For anyone concerned about the state of democracy in our area - and if you’re not, you really haven’t been paying attention for at least the past six years – a proposal in the state government’s recent draft Greater Newcastle Metropolitan Plan is a shocker.
Once finalised, the plan will determine much of what happens with urban development in Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, Maitland, Cessnock, and Port Stephens from now until 2036. It will affect urban land-use, development approval, infrastructure planning and delivery, transport planning and services, biodiversity in the Lower Hunter.
The draft Plan was put out for public comment late last year and is now being considered by state government planners and politicians.
Despite significant flaws, the document has much to commend it.
Predictably, the draft plan contains the usual range of ethereal, high-minded, infinitely malleable statements about sustainability, growth, and resilience, and the mandatory buzz words (“knowledge city”; “new economy”).
It’s easy to be sceptical about all this (and I am), and to dismiss it as neo-Orwellian “newspeak”, designed to leave a warm inner glow, but without substance. But such plans do need to express the broad principles on which they’re based, and the general objectives they aim to achieve, so let’s cut it some slack on that basis.
Given the turbulent and divisive history of urban development in the Lower Hunter, it’s hard to disagree with the draft Plan’s support for a new model of collaborative leadership and collaborative governance arrangements, including improving coordination between councils, creating a Committee for Greater Newcastle, and engaging with young people and community groups who tend not to get involved in strategic planning.
All well and good so far. Then this clanger:
“Hunter Development Corporation will lead the collaboration processes”.
Say what…?
For those familiar with the role played by the Hunter Development Corporation in development and transport controversies since its inception, it’s hard not to see such a statement as either utterly naïve or cruelly ironic.
Throughout its history, the Hunter Development Corporation has acted as little more than the mouthpiece of the Hunter’s development lobby.
The current HDC operates as a “Chief Executive governed” growth corporation under state government legislation, and its current CEO is Michael Cassel, who was promoted to the position by the state Planning Minister from NSW Urban Growth, the state government’s property development arm. Mr Cassel’s involvement in Newcastle revitalisation project has been mired in controversy.
The Corporation previously operated under a General Manager, who was responsible to a state government appointed Board.
The HDC was set up under that model in 2007 by the then Labor government through an amalgamation of the former Honeysuckle Development Corporation (established in 1992) and the Regional Land Management Corporation.
In its various incarnations, the HDC has advocated both inside and outside government in support of the agenda of sectoral lobby groups such as the Property Council and the Hunter Business Chamber.
The HDC played a leading role in the state government’s decision to cut the Newcastle rail line, after recommending this action in its subsequently discredited 2009 “Newcastle City Centre Renewal Report”, which contained a deeply flawed cost-benefit analysis that falsified the relative costs and benefits of keeping and cutting the line, skewing the result dramatically (but wrongly) in favour of the outcome for which Newcastle’s development lobby had been pressing for many years.
The HDC report also falsified a Newcastle council decision supporting an “interchange” at Wickham (changing this to support for a “terminus”, which is quite a different thing), and misrepresented the position of the University of Newcastle in relation to the future of the Newcastle rail line.
Worse, the HDC refused to correct these aspects of its report when they were exposed. That 2009 report (containing the above errors but without any correction or disclaimer) is still available on the HDC website, and has been (and still is) cited and referenced as though it is a credible and authoritative public policy document.
The HDC also notoriously mishandled clear conflicts of interest, with former senior staff having financial interests in properties directly advantaged by the Corporation’s decisions.
In this and many other ways, the HDC has demonstrated that it is an entirely inappropriate body to facilitate or lead any collaboration process, or, indeed, to play any leadership role in infrastructure planning or regional governance.
The relationship between the HDC and the region’s development lobby is reminiscent of the relationship between the former NSW Game Council and the shooters’ lobby.
The Game Council was abolished in 2013 after a review exposed major internal governance issues.
Our metropolitan area needs and deserves collaborative leadership that genuinely involves the local community in planning and delivering its future.
If the state government is genuine about supporting a “collaborative approach” to urban planning and development in the Lower Hunter, and expects to gain any community credibility in pursuing such an aim, the HDC must go the same way as the Game Council, and the various roles assigned to it must be given to a body or bodies that have the representative legitimacy, required expertise and organisational culture to deliver.
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