The Hunter needs good planning, desperately. Downtown Newcastle, the historic regional centre, wants for commercial and cultural juice. Sprawling housing estates trash Lower Hunter forests and farmlands. The challenge of transitioning away from coal sends politicians running.
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Then, last month, the NSW parliament passed the Greater Cities Commission Bill. Is there hope?
If you listened to the parliamentary speech by the minister in charge of the new Greater Cities Commission, the Liberal Member for Pittwater, Rob Stokes, you might have become excited. The new commission will undertake strategic planning for a six-cities mega-region, and supersede the Greater Sydney Commission. The old commission devised plans to steer the growth of metropolitan Sydney around three cities: the original CBD-based city, the emerging city of Parramatta, and a future city based around the under-construction Western Sydney airport. The replacement commission will enrol three more cities into this master planning: Illawarra-Shoalhaven, Central Coast and Newcastle-Lower Hunter. By 2040, this mega-region will house more than 8 million people, Stokes says.
Like Blacktown, we'll get a mention in a photo caption.
The idea to plan for a mega-region kicked off when lobby group, the Committee for Sydney, released in 2018 a policy paper arguing for high speed rail services to what it called a 'sandstone mega-region'. The six cities would be the high-speed rail hubs.
The idea gathered dust until NSW Premier Dom Perrottet, late last year, delivered the Bradfield Oration, an annual event run by the Daily Telegraph with an audience over-filled with property developers and their lobbyists. Perrottet laid out his six-cities vision, the evolution of Sydney into an urban mega-region stretching north and south. But, and missing the nub of the Committee for Sydney's argument, the Premier said nothing about high-speed rail.
In March this year, the Premier's thought bubble came before parliament. But doubters saw the bill as a government plan for a committee to devise a plan. The commission's first task, wrote the Sydney Morning Herald, would be to unveil a discussion paper by mid-year, with a full plan by the end of 2023.
The debate in parliament was instructive. No one opposed the bill, what harm could a plan do? There was wariness, though. I'm sceptical, said Yasmin Catley, Member for Swansea. We've already been planned to death, said David Harris, Member for Wyong. A new letterhead and a bloated bureaucracy, warned Paul Scully, Member for Wollongong. In the old commission's Greater Sydney Plan, said Stephen Bali, Member for Blacktown, his city received eight mentions across 194 pages, all incidental, like a caption on a photo or a name on a map.
Other Western Sydney MPs, while praising the goodwill of the old commission, noted failure by the government to convert the commission's plans into achievements that alleviated Western Sydney's jobs deficits and social disadvantage, and addressed liveability in hot, sprawling suburbs.
Ron Hoenig, Member for Heffron, in Sydney's inner south, nailed the core weakness of the new commission. It has no planning authority, he said, and isn't even part of the government's planning portfolio.
And, I might add, it has no revenue powers, or transport planning powers. The new commission will sit in a new ministry 'Cities, Infrastructure and Active Transport', without, as Hoenig revealed, the powers needed to be an effective planning agency. Planning in Newcastle and the Lower Hunter will continue to be determined by the NSW Planning Minister, Anthony Roberts, and his powerful Department of Planning.
Transport planning will remain under the tight control of Transport for NSW and its minister David Elliot. And the state's coffers will be guarded by former treasurer and now Premier, Dom Perrottet, and his ambitious new Treasurer Matt Kean.
Curiously, the new commission kicks off just as the Department of Planning is finalising its 2041 regional plan for the Hunter. The finalisation will continue, says Stokes.
It's clear, then, really.
Soon, the Hunter will get a new glossy plan from the Department of Planning, as planned. A few months later, we'll get a discussion paper from the new Greater Cities Commission. By the end of 2023 we'll get the commission's plan.
Be excited, like Blacktown, we'll get a mention in a photo caption and be named on a map.
New commission, same old story.
Phillip O'Neill is professor of economic geography at Western Sydney University
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