Do we need Elon Musk to help fix our planning systems?

I know the mention of Elon Musk can be triggering for some. Mention of planning laws is equally triggering, but for a great many more people. You will see the connection soon.

My first formal encounter with "planning law reform" was in the mid 1990s, when as a fairly new Executive Director of the then newly named Property Council, the case for planning reform was passionately promoted by the industry. Planning laws were - it was argued - overly complex, time consuming, inconsistent and riddled with costly process. Or so we thought. Oh, to have those bad old days back again.

The Government of the day introduced a reform package in what was known as the "Planning, Environment and Development Assessment Bill" (PEDA). We joked we should call it 'the PEDA-file.' The name was swiftly and wisely changed, into what would later become the Integrated Planning Act (1997).

Proponents hailed IPA as something of a revolution. It introduced what was billed as an 'Integrated Development Assessment System' (IDAS) which promised a more coordinated approach to assessing and approving development applications. It also introduced a less prescriptive form of land use control, via a system of performance-based planning – the idea being that how a project performs against outcomes of sustainability, economic and community criteria is more important that prescribing what can and cannot be built on a particular piece of land. Environmental sustainability was also heralded as a key objective of the act.

The IPA promise of greater efficiency and transparency proved an abject fail, if the burgeoning number of planning law specialists, town planners and associated experts is anything to go by. Local governments resisted interference in their plan making and adjudication powers, while applicants were faced with a confusing labyrinth of overlapping assessment pathways under different regulations. Ambiguity led to community anger, and the government of the day played up to it by labelling all developers as 'greedy' for trying to do what the original act had promised.

It kept us busy at the PCA. The Bligh Government, under pressure to resolve the widespread dissent, worked up a new regulatory framework, initially under Deputy Premier and Planning Minister Paul Lucas, then Stirling Hinchliffe who took over as Planning Minister in early 2009. The new 'Sustainable Planning Act' was passed in late 2009. I recall Minister Hinchliffe joking to me that a core KPI of his for the new Act was that the word 'sustainable' must appear on every page at least once. I later learned he wasn't really joking. While the industry continued to be blasted as "greedy developers" the Act was very much positioned for political appeal to the growing environmental movement. Planning was becoming a political plaything.

Once again, any promise of regulatory improvement was a fail. Complexity, confusion, process-led assessments which took extraordinarily long times to consider, and inconsistent outcomes flourished under the SPA. More planning lawyers, town planners, and related experts were now needed to answer the simple question: "what can I do with this piece of land?"

And so once more it was necessary revisit the regulatory framework, with the noble aims of simplicity and transparency front and centre. And with that, some years more of industry advocacy later, the Planning Act (2016) was passed.

Are we any better off now than we were back in 1997? In a paper I was commissioned to produce for the Australian Institute for Progress titled "FASTER, BETTER, MORE - Why it takes so long and costs so much to deliver the housing we need – and what we can do about it" I observed that:

The increase in complexity is illustrated by the length of many state planning regulations: for example, the Local Government (Planning and Environment) Act of 1990 was 120 pages in length. The latest incarnation – the Planning Act 2016 – is 430 pages plus 526 pages of planning regulations, plus 54 pages of Rules under the Act, 86 pages of Minister's Guidelines and Rules and over 200 pages in State Development Assessment provisions. Further, there has been exponential growth in local government planning schemes and infrastructure agreements which can run to thousands of pages.

Lawyers I spoke with told me they didn't really know how many pages of rules and regulations were now in force – just that it would be so many as to be impossible to count.

To deal with this level of complexity, the Planning Institute of Australia is now calling for more town planners. True, the complexity is such that what could once be performed by a trained administrative officer now requires a team of university-trained Town Planners. But rather than asking for more town planners, could it make more sense to call for less planning red tape? After all, the idea of a university educated Town Planner with a HECs debt now devoting their mind to what are often mindless administrative processes seems a terrible waste of human intelligence.