make the MCC safe for business and absentee property owning interests. Council assets were sold off and its departments down-sized. Whole functions were contracted out.

Inner city residential areas like North Carlton (where the streets are named after former city councilors) were hived off to other municipalities like the City of Yarra. Those of the emerging Docklands area were denied a vote altogether, until this election. The expensive and cumbersome system of postal voting was introduced along with a Senate-like field of candidates (but areduced number of councilors) across the entire council area. Wards were done away with progressively making it impossible for resident activist councilors to get elected on a cheap campaign. The Labor Party when it gained office in 1999 kept the changes and introduced the separate election of Lord Mayor. Formerly, the Lord Mayor was chosen by the Council. Governing by a slender margin from 1999 Labor wanted as few opponents as possible and was happy to go along with the conservative agenda on inner-city politics. The job of the Council in new-think corporate governance of the 1990s was defined as “steering not rowing”.

Only slowly have residents like some in North Melbourne and Flemington been brought back into the voting fold. They may make a difference at this election along with increased numbers of residents in central city apartments, if they vote. Commuters who spend most of their working lives in the CBD and care about it but live in the suburbs are denied a vote. Yet even as the State Government gutted the MCC and rendered it ineffective with the perpetual threat of dismissal now and again it made waves. Greens and maverick conservative councilors were not happy with John So blowing the City’s $300 million plus budget on junkets, self-promotion and development projects of dubious worth to the ratepayers like the new business serving World Trade Centre.
But John So remained popular with Spring Street. Importantly, he never questioned State Government policy (or the lack of it in urban affairs) or raised disturbing issues for the citizens. Yet he infuriated Council colleagues with his non-attendance at committees and lackof interest in administration and urban affairs. The development of new planning policies and a vision for Melbourne was something for others.
Maybe that’s what the citizens and certainly the government wanted. Local Labor Federal member Lindsay Tanner and State member Bronwyn Pike are on record at the time of the last elections in 2004 as saying the Council it must be doing a good job if you don’t hear much about it. But with metropolitan planning and transport emerging as battleground issues for the forthcoming State election in 2010 the MCC elections could be a test of influence for the Green opposition, even given the extent to which the cards are stacked against them with the electoral system and the franchise.
With candidates still weighing their options and preference deals the focus is still on John So. If he leaves any legacy or example it is perhaps one of smiling inactivity and spin as issues of conservation, environmental challenge, financial accountability and public amenity that would have hit the headlines in previous years were swept under the carpet or simply aside. In the coming weeks Melburnians may consider whether the Lord Mayor’s position is just a ribbon cutting role? Or, does the incumbent need to have something to say about the future of our city, about public transport, about the arts and heritage, about the environment and planning for the future and the health and well-being of the city? Perhaps in the coming weeks we shall hear something from the candidates. Perhaps we will discover whether we are entering into a new post-John So era for the City Council with an articulate and engaged Lord Mayor or whether it is business as usual.

©David Dunstan

The post John So’s legacy….just so-so appeared first on David Dunstan.

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

The post Melbourne Wants for Authority appeared first on David Dunstan.