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News

Too much faith in developers, Sydney Morning Herald, January 31, 2012

IN THE maze that is Sydney property planning, let’s start with the incontrovertible. There is not enough housing. Demand grows by 25,000 homes a year but only about 18,000 are built. That helps keep housing prices out of the reach of many, particularly the young.

Next, whatever the strengths and flaws of past policies intended to free up housing supply, they did not work, or did not work enough. There is little sense in persisting exclusively with a policy or suite of policies that do not do the job.

Planning chiefs hail smarter, simpler scheme, Kelsey Munro Urban Affairs, December 7, 2011

It’s a start, but all the tough decisions are yet to be made. That’s the industry verdict on the state government’s “once-in-a-generation” overhaul of the state’s moribund Planning Act.

The Planning Minister, Brad Hazzard, yesterday released a wide-ranging issues paper that pulled together months of community consultations by review chairmen Ron Dyer and Tim Moore, confirming that the 30-year-old planning system was broken beyond repair.

Rowan Moore, Kevin McCloud’s grand design for British Housing, Guardian 19 Nov 2011

‘The Triangle is in a tradition of model villages beloved of aristocrats, princes, of Brad Pitt in New Orleans and the Bordeaux sugar-cube manufacturer who commissioned workers’ housing from Le Corbusier. Such places can be over-scripted, too much about fulfilling their makers’ picture-book fantasies about contented communities. There is a whiff of this with Hab’s gooey talk about “making people happy”, although they are conscious of the need not to over-control. “If they decide they don’t want to grow food and just want to park cars, we’d be a bit upset,” says Isabel Allen, but in the end it will be up to the residents. Maggie Lowton sounds a note of caution by citing other communities in Swindon that started well but went downhill. No amount of forethought and attention to detail can guarantee the success of the Triangle. But at the very least it is an imaginative and well-designed project, which achieves about as much as can be done with its budget. It focuses on what matters most and gives itself the best chance of success. Which is far more rare than it should be in British house building and a much better application of celebrity philanthropy than most.’

Climate change science being stifled by NSW Labor bureaucrats, Malcolm Holland From: The Daily Telegraph December 02, 2011

SENIOR bureaucrats in the state government’s environment department have routinely stopped publishing scientific papers which challenge the federal government’s claims of sea level rises threatening Australia’s coastline, a former senior public servant said yesterday.

Doug Lord helped prepare six scientific papers which examined 120 years of tidal data from a gauge at Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour.