As Imre Salusinszky noted a few days ago, the McGurk inquiry into planning decisions made for land in the Badgery’s Creek area of western Sydney has found that, ‘no NSW Labor politician or government official has acted corruptly.’
In handing down its report, the inquiry said it found no corrupt activity in relation to the land.
“It’s correct to say that we did not find any corrupt activity in that regard,” inquiry chair and Nationals MP Jenny Gardiner said.
However, the inquiry, which included two days of public hearings, more generally put the spotlight on the potential influence of property developers in the planning system.
As such, the report calls for wide-ranging reform of NSW election and campaign funding laws and in particular, tighter regulation of political donations.
This follows Premier Rees promises at the the eventful annual State Labor conference, held last week, to revamp how Government deals with lobbyists and developers.
Continue reading ‘All clear in McGurk inquiry’
The world’s first clean coal power station (discussed earlier here on LP) has been operating for a little while now. It’s working fine – except for one little problem. All the CO2 is still ending up in the atmosphere. As the Guardian reports, they can’t get a permit to use the proposed storage site because of local protests.
Mind you, it seems that wind farms are also suffering persistent NIMBY problems in the UK.
If climate change is an emergency – and it’s pretty clear that it is – haven’t we reached the point where the concerns of local communities are sometimes going to have to come second to the pressing need to find energy sources that don’t fry the planet?
As a VFL/AFL footballer, he “boasted neither elegance nor athleticism, but Justin Madden was one of the most supremely effective ruckmen of recent times”. As a minister in the Bracks and Brumby Labor governments, he’s arguably made one of the more successful transitions from sport to politics, notwithstanding the factional hackery of his staff (see here for some of the skullduggery inflicted). Madden is an architect by training, and has made noises in the past about the profilgate environmental footprint of the McMansions springing up in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. But, as Planning Minister, he’s presided over the continual watering-down of Melbourne 2030, a planning strategy that was supposed to contain Melbourne’s sprawl and encourage higher-density housing. This watering down has been heavily criticized, not least by the editorial staff of The Age. So it’s not entirely surprising that he’s bobbed up with an op-ed defending the government’s planning policies. Unfortunately, it displays a talent for evading one’s opponents never displayed by Madden on the footy field:
I totally reject the sort of intellectual superiority of some “planning experts” that would dictate an inflexible planning solution. People deserve choice. If they want to live in tram-track suburbs, good planning gives them the choice to do that. If growing suburbs on the fringe of the city meet their needs, then there must be appropriate supply. Too often the debate is hijacked either by a cultural snobbery against growth suburbs on the city fringe, or a self-serving not-in-my-backyard-ism against development in established areas.
I’m all for an honest and continuing debate about how best to manage Melbourne and Victoria’s growth. But I won’t stand for cultural snobbery and NIMBY-ism being dressed up as public debate.
Continue reading ‘Planning straw men’
ABC News reports that the architect of the Sydney Opera House died of a heart attack in his sleep at age 90.
Whatever else he did in his long career – as usual, the Wikipedia has more – it’s almost impossible to imagine Sydney without that building. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to imagine an Australia without it. It’s driven Melburnians mad for decades trying to find a similarly iconic building (a quest that has been thankfully abandoned).
Hopefully, the process of renovating the Opera House, which was proceeding with the cooperation of Utzon and his son, will result in a building whose interior – and acoustics – match its astonishing exterior. As a further memorial, perhaps state governments (and this seems to apply particularly to the NSW state government) can find a way to encourage better architecture, not just for icon buildings but across the board. Utzon, whose career also included work on low-cost housing in Denmark, would surely approve.
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