Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House:

(1)

recognises the importance of sound urban planning for the long term future of our towns and cities;

(2)

acknowledges that:

(a)

planning new communities and regenerating older communities must maximise the ‘liveability’ of these communities;

(b)

local planning should ensure that:

(i)

local employment is available close to the local communities;

(ii)

transport options are well connected and integrated, including the availability of public transport and bike paths to reduce car dependency and promote healthy alternatives such as walking and cycling;

(iii)

housing and local infrastructure are designed to minimise the environmental footprint, including options to promote water and energy conservation;

(iv)

community services are available; and

(v)

local infrastructure facilitates a sense of community and place; and

(c)

urban planing of our communities must maximise the social, economic and environmental outcomes for local residents; and

(3)

urges all levels of government, industry, associated professions and the community to work together to ensure that we have healthy, happy, safe and sustainable communities.

In moving this motion, I hope that the parliament will join me in recognising the importance that sound urban planning has for the future health and wellbeing of our cities, local communities and us as individuals. With the population of our cities growing and with the increasing demand for housing, our communities are faced with a challenge of how we best manage this need. The solution is much more complex than just allowing urban sprawl to continue. Rather, as the motion states, we must take the opportunity to develop communities that maximise the social, economic and environmental outcomes for local residents. This reflects the Planning Institute of Australia’s principles on urban growth management, which begin by declaring:

Any pattern of urban growth has social, economic and environmental implications that need to be considered and balanced in deciding the most desirable urban growth solution.

This means, as the motion states, that the planning of our new communities should consider the availability of local employment, allowing for people to spend less time travelling to and from work and more time with their families. The motion also makes clear that considerations regarding the health of residents are essential. If we look at the ABS statistics in 2007-08 we find that they show that 68 per cent of all Australian men and 55 per cent of all Australian women are overweight or obese. This is an increase of five per cent since 1995. We need to think about how our town planning may affect every policy area, including health, and how we might address this issue of obesity in our society. People can be healthier and have a more enjoyable life with the best opportunities if they are at the forefront of planners’ minds and considerations. This means ensuring that transport options connect people to their places of employment and their places of leisure.

Transport options should include clean and green modes such as bike paths and public transport. They also mean making it easier for residents to go to local shops and services on foot. A well-designed community reduces its carbon footprint by reducing the amount of kilometres driven by each of its residents, in turn allowing residents to spend more time enjoying the things they like to do around their local community. On top of this, if people are not driving they are more likely to be walking or riding their bikes, which, as I said earlier, is far better for their health and the environment.

As our suburbs keep expanding, as they are likely to do in Kingston, it is vitally important that we think about what we would like our new suburbs to look like. I know that the RMIT University is currently undertaking a 10-year research program titled ‘Re-imagining the Australian suburb’ and I look forward to reading more of their work, but we already know a number of key things. Our future suburbs need to be designed so that houses and communities minimise water consumption and to allow for the re-use of greywater and stormwater run-off. They need to be planned to minimise energy consumption in terms of lighting and other energy use. There are many local communities who are already choosing to take the lead on this. In my electorate of Kingston, residents of the Aldinga eco-village have prided themselves on their houses and their common community areas being both water and energy efficient.

To make sure that we promote the wellbeing of our communities, we must plan to provide for community spaces, spaces for young and old sports teams to compete and places for families to enjoy and share activities with one another. Urban planning as an idea has a very short history, but if we do not realise the ramifications of bad town planning then our communities will not sustain us into the future. I commend the motion to the House. (Time expired)

Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to join with the member for Kingston on this issue of town planning and support her motion. I understand she comes from an area which has significant planning issues. The Onkaparinga council—the city of Onkaparinga inches into my electorate—struggles with issues of planning in the southern suburbs of Adelaide.

There are two issues I wish to deal with tonight in regard to planning. They relate to my electorate, Mount Barker and surrounds, Littlehampton and Nairne in particular. Some years ago, in 2000, the Heysen Tunnels opened in the Adelaide Hills on the Great Eastern Freeway, which opened up the Adelaide Hills significantly. That was the former member for Mayo’s greatest achievement as the member for Mayo, he proudly boasts, and it certainly has created significant economic development in the Adelaide Hills, opened them up and changed the dynamic.

However, it also brought an up-tick in growth—in Mount Barker, Nairne and Littlehampton in particular—which has brought with it considerable difficulties, with lagging infrastructure, roads, services and water. Water, of course, is a huge issue in my electorate. This has been a major concern for my constituents. It has a major impact on our ability to grow our own food. The Adelaide Hills produces not only some of the best wine in the country but also some of the best food. It is an important area for agriculture and an area we must protect. With this fast expansion there has been a real impact on people’s ability to continue to grow their own food. We have seen farmers tempted by offers from developers—as retirement packages, I guess—for their land. This has created an interesting dynamic, where there is now quite an anti-development feeling in Mount Barker and surrounding communities.

The second issue I want to deal with is that of future growth in my area. It is an issue which the state member for Kavel, Mark Goldsworthy, has been following. I commend Mark for the work he has done. He recently surveyed the towns concerned asking people’s opinions on this issue and received quite an extraordinary reaction, with about 1,500 survey respondents all very strongly raising concerns about the pace of development and the actions of the state government in relation to development. The state planning minister, Mr Holloway—who I think is an upper house member in the state parliament—said in our local newspaper, the Mount Barker Courier, which has also been pursuing this issue with some vigour, that the state government will have the final say about continuing development in the region. It is fair to say that that has enraged locals. Rather than locals and the council being considered and their views taken into account, the state government is just going to bulldoze its way through ordinary people and their views. That has caused an enormous amount of concern in my electorate. Development is a very contentious issue, particularly as it impacts on agricultural land, services, whether we have enough police, hospitals, health care and whether the roads are up to standard. Mount Barker is a country town that is now being turned into a dormitory suburb.

This is a big issue, and I was disappointed with the action of the state government. I hope that they will reconsider the part of their plan—I think it is a 20-year plan—where they plan for Mount Barker, Littlehampton and Nairne to grow significantly. They should reconsider that. The people in my area want them to do so. What the state Labor minister said and did has been very unpopular. I think people accept that bulldozers are needed for development but they will not accept their opinion being bulldozed by the state Labor government. They need to reconsider this quickly. I know it is not an area that state Labor has traditionally put much emphasis on, up around Mount Barker, but it should not be treated as a second rate area because politically it is not important; it is very important to the Adelaide Hills and to South Australia. The Adelaide Hills retains a beauty and it should not just be turned into an outer dormitory suburb. (Time expired)

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As someone who is deeply interested in the future of our cities, and who believes that the forms of our cities plays a critical role in the sorts of lives we are able to lead, I am pleased to support this motion. The forms our cities take are important. They have a profound influence on our economic prosperity, on the impact we have on our unique environment, on the level of social exclusion and inequality experienced in our communities and on the quality of life Australians and their families are able to enjoy. Well-thought-out urban planning fosters the free flow of people and goods through major areas of economic activity and service delivery. Good urban planning connects communities with the Labor markets, educational institutions and community networks needed in order for them to flourish.

The great majority of Australians live in our major cities. You need only look to greater Melbourne or south-east Queensland to see the rapid expansion of our urban periphery. Our local community in my electorate of Isaacs, in Melbourne’s south-east growth corridor, is part of that expansion. We have young families looking for affordable low-density housing in new estates in Keysborough, Sandhurst, Carrum Downs and Skye. We have retirees moving from family homes to smaller properties in newer, denser developments by the beach in Chelsea, Carrum and Mentone. We have the growing industrial areas in Dandenong South and Braeside. And in the middle of my electorate we have a large green wedge. Previous far-sighted planning has preserved this green wedge, which provides our community with a semirural area close to home.

Urban policy in growth areas like my electorate demands careful planning for the needs of a community which is as diverse in age and occupation as it is in income and cultural heritage. Urban policy permeates every level of government involvement in public life. More than most other areas of policy, urban planning calls for an active role from government because we have a collective interest in the form of our cities. All governments have a legitimate policy objectives in areas like economic prosperity, social justice and environmental stability. These objectives can be facilitated by the structure of our cities or they can be ignored. Decisions about industry and innovation, migration, public transport, housing and infrastructure all affect the form and function of our cities. To act as if urban planning is not a federal issue does not lessen its federal implications; it simply results in poor policy outcomes. Government must be involved in and must lead the planning of our cities. This extends to the federal government as well as to state and local governments.

The Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government has created a major cities unit in his department. This major cities unit enables cities and agencies responsible for urban issues to have a single point of contact within the federal government. It is appalling that, for almost 12 years under the previous government, Australia had no Minister for Housing and no major cities strategy. We need to remember that the Labor government that left office in 1996 had created a Better Cities program and a Better Cities strategy, the objective of which was to address a number of challenges facing Australian cities. Those included rapid growth and a demand for infrastructure investment on the fringes of major cities, loss of population and under-use of facilities and services in established urban areas and the increasing social, environmental and economic cost of poorly planned and managed cities. After the 12 years of inaction of the Howard government these are still among the challenges of urban planning that face Australia today.

The Rudd government is responding to these challenges through the major cities unit and a coordinated whole-of-government approach to urban planning. Given the significance of urban planning to our economic prosperity and social structure, the future of our cities demands national leadership, which the Rudd government is providing. I look forward, in the coming years, to seeing more being done at a federal level in relation to the urban fabric of our cities, because the federal government is in the position of being able to provide the leadership which is needed, the leadership that was sorely lacking during the whole of the period of the former Howard government.

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the motion and the sentiment that has been put forward by the member for Kingston and acknowledge her interest in this area. I do say, though, that sentiment is no substitute for hard work and that words are no substitute for even harder work. And this area of public policy requires not only a lot of hard work but very extensive collaboration, because so many of the influences on successful cities are dispersed right across multiple levels of government—and, more importantly, across all the consumers, home purchasers, developers and investors, all looking at their interests as we in this national parliament look at the national interest.

This is not something new, though. This issue has been with us for some time. The previous government certainly did more than apprise itself of these concerns. It set about doing something about them. In fact, in the 2003-04 budget there was an urban environment initiative around sustainable cities. It touched on a number of issues concerning water quality, the information available within the community, air quality, renewable energy, waste management, the Year of the Built Environment, green buildings, a green car rating scheme, cycling facilities, air quality research, photovoltaic rebate schemes, chemical monitoring database, the National Pollutant Inventory—just to name a few. So this is not something that is particularly new.

But it went further. I was pleased to chair the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment and Heritage and undertake what was then viewed as a very seminal piece of research and a piece of important national leadership with the sustainable cities inquiry. This committee report was born out of my conviction, and that of the coalition government’s side of the parliament, that the cities that we have may not be directly a consequence of federal government policy but, when they do not work well, it lands on the federal government to provide the remedies. The social hardship, the economic dislocation, the enormous commuter times, the cost in terms of environment and in terms of family pressure, the economic concerns and the vulnerability of people to movement in petrol prices and the like all come home to the federal government.

With that in mind we thought, ‘What can we do now to outline a template for more sustainable cities into the future,’ and this report did that. We led that debate and it was welcomed unanimously right across the community and in a bipartisan sense. I was promoted into the ministry and did not have the privilege of finishing the final few paragraphs—my friend and colleague Dr Mal Washer had that honour and distinction—but the report is still very much true to the work that we undertook. It talked about the key things that we need to look at in terms of sustainability: to recognise that more than three-quarters of GDP—the economic activity in Australia—happens in our cities; that the vast proportion of the population lives in our cites; and to recognise the pressure on our environment, our consumption of resources and our future living standards. All these are interwoven in our cities.

The report identified a range of areas of action about urban development and the role that the federal government could play in urban policy in trying to make sure that all decision making and funding was aligned to sustainability and better city objectives. It also looked at settlement patterns: what was happening in terms of dwelling sizes; the size of households; and the different models that were developing around the place and how they could be handled in a development assessment process that did not seek to tell people how and where they should live—because that would be destined to fail—but would at least make it easier and more convenient for people to live with amenity and lifestyle and with ready access to those important elements of their lives that they wanted to be near to, and if they were not they would commute.

A long time ago I drove a Mazda 808 super deluxe coupe, burnt orange—a great vehicle for its time—and at around 19 I stopped driving for pleasure and for the fun of it and started driving because I had to travel somewhere. I had a transport task. The mobility requirement was to move from where I lived, to where I worked, to where I studied, to where I played sport and to where I undertook leisure activities. The key about more sustainable cities is not just better planning and better urban land use but it is also about integrating all of those areas of policy so that those key elements of people’s lives are more within reach. We outlined an agenda for that in the sustainability report, but I do not have the time to go through that.

I was pleased that our leader, Malcolm Turnbull, was a part of that committee in its later incarnations and continues to highlight the importance of these issues. But I am drawn to something that Victorian senator Kim Carr said. He said that if you do not have a minister for cities and a minister for urban development you are not for real. Labor does not have a minister for cities and it does not have a minister for urban development. The opposition has a shadow minister for sustainable development and cities and, on the Kim Carr benchmark, the opposition is far more serious about taking the important action, not just recognising the problems and the challenges but putting in place the sound public policy. I fear that this will again be an area where Labor quickly identifies and secures the political opportunities and the sound bytes and leaves the sound public policy and hard work to others. The coalition is up to that task; we have the policies and they will be revealed—(Time expired)

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I begin by commending the member for Kingston for bringing this matter to the attention of the House. I certainly will not use up the few minutes that I have responding to everything that was said by members opposite, but I noticed the member for Dunkley talked about the record of this government when it comes urban planning and I think it is like chalk and cheese when you compare it with the previous government. I want to specifically respond to something the member for Mayo said when he made some references to the state planning minister in South Australia, the Hon. Paul Holloway. Paul Holloway is in fact a very highly regarded and very competent planning minister and one who is held in the utmost respect by most of the developers and the people involved in planning in South Australia.

I should also say that when it comes to the Hills Face area of South Australia, which is a very unique area and one that is of concern to a lot of South Australians, it was in fact Jay Wetherill, the planning minister prior to Paul Holloway, who implemented a freeze on planning and development in the Hills Face zone until a comprehensive community plan was developed for all of the Hills Face area. So, again, when it came to protecting our very valuable Hills Face area, it took a Labor government in South Australia to do that.

I would like to make a number of observations with respect to this resolution. The first is that good planning is often taken for granted and sufficient recognition is not given to the importance that it plays in the lives of people. Planning can have a very profound effect on the quality of the lives of people who live in any community, because that is where they spend their lives, it is where they interact with others and it is where their children attend school, sport and other activities. As a consequence, a person’s life is very much influenced by the people they associate with. Local communities effectively become an extension of one’s own home. You can often become very attached to your local community, as we see frequently from the fact that people will live in the same area for pretty much all of their lives. And if you look at the statistics you will see that of those people who do move the majority do not move very far away from the original suburban area or community they grew up in. So it is a fact of life that the local community and the planning that goes into it can truly affect the quality of a person’s life and the opportunities that are presented to them. Sometimes, regrettably, as a result of poor planning rather than a lack of opportunities, a person will find themselves in a situation where they are confronted by some very negative forces. Time will not permit me to elaborate on that but perhaps on another occasion I will.

So good local area planning does make a drastic difference to the individual lives of people, to the environment, which we have heard other speakers talk about, and to the economic opportunities presented both to the individual and to the community as a whole. Critically, the areas of health and education outcomes can very much become reliant on good planning and good development. In recent times the term ‘sustainable communities’ has often been used; it is an expression you hear quite frequently when you talk to planners. Conversely, governments around the world are now expending large sums of money rectifying and rebuilding poorly planned communities of earlier years. We have some good examples of that is South Australia where the state government today is having to expend hundred of millions of dollars in order to rectify and rebuild communities that were built some 50 years ago and not properly planned out.

One of the sad things that I hear too often is that there ought to be more land released for the purpose of building new homes. It is a view promoted by a number of housing developers. The problem with that is that housing developers may be very good at building houses but they are not necessarily so good at building communities, and there is a difference. Having a nice house without access to schools, shops, hospitals, sports clubs, parks, community hubs, universities, workplaces and so on can very much add to the cost of living and can lead to a much poorer quality of life for those people who live there. It is true that not all services can ever be available in every community. But that is why transport systems have to be designed from the very outset. However, I accept that long-term area planning can never be perfect. (Time expired)