The light on the hill flickers: continuity and change in Australian urban policy
Paper presented at the 2014 Public Policy Network Annual Conference University of Canberra 30-31 January 2014
Paul Burton Urban Research Program Griffith University
[email protected]
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1. Introduction Despite being one of the most urbanised of developed nations, Australia has only occasionally contemplated the development of an explicit and self-conscious national urban policy. How do we understand and explain this apparent conundrum and would we be better off if we had a more fully developed national urban policy? This paper sets out to answer these questions and proceeds in three main parts. It begins by asking what we mean by a national urban policy and what it has been taken to mean in some other settings. It then considers what has passed for urban policy in Australia before exploring in more detail how we might explain the apparent ebbs and flows in Australian urban policy debate over the last century. The paper concludes with some brief reflections on whether a more explicit and extensive urban policy would improve the well being of those living in this highly urbanised nation. But first, it is important to recognise that much debate about the urban (including urban policy) in Australia is conducted in relation to conceptions of its opposite and on the basis of exaggerated, idealised and romanticised views. Cities are presented as places of boundless creativity and economic opportunity, as well as places of crime, violence and social disintegration; country towns offer a unique combination of community spirit and economic prospects for the small business operator and only occasionally present as crime stricken places of poverty and substantial mental ill health; while the suburbs are either bland and boring or an ideal combination of town and country life. In fact life in an apartment in Melbourne’s docklands can be as boring as in a detached house in Moonee Ponds. In contrast to the romantic (or perhaps romanticised) ideal of Australian country life, in which weather-beaten stalwarts work hard to feed the latte-swilling metropolitan masses while their children enjoy an often parched but nevertheless bucolic lifestyle, free from the crime and distraction of cities, Martin Mischkulnig and Tim Winton have documented in Smalltown (2009) a contemporary rural ‘fugliness’, starkly at odds with this vision. These examples illustrate the often substantial and significant differences between the reality of daily life in cities and rural areas and the pictures painted by advocates and critics alike. In her Quarterly Essay, Fair Share: Country and City in Australia, Judith Brett traces the history of city/country relations and reminds us of the strength of anti-urban sentiment 2
so often expressed by advocates of country life. Just after the 2010 federal election when the Labor and Coalition parties were courting the country independents in an attempt to form a government, this antipathy came to the fore in much public debate and commentary. Speaking on ABC’s Lateline, Tony Windsor likened Sydney to a feedlot into which government policy had been driving people (presumably against their will or least their best interests), while Bob Katter said he did not want Australia’s expanding population to continue to go into cities, ‘We want to take some of the people out of Sydney and Melbourne and put them where they can have a civilised lifestyle..’[emphasis added]. In both cases they believe that living in the country, presumably in or near country towns, offers a better prospect than living in the major cities of Australia and moreover that government policy should make this choice easier, by ensuring decent public services are available in rural areas at broadly the same cost to consumers as in cities and even by offering incentives to take jobs, buy property or to invest in businesses in areas beyond the major cities. The anti-urbanism expressed by Windsor and Katter of course has a long pedigree, going back at least to the early years of the town and country planning movement in the UK where Howard’s peaceful path to real reform envisaged a suburban solution to the problems of over-crowded, unsanitary and dangerous Victorian cities. Judith Brett suggests that in contrast to many of the so-called Baby Boom generation, most young urban Australians now have little direct contact with the countryside or experience of rural family life; the tradition of their parents’ generation of staying with ‘country cousins’ during the holidays has now all but disappeared for the new urban majority. So, public debate about the nature of our towns and cities and about the problems associated with urban and rural areas is often conducted on the basis of only patchy evidence or selective experience. This then frames the way urban policy debate is conducted: do we need it, what should it be, how would we know if it works and so on. The next section considers what, generally, we mean by urban policy. 2. What is urban policy? Although there is a somewhat superficial and self-evident approach to defining urban policy - it is whatever policy has an impact on urban areas – this raises more questions than it answers. For example: what do we mean by an urban area, is it the same as a city, 3
or a major city, or a capital city; which policies have no impact on urban areas and is the impact significant no matter how tenuous the connection; does policy intent have any bearing on this definition such that only policies that intend to affect urban areas should be considered urban policies? Unfortunately previous attempts to provide a robust, widely applicable and theoretically coherent definition of urban policy have often foundered. I hope to get around this problem by focusing mainly on Australian debates about urban policy and on the processes which have framed the issue in these debates. It is worthwhile rehearsing some of the previous debates about the nature, definition and purpose of urban policy in capitalist systems. Cochrane’s (2007) critical approach to understanding urban policy remains one of the most comprehensive treatments of the topic, while Savage and Warde’s (1993) consideration of urban sociology, capitalism and modernity and Dear and Scott’s (1981) collection of essays on urbanization and urban planning in capitalist societies both provide valuable insights from slightly earlier periods. A common feature of each of these reviews is the challenge of identifying the theoretical specificity of anything urban. Savage and Warde are especially concerned with the focus of urban sociology, but many of the essays in Dear and Scott’s collection, while not referring to urban policy by name, seek to explain the nature of urban planning as a distinct form of state intervention. They typically frame the issue of urban planning as a contradictory imperative of capitalist urban development such that dominant sectors of the development industry seek a degree of certainty about the nature and timing of future development that an entirely free-market system would not deliver. However these same interests are often profoundly opposed to any attempt to limit their ability to develop whatever they like, wherever they can do so profitably. This can be seen as a version of NIMBYism in which there is agreement in general with the need for regulation but disagreement over the regulation of one’s own particular development projects and proposals. Until relatively recently, urban policy was often conflated with urban planning and indeed the books by Savage and Warde and by Dear and Scott do not even use the term ‘urban policy’. However, closer to home a collection of essays edited by Troy in 1995 does refer to urban policy but in ways that could be used synonymously with urban planning, albeit extending to the metropolitan scale.
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Cochrane’s discussion of the ‘what’ and the ‘when’ of urban policy is instructive. He refers to the ‘chaotic conception’ that characterises much discussion of British urban policy and suggests that its main distinctive feature might be a territorial or area focus. This is somewhat helpful, but as Saunders (ref) points out this does not tell us whether processes of development and the social and economic outcomes associated with them are essentially (or theoretically) different in a capital city, a large regional city or a small country town and hence whether different policy responses are called for. Of course there are well-recognised scale and location effects that will affect our understanding of these problems and our framing of policy responses to them, but it is not clear whether these are essential or contextual elements of any explanation of the specificity of the urban (Pawson and Tilley, 1997). But we should remember also the historical trajectory of urban problems as requiring policy intervention, or the ‘when’ of urban policy as Cochrane puts it. In the UK, a concerted and explicit policy of spatially targeting problems in cities began in the 1960s, prompted in part at least by growing tensions within many cities in areas where relatively large numbers of new migrants from Commonwealth countries were settling, to the consternation of some existing residents Burton, 1997). Racial politics also served as a spur to much North American urban policy development where the racialisation of poverty and the increasing concentration of non-white Americans in those cities facing the greatest problems in adjusting to rapid economic change and deindustrialisation could not be ignored. Although there is clearly a degree of racialisation in the framing of urban problems in Australia, this does not appear to have been as strong as in the UK or USA, even though the need to respond to problems of concentrated urban poverty and more widespread inadequacies in urban infrastructure is an important element in explaining the emergence of urban policy in Australia. So, in many settings including Australia, urban policy signified a concern to address problems that were most obvious and perhaps even most severe within urban areas. Although ‘urban areas’ were not clearly defined they were taken to refer mainly to the capital cities. Scholarly preoccupation with the theoretical specificity of the urban was not of any great concern to policy makers and there is no evidence that it limited the terms or the extent of policy development in Australia from the 1960s onwards. 5
Moreover, in many respects this scholarly concern with the specificity of the urban faded when explicitly Marxist (or neo-Marxist) analytical frameworks were superseded first by the post-empiricist tendency to rely more on discursive critique (Fischer and Forester, 1993) than on the development and testing of theoretical propositions and then by a neoliberal frame that offered opportunities for expressions of academic indignation more than a theoretically informed program of practical and political opposition (eg Lovering, 2009). The underlying urban problems of market dysfunction, concentrations of poverty and growing social inequities in Australian did not go away. However, a coherent and cogent urban policy response required a coherent and cogent appreciation of the wider metropolitan setting of urban areas, however they might be defined, and this has never been helped by what seems to be a peculiarly Australian tendency to contrast urban with regional in a similar vein to more traditional town and country distinctions, while at the same time using regional to refer also to the greater metropolitan scale. 1 In fact, and despite this linguistic ambiguity in Australia, the difference between urban and regional policy has always been significant in most developed countries of Europe and North America. Urban policy has tended to focus on issues, concerns and problems within cities, while regional policy has typically taken a broader spatial perspective and concerned itself also with the distribution of activities (economic growth, investment in infrastructure, commuting etc) between cities. In the UK for example the impact of the Great Depression on the industrial heartlands of the north saw regional imbalances in economic activity established and become the object of government intervention through a succession of regional policy measures designed to stimulate endogenous growth while at the same time offering incentives to attract footloose capital and inward investment. While the cumulative impact of these policies over the following decades may have held these imbalances in check, they did little to reduce them and the South East of England has continued to be the dominant economic region of the UK, attracting workers from
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As a member of a local committee of Regional Development Australia these confusions present themselves in a number of different ways, for example when the jurisdiction of these Committees ranges from being coterminous with the boundary of a major city to encompassing the whole of the Northern Territory. 6
elsewhere in the country to what has continued to be an expensive, overcrowded and congested region (Gudgin, 1995). Regional policy has been no more successful in altering the broad pattern of economic development and population across Australia, even though the canvas of regional uneven development is different. Beer (2006) goes so far as to suggest that while economic development has long been a driver of policy in Australia, ‘..the programs and actions of government have largely ignored regional impacts..[and]..given scant attention to the distribution of growth opportunities at the regional or local level.’ (p119). He also notes that regions and hence regional policy are treated as ex-urban phenomena: ‘It is as if regions start at the metropolitan boundary – or to view this phenomenon in another way, it is as if regions exist up to the edges of the capital cities and then disappear.’ (p124). I return to the distinction between urban and regional policy in the conclusion. But in the meantime, what might a typical urban policy look like in a developed country with a capitalist economy and a government of broadly social or liberal democratic outlook? Rather than rely for this purpose on the urban policy of any one country, I offer the latest thoughts of a supranational body, the United Nations. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) provides what is in many ways the epitome of the social democratic/bureaucratic conception of urban policy and although it is concerned more with responding to problems of rapid urban growth in developing countries, it is still relevant to the situation of many developed countries, including Australia. Through the work of its branches and units, UN-Habitat promotes a number of urban policy principles, such as mixed land uses, improved connectivity and higher degrees of population density ‘..in order to take advantage of agglomeration of economies’ (UNHabitat, 2013) while recognising local cultural values. The institution expresses its confidence that the application of these (and other) principles to urban planning will ‘...support the management of growth and improve sustainability, efficiency and equity of cities...at different scales, i.e. the slum (sic) and neighbourhood, city, regional, national and supra-national scales.’ (UN-Habitat, 2013). They go on to claim that the development of a ‘National Urban Policy’ is a key step for reasserting the importance of urban space in coping with rapid urban development and the provision of urban services and in guiding ‘...the future development of the national urban system..’ 7
These last points are especially interesting as they exemplify the view that urban policy is essentially scalable from the very local (slums and neighbourhoods in their terminology, suburbs in Australian parlance) through the national to the supra-national. While it may be difficult to envisage any Australian government participating in the development of a meaningful urban policy that might apply to the wider Asia-Pacific region, there has always been a vigorous policy debate in Australia about the need for metropolitan scale planning and policy making and is reviewed in the next section. So, apart from those who see no need for (or even harm in) spatial plans or spatial planning at any scale, one of the conceptual challenges to Australian policy debate in this field has been to comprehend a ‘national urban system’ that might be as susceptible to policy intervention as a panoply of neighbourhood/suburb, city and metropolitan region. In many respects this UN-Habitat view presents urban problems as a managerial challenge for any system of governance. Indeed, urban governance is one of the core themes of their work and there is a sense in which any urban problem could (in theory) be solved by following the principles and good practice examples set out in their urban policy guidelines: engaging in some local capacity building work and developing a multiagency and cross-sectoral partnership. While I described this view or conception of the nature of urban problems and how they might be solved as social democratic, this is of course a short-hand term that is intended to convey a stance that is inherently positive or optimistic about the capacity of governments to intervene effectively in most fields, be they urban, economic, social or environmental. Clearly it does not mean that all members of the UN adopt explicit social democratic principles in how they go about governing. Nevertheless, it does denote a degree of common ground in appreciating the capacity of governments to solve in principle problems through their policy interventions2
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It is worth noting that Australia is not among the 58 member states comprising the Governing Council of the UN Human Settlements Programme, unlike Bahrain, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Jordan as Asia-Pacific region member states. In a speech to a conference in Adelaide in 2002 on sustainable communities, the Executive Director of UN-Habitat, Anna Tibaijuka concluded her address by looking forward to the active participation of the Government of Australia in this Governing Council, but this has yet to come to pass.
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3. What has passed for urban policy in Australia? In this section I trace briefly the historical trajectory of urban policy debate and development over the last century to show how the emerging Australian cities have experienced more generally applicable problems of urban growth in particularly Australian ways, and how this has spurred debates about the need for government intervention. The pace of urban development in Australia was slow in the early years of colonisation, not least because these new colonies were seen, rightly, as relatively risky places of investment, remote from European markets and subject to the tyranny of distance. However, the development of agriculture as part of the wider colonial economy by the mid-19th century permitted much more rapid urban development and yet government regulation of this development remained light not least because the institutions of local government were themselves underdeveloped. Local governments were established from the 1840s onwards but were weak and often ineffectual in managing urban problems particularly in the face of rapid growth. Melbourne, for example, grew rapidly in population in the middle decades of the 19th century, with 90,000 settlers estimated to have arrived between 1838 and 1851 (Priestley, 1991, 227). This influx of new residents and development with minimal civic oversight led to what Priestley called ‘periodic outcries against piles of refuse, builders’ rubbish, putrefying animal carcasses, from horses to cats, and general filth’ (p 220). Furthermore, regular flooding from inadequate drainage systems and the growing volume of informally disposed sewage and effluent produced by such noxious activities as slaughterhouses, tanneries and wool scours made cities especially unhealthy places in which to live (Davison, 1978). Indeed it was the pressing need to create and then properly manage the supply of safe and potable public water and to dispose of sewage more effectively that led to the establishment of the City of Sydney in 1843(Hector, 2011). So, as in the UK, the emergence of municipal government and of the function of regulating and planning development was driven by public health, social order and economic concerns within the emerging Australian cities. The location of these cities on the national canvas was not seen to be a proper concern of colonial governments in the 19th century but the outcome of market forces and hence ‘natural’. 9
The transformation of the colonies into a federation of states in 1901 and the establishment of the Commonwealth government brought no real pressure for anything resembling a national urban policy as under the new constitution territorial affairs such as land development were left to the States to manage. However, there was always a recognition that the new nation needed to grow in order to better fit the vast continent it occupied. In part this was to expand the workforce and the domestic market for manufactured goods, but there was also a belief that a larger population was needed to be in a better position to defend the country against any potential threats from the more heavily populated countries to the north. Judith Brett suggests this had a spatial dimension in the sense that the relatively uninhabited centre and north was look to to house this growing population more than the already overcrowded cities. Despite the rapid growth of suburban development from the 1880s onwards, the core areas of Australian cities remained crowded and often degraded and it was not until the early decades of the 20th century that the nascent town planning movement took hold in Australia. The movement was boosted by the competition to design the new national capital in Canberra and along with other concerns about ‘urban hygiene’ and threats to the moral order from overcrowding and congestion served as a spur to the development of various policy responses. There were also some attempts to establish the institutions and principles of town planning at the metropolitan scale: for example, the 1929 Victorian Royal Commission into Melbourne’s metropolitan planning and the amalgamation of Brisbane’s individual boroughs into a unitary metropolitan Council in 1925, which to this day is the only amalgamated council serving a State capital (although the urban footprint of Brisbane now extends well beyond its municipal boundary). Following WWII the new Commonwealth began to intervene more in urban affairs, particularly in the field of housing. The main vehicle for this was the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement (CSHA) through which federal monies were made available to support the expansion of state government housing stock (Berry, 1999). Although the initial focus was on mass rental housing this soon shifted to supporting owner occupation mainly through suburban expansion. As a result of this policy, Australia’s housing tenure structure shifted dramatically so that in 1947 just over half of all households were owner-occupiers, but by 1970 this had reached 70 percent, a remarkable 10
shift in the social distribution of home ownership and indeed of personal wealth (Badcock, 2000). The extraordinary pace of this process of suburban growth during the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s stretched the capacity of many new suburban local governments to provide local infrastructure and services to meet the needs of this growing population and the hopes of some planners for more metropolitan scale planning – with the exception of the 1948 County of Cumberland plan for Sydney and Melbourne’s 1954 Metropolitan Plan – were in general not realised. By the 1970s the consequences of weak planning policy implementation had become increasingly visible and difficult to ignore as large tracts of Sydney and Melbourne remained unsewered and there was mounting public concern about the social and economic problems of suburban isolation in all of the major cities. It was against this backdrop that the pioneering Whitlam government launched what was Australia’s first significant attempt at developing a national urban policy. Under the political direction of the Minister for Urban and Regional Development, Tom Uren and with the intellectual stimulation of Patrick Troy and Max Neutze from the Urban Research Unit at the Australian National University the Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD) was established (Lloyd and Troy, 1981). The urban policy that emerged from this setting saw the combination of measures to deal with the spatial concentration of poverty within cities and ‘a bold program of decentralisation, attempting to direct settlement growth into newly designated regional centres’ (Gleeson & Low, 2000, 33). In other words, for the first time there was a concerted effort at the national level to integrate policy concerns about conditions within cities, with some consideration of the relationships between cities and between cities and their hinterlands. The dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 saw the abandonment of these institutions and policy measures and as Stretton (1989, xiii) notes in his review of government and the cities, ‘... most of his [Whitlam’s] urban initiatives ... came to be remembered – or slandered – as extravagant follies which had helped him to fall’. However, Orchard’s (1999) comprehensive and detailed review of post-war national urban policy demonstrates that a variety of very positive outcomes were achieved during this short-lived policy initiative, including rectifying Sydney’s massive sewerage backlog, although some outcomes were less positive, such as the failure of the land commissions 11
and regional growth centre programs. Without labouring the point, the positive outcomes were more often associated with those measures designed to improve conditions within cities, while the less successful measures were those associated with the more novel attempts to deal with problems beyond and between cities. The conservative governments that followed Whitlam reverted to the more familiar stance of denying the need for a national urban policy and resorted again to promoting a relatively parochial set of town planning measures. However, the Hawke Labor government that came into being after the 1983 election heralded another period of debate about the nature of urban policy in general and the particular case for its reformulation and reintroduction. In terms similar to those used by Prime Minister Rudd in the last days of the 2013 election campaign, Prime Minister Hawke, Treasurer Keating and Minister for Social Security Brian Howe (there was no minister for urban policy) built the case for a program of substantial investment in urban infrastructure, particularly in the outer suburbs rather than in city centre locations, in the hope that this would foster a more sustainable urban form and more efficient cities. This thinking eventually informed Keating’s Building Better Cities (BBC) program that combined a degree of spatial targeting with the principle of the demonstration project. While many see a positive legacy from the program (e.g. Simons, 2011), others have observed how difficult it was to measure with any precision the impact of BBC-funded local initiatives because of their breadth and depth as well as their local specificity (Baragwanath, 1996). This type of urban policy was by then well established in Europe and especially in the UK, where the legacy of Labour’s policy for the inner cities introduced in the mid-1970s was continued by the otherwise reforming Thatcher governments, albeit using the vehicles of urban development corporations and enterprise zones (Murray Stewart, new wine). The election of the Howard government in 1996 saw a return, unsurprisingly, to the conservative orthodoxy of denying the national significance of urban policy. Although the conservative tendency to promote market based approaches chimed with the increasingly neo-liberal Liberal Party position (places should take greater responsibility for their own circumstances and rely less on horizontal fiscal equalisation measures), the old Country Party (and subsequently the National Party) concern with striking a better balance between city and country might have been expected to support those between12
city aspects of Labor’s policy position, were it not for their political decline vis a vis the Liberal Party. Prior to the 2007 federal election, the Australian Labor Party published a broad platform of urban policy measures relating to housing affordability, infrastructure investment and metropolitan strategic planning, all presented as part of a wider platform of ‘nation building’ measures (ALP, 2007). The process of developing this national framework of urban policy measures was initially the responsibility of the COAG Reform Council as a part of its broader agenda of institutional and policy reform. COAG identified a series principles for urban planning and focused on strategic metropolitan planning as the most important spatial scale for these principles to be applied, and then audited the metropolitan strategies of each of the eight State or Territory capital cities to test their adherence to them (COAG, 2012). In its next phase of work COAG invited each State to revise its relevant metropolitan strategy so that it aligned with these national policy principles. From 2007 onwards the Rudd/Gillard governments pursued a program of national urban policy development that generated a substantial volume of analytical material and a large program of major project infrastructure investment. This new National Urban Policy [NUP] differed from previous attempts at national intervention in terms of both content and strategic approach. National urban policy was for the first time presented as an opportunity to capitalise on the governance capabilities provided by the federal-state hierarchy rather than assuming opposition from them. But despite its ambitious objectives and methods, the NUP had a number of weaknesses that limited its impact on the trajectory of Australian cities and their ever-evolving patterns of urbanisation. Although its proposed internal management structure was complex, the NUP program recognised that the Australian federal system imposes limits on the responsibilities and capacities of each level of government. The Commonwealth clearly has strong taxation and revenue raising powers including control of income, company and consumption taxes, yet the other arenas in which they can intervene are constitutionally limited to those of a national significance. These include the important responsibility for immigration control, which regulates population flows and thus urban growth rates, as well as interest rate settings, which influence aggregate business and household 13
investment, particularly in commercial development and housing. Territorial matters, including spatial planning and urban development, are typically State responsibilities and the Commonwealth has no direct role. On the other hand the States have responsibility for the territorial delivery of an array of services and infrastructure, including strategic urban planning and development regulation and the provision of much physical urban infrastructure, such as water supply, electricity, sewerage, roads and rail, but the States have weak taxation powers with which to fund these services and infrastructure. While the important drivers of urban development – national population and public capital flows – are held by the Commonwealth, the States face major problems in coordinating and planning infrastructure provision. Although the costs of water, electricity and sewerage provision can be covered in the main by user charges, this is more difficult to achieve for road and rail networks where the benefits are more diffuse. While States are responsible for planning in their major cities this task is often either delegated to comparatively weak local governments or undertaken by state agencies with only limited scope and ambition at the metropolitan scale. So, urban planning is subject to a classic Australian constitutional policy tension between a well-resourced Commonwealth with limited leverage on service provision and more capable States with limited funds to resource their planning ambitions and to deliver critical metropolitan infrastructure. This approach stands in contrast to previous Commonwealth urban policy efforts. There was no dedicated delivery agency, like DURD; rather the key policy development entity, the Major Cities Unit, sat within the Department of Infrastructure and Transport but had limited responsibility for program implementation. The wider urban policy framework involved infrastructure investment but it was very different to that developed under Keating’s BBC program as it was intended to be a long-term framework for Commonwealth investment and did not, like the BBC, give responsibility for the management of local urban renewal projects to Commonwealth agencies. In essence this NUP sought to establish a clear policy rationale for a Commonwealth interest in cities and then use the federal system as a mechanism for applying that policy within each State or Territory, using a largely cooperative model. In this respect it finally adopted an approach advocated by Troy (1995) almost two decades earlier.
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Part of the intent of these arrangements was to embed urban issues, and infrastructure considerations in particular, in a wider array of institutional sites than just a single program within an agency. This would make it harder, in theory at least, for urban issues to disappear from the policy agenda of future governments of whichever political colour, although the Coalition has shown little commitment to keeping this institutional architecture of urban policy established by Labor. In fact, the Coalition’s 2013 election platform made only passing reference to the significance and importance of cities, noting that only that ‘congestion is an increasing problem in our cities’ and proposing a program of investment in urban roads and national highways ‘… because people who are stuck in traffic jams, moving around our cities or moving between our regional centres, are obviously far less productive than they should be’ (Abbott, 2013). The Liberals’ Coalition partners, The Nationals, focused their attention on matters deemed to be important to people living outside of the capital cities and defined themselves as the only party ‘dedicated to regional Australia’ (Truss, 2013). Their interest in urban policy was not especially evident apart from supporting the development of policies that would help unemployed city residents move to regional areas where there are believed to be unfilled jobs. In the last week of the 2013 election campaign, Prime Minister Rudd announced that a re-elected Labor government would appoint a Minister for Cities, because ‘… it was about time that the 80 per cent of Australians who live in cities get a look in’ (Hall, 2013). The Urban Coalition (2013), a partnership including the Planning Institute of Australia and the Urban Development Institute of Australia, welcomed this announcement as the culmination of many years of lobbying but called in vain for the Coalition to make a similar commitment. It would seem therefore that national urban policy remains something that divides the two main political parties in Australia, at least in symbolic terms. Explicit and self-conscious national urban policy proposals seem to emerge only from Labor governments, while Coalition governments typically eschew them, even if they continue to support in practice a number of specific measures that often exist under the banner of a national urban policy in other settings. In the next section, I look in more detail at possible explanations for this variability in policy stance and attempt to frame these explanations in a more structural analysis of the
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imperatives and conflicting pressures of urban policy development within capitalist systems. 4. How might we explain the dynamics of Australian urban policy debate and development over the last century? Rather than taking an overly parochial and exceptionalist stance by trying to explain the dynamics of policy change purely by reference to Australian factors, I develop an analytical framework that draws on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) of Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993). This will, I hope, allow a useful combination of general and particular factors in developing an explanation of urban policy change and stability over a long period of time. Put simply, the ACF claims that long term policy change is best understood as the outcome of ideological battles between different advocacy coalitions (comprising inter alia politicians, interest and lobby groups, researchers and media players) competing within a socio/cultural, political and economic environment which is structured in such a way as to confer certain advantages on some coalitions and not others. The structural characteristics of this environment typically change slowly although they are susceptible to periods when this equilibrium and stability is punctuated by relatively rapid change (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993). In this case, the socio/cultural, political and economic environment refers to the processes of urban development within capitalist societies such as Australia. This initial framing of the issue enables us to take a critical view of the imperatives of state intervention (or public policy making) in general and of intervention in the production and consumption of built environments in particular, as well as appreciating the conflicting (or contradictory) forces that limit and constrain such policy interventions. As noted in section 2 above, Marxist analyses of capitalist urban development and its regulation have fallen out of fashion among urban scholars in recent years and have, to some extent, been replaced by analytical frameworks built on a critical stance towards neo-liberal forms of capitalism. However, this framework is highly susceptible to criticism of its neglect of the practical imperatives and drivers of state intervention in particular settings vis a vis the ideological principles of intervention in general. And it is, of course, misleading to suggest there is only one relatively unchanging Marxist 16
explanation of the nature of state intervention in processes of capitalist urban development at all spatial scales. Dear and Scott’s (1981b) account of the emergence of urban planning in the face of contradictions in capitalist process of urban development is a useful starting point. They point to two particular areas in which the array of market mechanisms typically fail and demand government intervention. The first is in the provision of major urban infrastructure such as roads, railways, sewerage and ICT systems; the second is in the regulation of land use development in the public interest. In the first case, these facilities may well be seen as socially useful or even essential but they cannot be provided profitably by private companies even though they may be built profitably by private companies on behalf of and at the expense of government. In the second case, the regulation of land uses and development activity by government according to publicly available plans is again seen as useful or essential because of the certainty it promises and the opportunity it provides to screen out proposals that are deemed inappropriate. At the same time it fetters the profit-seeking activities of individual developers who rarely see the collective benefit in having their particular development proposal rejected or modified. The broad terrain on which specific urban policy debates are conducted is, therefore, one of capitalist development supported and regulated by government intervention. While there may be some who advocate and can envisage the end of the capitalist mode of production and some who advocate and envisage the withdrawal of government from all but a minimalist set of responsibilities, they do not influence the nature of this terrain in any significant way. But are there more subtle shifts over time in the terrain that tend to favour one or other of these poles, and do they coincide with changes of government? I suggest that changes of government may signal attempts to introduce substantial changes to the terrain, but that in practice these are often less influential. While changes of government often represent only marginal changes in the terrain, the moment of federation at the start of the 20th century represented a substantial and significant shift in the terrain of policy debate, almost by definition introducing opportunities for the development of national or federal policy that simply did not previously exist. There has
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been no such seismic shift since then, even though it may be possible to detect some changes in conditions over relatively long (ie decadal) periods of time. In this case, the relatively unchanging terrain of debate about urban policy has continuously reflected the general dilemmas of framing, developing and implementing urban policy in a capitalist society but with a distinctive Australian flavour based on the traditional views of town and country described above. To a great extent the state of play in the debates between the advocates of different urban policy positions has reflected the balance of power among the major political parties and between different factions within them. The decline of the Country Party and the inability of the Nationals to halt this long term process has tended to favour the more urban-focused Liberal Party within the Coalition and within the ALP (and indeed the Coalition) the embrace of economic rationalism by the right wing has tended to dominate the social justice priorities of its left wing. The influence of the Greens and the Independents in recent years has clearly injected some additional unpredictability into the system and created relatively short periods in which advocates of certain policy positions have found themselves on more favourable ground than usual. The enthusiasm for regional policy under the Rudd/Gillard governments is a case in point. Although this party political explanation of the shifting fortunes of urban policy carries some weight, it neglects another aspect of Australian federalism. Troy (1978: 7) has drawn attention to the perennial excuse of Commonwealth governments for not involving themselves in the affairs of Australian cities, suggesting there is no constitutional impediment to federal level intervention while also acknowledging that the framers of the constitution did not anticipate a significant role for the Commonwealth government in the affairs of cities. However, as Gleeson (2006: 72) argues, when judged important they ‘..have simply gone around the Maginot line of constitutional objection to claim urban policy for the Commonwealth.’ So, apart from two periods when first the Whitlam and then the Hawke/Keating governments flexed their political muscles and chose to intervene in the affairs of cities, the 20th century was characterised by a combination of active avoidance or more benign indifference by national government to the development of a national urban policy. While there have been advocates for such a policy, ranging from academics (eg Stretton, 18
1970; Troy, 1978, 1995, 2013; Orchard, 1999; Gleeson, 2006), through some individual politicians (eg Hunt, 2013; Ludlam, 2013; Albanese, 2013) to lobby groups such as the Planning Institute of Australia, the Urban Development Institute of Australia and the Property Council, it is more difficult to identify self-conscious opponents or organised advocates of non-intervention. Of course the state and territory governments tend to be suspicious of any intervention by the Commonwealth into what they see as their bailiwick, despite scant evidence of their inclination or ability in practice to develop and implement comprehensive and coherent plans for the management of their own major cities (Gleeson, 2006). But the states and territories have not consistently and systematically opposed the development of policy in this field and it may be that the status quo of non-intervention is so entrenched that the real challenge is simply to get urban policy debates onto the national political agenda and to keep them there when governments change. 5. Conclusions: would Australia be better off with a national urban policy? The danger with relying on some Marxist accounts of state intervention to explain policy change is that each and every policy measure is found, in the last instance, to be driven by the need to support the interests of capital whether in the short or long term, directly or indirectly. In this paper I have tried to avoid this functionalist pitfall while acknowledging that in a capitalist society and economy like Australia, state intervention or government policy developed in response to problems of urban development is beset continuously by conflicting structural pressures. These shape the broad approach to policy as much as more particular debates about the nature and possible solution to specific urban problems. For example, they typically include the overall extent of intervention and regulation or the degree of freedom that market institutions (developers, builders, financiers, real estate agents and so on) should enjoy; the extent of public subsidy for certain development activities (home ownership grants, tax relief on property investment etc); the scale of public provision of key urban infrastructure and provision of urban services and the degree to which the costs of this provision should be collectivised or focused on those who enjoy or consume them directly. These structural tensions endure over long periods of time and while their determination varies to some extent at different moments in time, they are never completely resolved 19
because, notwithstanding some cyclical patterns of economic and urban development, unpredictable pressures within the system build up and require an ever changing response. So, according to this interpretation the structural parameters within which specific Australian urban policy debates take place have not changed substantially over the last century or more. The economic system is still capitalistic and a belief in the inherent capacity of markets to deliver optimum outcomes, albeit with some government support, continues to dominate in most areas of government activity. The balance of power and the relationship between the different levels of government has not changed substantially, although there has in recent years been some increased acknowledgement of the significant role to be played by local governments, alone or in partnerships, in trying to manage a wider range of factors affecting local quality of life and economic development. There are of course numerous critiques of this form of localism in which particular places are given greater responsibility for things beyond their control and for managing what are often inexorable processes of local decline (Pratchett, 2004). So, from the ACF perspective, without any significant long term change in the structural terrain, Australian urban policy debate is remains a battle between a limited number of competing coalitions. Indeed it is not even clear that there are distinctly different policy positions being advocated by different coalitions. Rather there is a grouping, best represented by the Urban Coalition, which supports the adoption of an urban policy along the lines of that published in the latter period of the last Labor government, and those who are indifferent to any concerted national level government intervention in this field. This indifference is not always to all the components of the Urban Coalition urban policy proposal, in fact the Abbott government (as the most significant entity indifferent to a national urban policy) is supportive of investment in some urban infrastructure, of measures to relieve urban congestion and increasing economic productivity in cities through some degree of clustering of mutually reinforcing activities. It simply does not appear to see any need for this package of measures to be labelled a ‘national urban policy’. But if Australia were to consciously abandon this particular type of national urban policy would this mean abandoning also a concern with the spatial distribution of development at the national scale? This is even less obvious because there continues to be an ongoing commitment to supporting the needs of ex-urban Australia and of 20
promoting development in these places. Indeed, the Premier of Queensland revealed recently that he has discussed with the Federal Immigration Minister the possibility of directing new migrants to regional cities such as Cairns, Rockhampton and Townsville in order to disperse the State’s population more widely to the point that no more than half live in the apparently congested south-east corner. What is perhaps most conspicuous by its absence from contemporary urban policy debate in Australia (and many other countries) is a conception of urban policy as something concerned with conditions within cities and with the connections between cities and other settlements. There are few examples to learn from; few cases where the entire settlement system of a country is treated as the object of policy attention. This is perhaps understandable in Europe where a set of nation states co-exist within a larger system, but in self-contained Australia where the number of settlements over a certain size (say 100,000) is comparatively small, it is less so. Whether a policy built on these foundations should be called an urban policy is another matter which takes us back yet again, to the perennial question of the specificity of the urban. However the urban is conceived, its definition always entails its opposite so that urban places co-exist with non-urban places – villages, rural places, the countryside, regional Australia and so on. This begs the question of whether processes of development are essentially different in these places and whether the social and economic problems manifest in country towns are inherently different to those seen in cities and metropolitan areas? I do not believe they are: developers’ pursuit of profitable development does not vary; the tensions between the certainty offered by planning schemes and the regulation this necessarily entails are similar and although the scale and cost of infrastructure provision may be substantially greater in major cities the question of who pays for this provision and on what terms transcends any urban/rural divide. Of course the remoteness of some rural settlements is distinctive and the concentration effects experienced in large cities will not be felt in regional Australia, but in many respects the causes and experience of these problems will be similar regardless of their location. This has long presented a challenge for those advocating spatially targeted policies to deal with systemic problems, not least because of the political difficulty of focusing policy attention (and often resources) on some areas and not others when the 21
distribution of problems is more complex. Thus there is a long standing argument that we need more effective generic anti-poverty policy measures and economic development policies rather than policies for particular places where these problems may be relatively concentrated. The promise and threat of the pork barrel is never far from these debates. If it is normal for development plans or spatial strategies to be prepared for suburbs within cities, for whole towns and cities and for broader regions, then why should they not also be considered for the nation as whole? And if such plans are to be produced, should they not be based on a more sophisticated analysis of the increasingly complex relationships that exist between places and of the existence of hierarchies of settlements (Batty, 2013)? The principle of scalability embodied in the policy prescriptions of the UN-Habitat suggests that this should at least be considered, even if it presents considerable conceptual and empirical challenges in practice. To consciously avoid this challenge is to condemn debates about the pace and accommodation of growth in Australia to sterile arguments about the inherent goodness and badness of town and country life and the unimpeachable but elusive qualities of the suburban environment in which most of us live. Australians may be reluctant to corral the ragbag of policy measures designed to deal with pockets of deprivation, provide essential urban infrastructure and channel growth to designated areas into a package and call it ‘urban policy’, but there is no escaping the need for such measures. Systems of capitalist urban development need urban planning and urban policies to attempt to manage the problems inherent in this mode of production. Of course, they will never solve them once and for all precisely because they are inherent to the system, but they are also susceptible to a dynamism that ensures that each policy intervention generates its own set of unintended consequences which must in turn be tackled. If Australia ever embraces more fully its urban legacy and accepts that town and country or urban and rural co-exist in practice and indeed are mutually dependent, then perhaps the time will be right for a more explicit national policy for settlements, if not an urban policy.
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6. References Abbott, T. (2013), ‘New accountability on infrastructure and major project delivery’, Liberal Party Media Release12 August, available at: http://www.liberal.org.au/latestnews/2013/08/12/tony-abbott-new-accountability-infrastructure-and-major-projectdelivery Albanese, A. (2013), ‘Urban Policy and Research (2013): Our Cities, Our Future’, Urban Policy and Research, DOI: 10.1080/08111146.2013.832843 Australian Labor Party. (2007), National Platform and Constitution, Sydney, ALP Baragwanath, C. (1996) Building Better Cities: A joint government approach to urban development, Special Report No 45, Melbourne, Auditor-General of Victoria Brett, J. (2011) Fair share: Country and city in Australia, Quarterly Essay, Black Inc, Collingwood, VIC Brown , A. and Bellamy, J. (eds) (2006) Federalism and Regionalism in Australia: New approaches, new institutions?, ANU E Press, Canberra Burton, P. (1997) ‘Urban Policy and the Myth of Progress’, Policy and Politics, 25, 4, 421436 Cochrane, A. (2007) Understanding Urban Policy: A critical approach, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford Cochrane, A. (2007) Understanding Urban Policy: A Critical Approach, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Council of Australian Governments (COAG). (2012), Review of Capital City Strategic Planning Systems, Canberra, COAG Davison, G. (1995). ‘Australia: The first suburban nation?’ Journal of Urban History 21. 1: 40-74 Dear, M. and Scott, A. (eds) (1981) Urbanization and urban planning in capitalist society, Methuen, London
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Department of Infrastructure and Transport DIT). (2011), Our Cities, Our Future: A National Urban Policy for a Productive, Sustainable and Liveable Future, Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia Department of Infrastructure and Transport, Major Cities Unit (DITMCU). (2013) State of Australian Cities 2013, Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia Department of Sustainability Environment Water Population and Communities (DSEWPC) (2011). Sustainable Australia – Sustainable Communities: A Sustainable Population Strategy for Australia. Canberra, Australian Government Fischer, F. and Forester, J. (eds) (1993) The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning, UCL Press, London Forster, C. (2004) Australian cities: continuity and change, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne Gleeson and Low (2000) Australian Urban Planning: New Challenges, New Agendas, St Leonards, NSW, Allen and Unwin Gleeson, B. (2010) Lifeboat Cities: Making a New World, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press Gleeson, B. and Low, N. (eds) (2000) Australian urban planning: new challenges, new agendas, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, ?? Gudgin, G. (1995) Regional problems and policy in the UK, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol 11, no 2, 18-63 Hall, B. (2013) ‘States don’t get it on reforming our cities, says Kevin Rudd’, Brisbane Times, 30 August, available at: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/federalpolitics/federal-election-2013/states-dont-get-it-on-reforming-our-cities-says-kevin-rudd20130830-2sv1j.html Hunt, G. (2013), ‘Urban Policy and Research (2013): Achieving the 30- and 50-Year Plans for Our Cities’, Urban Policy and Research, DOI: 10.1080/08111146.2013.832844 Jones, M. (1979) Review Article: ‘Australian Urban Policy’, Politics, 14, 2, 295-303
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Kirwan, R. (1990) ‘Planning our urban futures’, in Wilmoth, D. Towards an agenda for Australian cities - conference papers, Canberra, AGPS Lovering, J. (2009) The recession and the end of planning as we have known it, International Planning Studies, vol 14, no 1, 1-6 Ludlam, S. (2013). ‘Urban Policy and Research (2013): Whether or Not Australia Needs a National Urban Policy’, Urban Policy and Research, DOI: 10.1080/08111146.2013.832846 Mischkulnig, M. and Winton, T. (2009) Smalltown, Penguin Australia, Orchard, L. (1999) ‘Shifting Visions in National Urban and Regional Policy 2’, Australian Planner, 34, 4, 200-209 Pratchett, L. (2004) Local Autonomy, Local Democracy and the ‘New Localism’, Political Studies, vol 52, no 2, 358-375 Sabatier, P. And Jenkins-Smith, H. (1993) Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach, Westview Press, Boulder, CO Savage, M. and Warde, A. (1993) Urban sociology, capitalism and modernity, Macmillan Press Ltd, London Simons, M. (2011) ‘Who should look after the cities?’ Inside Story, 2 June, http://inside.org.au Stretton, H (1989) Ideas for Australian Cities, 3rd edition, Sydney, Transit Australia Publishing Tibaijuka, A (2002) Address by the Director of UN-Habitat to conference delegates, International Local Agenda 21 Conference: Sustaining Our Communities, Adelaide, 3-6 March 2002. Available at: http://www.regional.org.au/au/soc/2002/1/tibaijuka.htm#TopOfPage Troy, P. (1978) Federal power in Australia’s cities: essays in honour of Peter Till, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney Troy, P. (ed) (1995) Australian Cities: Issues, strategies and policies for urban Australia in the 1990s, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 25
Truss, W. (2013) The Coalition’s 2030 Vision for Developing Northern Australia, Barton, ACT: The National Party
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7. Acknowledgments While all my colleagues at Griffith and beyond should be thanked for their patience in answering my questions about Australian policy and politics, I should especially like to thank Peter Chapman for taking the time to offer a more systematic critique of my thoughts on Australian urban policy. A number of the lines of argument pursued here follow his promptings, for which I am grateful. This paper also draws on a chapter co-written with Jago Dodson, for a collection on Australian public policy edited by Lionel Orchard and Chris Miller and to be published in 2014 by The Policy Press. Some arguments introduced in that chapter have been extended and developed further in this paper.
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