The recent news that Urban Growth and GPT have submitted a new
development proposal to replace their controversial high-rise tower proposal
for their strategically important Newcastle CBD site fulfilled a commitment by
the NSW Planning Minister, Rob Stokes, to look at the proposal “with fresh eyes”.
By all accounts, the new proposal is now within the height limits
that applied to the site before the changes imposed earlier this year by the
state government to accommodate the high-rise towers.
It made a refreshing change in a city where political commitments
are routinely broken.
However, the imposed planning controls are still in place, and
still available to any future developer who might be interested in exploiting
them.
So far, the current Planning Minister appears to be serious about
preserving the human scale and heritage character of Newcastle’s eastern
precinct. To confirm this, the state government needs to remove the imposed
planning controls.
However, on another front, Macquarie St looks set to break an
election commitment in order to impose yet another unwanted decision on the
Hunter community.
Despite promises by the NSW Coalition government that they
wouldn’t force NSW councils to amalgamate, they’re now threatening to amalgamate
councils across the state, including Newcastle and Lake Macquarie.
The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART)
recently recommended the two councils merge, after declaring both councils “unfit
for the future” on the grounds of their “scale and capacity”.
The IPART “Fit for the Future” report containing this recommendation
does not define “scale and capacity”, nor explain how various councils
(including Newcastle and Lake Macquarie) failed on these grounds.
When I asked IPART what they meant by “scale and capacity”,
I was referred to a list of ten factors published in previous reports,
including highly subjective considerations such as “knowledge, creativity and
innovation, credibility for more effective advocacy, and high quality political
and managerial leadership”.
IPART told me that they had undertaken a “comprehensive and
in-depth” assessment of each council using these factors.
When I requested a copy of that assessment, I was told it
was “internal information” and could not be released.
Without access to the assessment that found them supposedly
wanting in “scale and capacity”, the councils can’t scrutinise and critique IPART’s
recommendation.
Newcastle hasn’t polled its community to find out how they
feel about amalgamating with Lake Macquarie, but when Lake Macquarie surveyed its
residents it found 87% of them opposed such a merger.
So, the councils and their communities are now expected to
respond by November 18 to an IPART recommendation that is not supported by
either of the councils or their communities, and that is based on a secret
assessment using highly subjective criteria.
In an even more recent move, the NSW Transport Minister, Andrew
Constance, shocked the city by announcing that the state government intended to
privatise Newcastle’s public bus, ferry and (future) light rail services.
The Minister’s announcement was framed as a positive response
to the region’s long held demand for more local control over planning and
operating local transport services.
While the
Minister’s media release referred vaguely to the government starting “a market
sounding process”, it astutely avoided any mention of “privatisation”, and it took
some time for the penny to drop in local media reporting that this is what he
was talking about.
At the time of writing, some still appear to be caught in
the spin.
The Greens Transport Spokesperson, Mehreen Faruqui, said it
was “unacceptable that the system has been run into
the ground to justify the privatisation of the network”.
“The Baird government have themselves created the problem they now
say they are trying to fix,” she said.
While the announcement caught the local community by
surprise, media reports speculated that the state government has been
discussing the matter with at least one private transport operator, Keolis
Downer.
To its credit, the state government has effectively admitted
it made a big mistake in the matter of the proposed Newcastle CBD high-rise
towers, when it privileged the views of vested private interests and imposed
their agenda on a hostile community.
But, given the recent signals about what it intends to do
with local council amalgamations and local transport privatisation, you have to
wonder about its ability to learn from past mistakes.
