Address by The Hon Lindsay Tanner MP
Minister for Finance and Deregulation
12 August 2009
I am delighted that I have the opportunity to contribute to these discussions. We are dealing here today with fundamentally important issues for Australia’s future and they are issues that have proved problematic for governments over many years because they have essentially been the domain of state governments. But of course state governments are not city governments, they are governments of states and therefore they have a wider reemit than dealing with the problems of Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane or wherever.
Equally, historically federal governments have moved in and out of the frame with respect to issues affecting cities, planning and the built environment, all too often in a sporadic or opportunistic way. Sometimes with an underlying rational that has got merit and other times just to interfere. So there are problematic questions about our structures of government and how we deal with these issues.
But I think there is a process of evolution where the national government takes a greater degree of responsibility for how our cities are structured, how they function and how they will evolve in the future.
Certainly there have been a number of things under the current government where for several reasons we have taken a major interest in matters which are of great importance to cities and the built environment. Most of these you would be aware of these but I will just run through them very quickly.
The response that we have put together over a period of months to the threat of the global financial crisis and the global recession that followed in its wake of course has focused on investment in cities and in particular, although it’s not restricted to cities, the first home owners grant as an important device for boosting demand in housing.
We have provided grants to local governments as a way of stimulating activity and building amenity, particularly in urban areas, enabling local governments to build new infrastructure and revitalise existing infrastructure across Australia.
We have made major investments in our road and rail and ports systems and larger longer-term investments through the Infrastructure Australia process in hard infrastructure, projects like reforming the regional rail access to Melbourne, projects like the Gold Coast light rail project.
And of course as part of the response to the Global Financial Crisis a proposal which sadly didn’t pass the Senate, the Australian Business Investment Partnership proposal which was designed to act as a safety net or insurance policy should major commercial property projects but at risk of failing because one component of a syndicate, a foreign bank in the syndicate, leaves for reasons unrelated to the viability of the project.
We have also of course invested very substantially in social housing projects and some of those things are underway already and we have committed very substantial amounts of money to ensuring that our housing stock across the country is insulated.
There is also a range of very important regulatory reforms that we are gradually working through with the states. That is a painstaking process, a complex process but to give the states their due their demeanour, their approach to these issues has been uniformly constructive. They have rolled up their sleeves to try and work their way through with us in getting positive outcomes, getting harmony, getting positive regulatory arrangements for the future.
So although the progress is slow you will be pleased to know that we are making progress in the area of development assessment processes across Australia. The states have agreed that by June 2010 we will see full bench marking data, performance data, on approval process around the country being published for the 08/09 year and that is the first step in harmonising our development assessment processes around the country and also we are moving towards a greater code based approach to development assessments.
Second, we made significant progress with respect to environmental assessments and overcoming a problem of a sequential approach where you have a state-based assessment and then in its wake an Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act assessment, which all too often in the public mind appears to be an appeal against whatever decisions are being made or assessments have occurred as a result of a state process. We’ve now got capacity to do those processes jointly and further progress in improving that whole system we hope will occur in the wake of the current review of the EPBC act headed by Dr Alan Hawke.
We are in the early stages of developing a single national construction code which will include standards like plumbing, electrical, telecommunications, energy efficiency. And of course we have committed to a process of mandatory disclosure of energy efficiency of new buildings and harmonising the various ratings systems.
Since the budget last year we dedicated $75 million to enable them to do work on congestion planning in our major cities. And as part of our stimulus package in February this year, one of the lesser known items in the agreements with the states is that all the states committed to develop overall strategic plans for their major cities where such plans currently do not exist.
So all of that, of course, adds up to a very substantial federal involvement in these issues that have traditionally been state dominated and the reasons for that are pretty straightforward. The economic challenges have driven many of these things, but also the challenge of climate change and the centrality of the built environment in that challenge, in tackling climate change. And the fact that Australia, more and more is becoming a nation rather than a collection of disparate communities just through technological change, through greater economic and social interaction across our borders. All of these things are driving issues of this kind onto the national agenda.
We have also been involved; this is something that is directly in my area of responsibility, in reforming procurement processes, in particular reforming the way that we go about our own building needs being acquired, being dealt with. The previous arrangements that we inherited were totally decentralised, individual agencies were in effect able to do pretty much as they liked, and this had very major deficiencies in waste and not using collective buying power.
There are a number of specific procurement reforms that will be of interest to some of you such as reforming the allocation of risk and liability in procurement processes, that is a tricky thing. But we do accept that there is need for change there.
So in overall terms, there is a lot going in this area. It is for a reason, we need to improve the overall functionality of our society and our economy, we need to improve the efficiency of the ways in which we conduct our affairs, with which we live and work and enjoy ourselves around the country. We are hampered in so many ways by legacy arrangements, by history, by circumstance, that in some circumstances we can really alter but we have to work out ways of doing things better.
If you look at cities like Melbourne, you will see what we are encountering in Australia are problems that are associated with spatial width of cities, just growing beyond capacity of a single infrastructure system to sustain efficient operation, to sustain a single transport and other infrastructure system that are being strained to breaking point.
That raises a number of questions about the functionality of our cities, about how they work, how they are planned, how they are designed and how we change those things. That is not easy because you can’t just uproot everybody and say look folks we are going to move to another spot.
These issues are something we have failed to tackle in Australia, we have failed to think through the functionality of our urban systems and how they can remain viable and efficient in the face of ever expanding urban boundaries. That is why we are getting all the debates and dramas about urban consolidation, problems that emerge from that the focus on electorates on mine, but it is inevitable that we need to deal with these issues.
We are in the early stages of our contributions on these issues and a lot of the things that I have referred to today are first steps and they are things that we take several years. Be under no illusion that negotiations with the states about national construction codes or about improving development approvals processes are difficult, complicated and will take time.
Most of all they need political will and that is what the Rudd Government is delivering, the political will to actually tackle these things.
There are others in the game as well, including the organisations involved in today’s forum and I applaud your continuing contribution to public debate. Your work is very important in bringing these issues to the top of the national agenda.
Thankyou
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