Can the NSW government learn from past mistakes?

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.