"It is important that we fight. The stakes are high. Urbanisation has become like tobacco and fossil fuels. A lot has been written about the dark arts employed by the tobacco companies and their lobbyists, and the fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists, to muddy the waters and prevent the public from understanding the damage their products do to public health and to the environment. But the problems created for public health and the environment by the massive growth of our cities gets less attention. It is the subject of an even more successful and effective PR campaign run by industry lobbyists than those run by Big Tobacco or Big Energy." (Kelvin Thomson)
Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you this afternoon. It is always encouraging to find in our community civic-minded 
people who are prepared to contribute their time and their ability to protecting the best of Melbourne, without the prospect of financial benefit, and indeed with precious little in the way of public recognition of your efforts. Thank you for what you do.
Around 20 years ago Mary Drost OAM set up Planning Backlash as an umbrella organisation and coalition of community and resident action groups. For the past two decades it has worked to protect Melbourne’s liveability, and to give residents a say in the character of their street and neighbourhood. Mary turned 90 last year, and asked me to take over as Convenor, so that she could focus on her key objectives of living to be 100, and going to London to demand her congratulatory letter from the Queen in person! While the second of those objectives will not be realised, Mary remains in good health, and we all wish her well in achieving her primary objective. She did a great job and we and all of Melbourne are in her debt.
I agreed to take over on the basis the organisation would be re-named Planning Democracy, which I feel better reflects our objectives. I see Planning Democracy as standing on 4 pillars – Heritage Protection, protecting Tree Canopy Cover, protecting Public Open Space, and giving residents a say in planning issues. We are a network of resident action groups. We have much in common with other non-government organisations working in the areas of environment, planning, and heritage, and I have been developing and maintaining contact with like-minded groups such as the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, the National Trust, the Australian Heritage Advocacy Alliance, Green Wedges, and of course the Protectors of Public Lands.
We are not confined to Melbourne, and some of the issues we have been involved in are clearly beyond Melbourne, in regional areas such as Kilmore, Castlemaine, and Westernport. However, most of our issues are in Melbourne. Some of the issues are very small, eg the setback on a single dwelling, but others, such as the Suburban Rail Loop and the North East Link, are massive.
A lot of the work is driven by our resident action groups – they advise me of what is happening in their area, and I assist them as best I can with advice and appropriate action. Of course, this carries the risk that everyone is off doing their own thing, and that our efforts are not very strategic. To help give us some direction and strategy, I have held several Forums focussing on particular issues of concern. Earlier this year in Hawthorn we held a Forum on Heritage Protection. In September we had a Forum in Moorabbin on Tree Canopy Cover. In October we had a Forum concerning the forthcoming State Election in Ashburton. These were well attended and highly successful.
I have been putting out regular Convenor’s Reports. One advantage of being a volunteer is that you don’t have to work to deadlines, and I don’t. But I have put out 18 in the past year, so they are coming out at the rate of roughly one every 3 weeks. They are intended to let people know what is going on around Melbourne in the areas of environment, planning and heritage. I hope they help us to learn from each other’s experiences. I also hope they give people a sense that they are not alone – that there are others out there fighting as well to protect what is good about our city. The late Julianne Bell used to talk about the heritage of “Marvellous Melbourne”, and I hope the Convenor’s Reports help keep that legacy alive.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media devotes little time to planning and heritage issues, and the collapse of local newspapers in recent years has been a disaster for local groups seeking to influence decision makers concerning planning, heritage, tree cover, and open space. I hope the Convenor’s Reports help redress this a little, enabling neighbourhood issues to become known by a wider audience, and making it harder for developers and authorities to get away with atrocities. I think most of you are already on the Planning Democracy emailing list, but if you are not, and would like to receive the Convenor’s Reports, please let me know.
We, or to be more accurate, our supporter groups, have plenty of losses, but we also have some wins. It is important to focus on these, lest we abandon hope, become captured by cynicism, and give up. I know that property developers are relentless, and find ways of continuing to fight, and that environmental battles, such as the one the Protectors of Public Lands have fought to stop the East West Link, never seem to quite go away. Nevertheless, the wins are real.
The Friends of Apollo Parkways saved parkland in Greensborough from being paved over by the Victorian Health Building Authority. The Mitchell Shire abandoned a planning scheme amendment that would have paved the way for a large residential development on land which the former Kilmore Council had given to the local Racing Club.
In Ferntree Gully VCAT upheld Council’s refusal of an application for a 12 metre high aged care facility in a quiet dead end street. In Lorne VCAT refused to allow a restaurant on the Lorne Pier, because it was zoned Public Park and Recreation Zone, a very positive precedent for Protectors of Public Lands.
Moreland Council (now Merri-bek) refused a proposal by Council officers which would have delegated numerous planning decisions to officers, instead voting to retain democratic oversight of the decisions by Council and the community. In March Hawthorn residents got the previous Federal Government to withdraw funding for a multi-storey carparking development at Glenferrie Station – at 490 spaces, the plan didn’t sound like a big win for public transport!
The Hume City Council decided to abandon an amendment for a residential rezoning for land adjacent to the Tullamarine Waste Dump, the location for the dumping of seriously toxic chemicals.
More recently, the Victorian Government has rejected plans for mountain bike tracks in the Yarra Ranges National Park. The Ballarat Council has voted to seek heritage overlay protection for Victory House after the National Trust urged it to rethink its initial decision not to seek protection for the property, which has strong connections with the Chinese community. VCAT has upheld Casey Council’s refusal of an application for a school adjacent to Lysterfield National Park, following a strong campaign by defenders of the Green Wedges.
This is certainly not a complete list of our wins, but I hope it gives you the flavour of them, and encourages resident action groups to believe that it is possible to win, and encourages them to fight.
It is important that we fight. The stakes are high. Urbanisation has become like tobacco and fossil fuels. A lot has been written about the dark arts employed by the tobacco companies and their lobbyists, and the fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists, to muddy the waters and prevent the public from understanding the damage their products do to public health and to the environment. Dodgy research, spin given relentlessly to journalists, donations and career opportunities given to politicians, all of that is pretty well known.
But the problems created for public health and the environment by the massive growth of our cities gets less attention. It is the subject of an even more successful and effective PR campaign run by industry lobbyists than those run by Big Tobacco or Big Energy.
In Australia and right around the world the size of cities is increasing massively. Urbanisation really was the defining characteristic of the human enterprise in the 20th century, and it continues unabated. In the past decade, over ¾ of the growth in Australia has occurred in Australia’s largest cities, and 39% of Australians live in either Melbourne or Sydney.
Globally, Earth’s population has risen 5 fold since the beginning of the 19th century. It is now 8 billion and rising at the rate of an extra billion every dozen years, the fastest rate ever. The spin merchants keep claiming that the growth is coming to an end, but they are having a lend of us, like the tobacco and fossil fuel lobbyists. And the proportion of city dwellers is growing. More than half the global population now resides in cities, and that is expected to increase to 2/3rds by 2050. Urban areas will double to triple in global extent between now and 2050.
But is this a good thing? The spin merchants would have you believe that urban consolidation is good for the environment. But the latest Australia State of the Environment Report makes clear that this is not so. It notes that “The growth rates of some of Australia’s capital cities are some of the highest in the developed world and these have placed growing pressure on the urban environment to expand either upwards (in terms of urban density) or outwards (in terms of urban sprawl).”
The Report has sobering news for the foolish planners, policy makers and commentators who claim that we can have our cake and eat it – keep increasing our urban populations without trashing our environment. It says “Because of the increasing ratio of building area to land area on lots, the space for trees, plants and outdoor recreation at both the front and rear of dwellings has declined. This change in urban form is not only changing the physical form and character of existing and green field neighbourhoods, but the ability to manage heat, improve walkability and thereby the liveability of our urban environments. It is also reducing the extent of urban biodiversity by decreasing tree canopy cover and garden space..’
Exactly. Urban consolidation is not saving the planet, it is wrecking it.
Unfortunately, VCAT seems to have swallowed industry spin about urban consolidation being good for the environment. In approving an 11 storey high rise tower right next to the Brunswick Central parklands of Gilpin and Clifton Parks, they claimed the development would bring environmental benefits because it “will help achieve a more sustainable land use and settlement pattern, and encourage reduced car dependency”. This is bollocks. The new tower will emit many tonnes of greenhouse gases in construction and operation, and damage the biodiversity value of the neighbouring parks. It will also set a precedent for the other applications for high rise in the precinct which are under consideration. The judgement also dismissed the urban heat island effect.
Professors Bill Laurance and Jayden Engert produced a paper in April that concluded that “One of the most important demographic events of the past half century is the dramatic growth of urban areas worldwide”. Growing cities, they say, “tend to engulf and devour their surrounding lands, often at the expense of biodiversity. Burgeoning cities are a very serious driver of biodiversity decline, comparable with the impacts of agriculture and forestry”.
And what of its impact on our physical and mental health? Well before the coronavirus pandemic brought home to many the health dangers of population density, the rapid construction of high-rise towers was raising health questions.
Whereas I and my generation had opportunities to buy and live in detached houses, high-rise apartment towers are now being built in central Melbourne at four times the maximum densities allowed in such crowded cities as New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo. These hyper-dense skyscrapers are being built with little regard to the effects on residents living within. Scant regard is paid to their impacts on the streets below, or their impact on neighbouring properties. There is no shortage of evidence that residents of high-rise housing are vulnerable to mental health issues. Psychologists have been investigating this for years. A 1979 study in Glasgow found evidence that high-rise residents were presenting psychological symptoms more than other housing residents.
A 1991 paper compared elderly African-Americans living in high-rise and low-rise buildings in Nashville. The high risers had a higher incidence of depression, phobias, and schizophrenia. Of course, there can be other factors contributing to this outcome, such as greater poverty among the high risers. But in Singapore, between 1960 and 1976, the percentage of people living in high-rise buildings climbed from 9% to 51%. During this period, the per capita rate of suicide by leaping from buildings increased four-fold. The overall suicide rate increased by 30%, but the rate of leaping increased many times faster.
This suggests that having more tall buildings leads to more suicides, and that the buildings themselves are responsible for some of the harms done to residents. A key issue is isolation. Residents of high-rise buildings in Leeds reported feeling lonely and isolated. And sharing semi-public spaces with strangers can make residents suspicious and fearful of crime – some of the Leeds residents were afraid to open their front door.
High-rise buildings are bad for our mental health. They block the sunlight to their neighbours and make soulless wind canyons of our streets. They are built over the (metaphorical) dead bodies of the local residents who consistently oppose them. They are coronavirus risks, and in Australia many of the new buildings are defective, with flammable cladding and other defects.
The spin merchants for urban consolidation have another dodgy claim besides the claim of environmental benefit. They claim it improves housing affordability. VCAT seems to have fallen for this one too. In the decision approving an 11 storey high rise tower in Brunswick they said “urban consolidation is intended to provide increased affordable housing”. In fact, it has the opposite effect. It increases land prices and makes housing less affordable. Professor Michael Buxton’s submission to the Legislative Council Parliamentary Inquiry into Planning and Heritage states that “Regulated planning systems can also control land price rises. Deregulated planning systems encourage developers to bid up the price of land and to constantly raise building heights as a form of compensation. Height and density controls limit this tendency”.
Professor Buxton’s analysis fits with the observed facts. Sydney and Melbourne are Australia’s densest cities. They are also our least affordable. This is also the case internationally. For the past 11 years Demographia International Housing Affordability has ranked Hong Kong as the least affordable city in the world. At 6,777 people per square kilometre, it is also one of the most densely populated.
Another piece of developer industry spin is that more dwellings would be built if only we gave them even more of a free hand with development applications. But the academic and author Cameron Murray has been pointing out for years that property developers hold back the supply of developments to ensure they maximise their profit. Property developers are in the business of making money, not lowering their profits by flooding the market with housing. The writer Conor Dougherty at the New York Times has noticed the same thing.
He quotes a major US property developer admitting that “we’re going to look project by project and say which ones we are going to go ahead on and which ones we are going to take a pause on”.
It’s developers who make the decision about where and when houses will be built, not builders. The relentless claim by the property industry, and their useful idiots in government and the media, that “planning has caused a housing shortage” is just not correct. It is no more believable than the gas companies who tell us that our gas prices will go down if only they are allowed to explore for more gas, when they’re presently exporting all the gas overseas to the highest bidder!
Urban consolidation not only causes environmental and health damage, and harms housing affordability, it has a range of other adverse social consequences, such as traffic congestion. Governments come up with plans for infrastructure projects to tackle the congestion. They sound good, particularly when government and industry lobbyists talk about all the jobs the project will create. But sometimes all is not as it seems. When the Suburban Rail Loop was announced in 2018 it sounded to me like a good idea, and I welcomed it.
But it is increasingly clear that it is not so much a transport project as an urban consolidation one. It will take planning powers around the railway stations off local Councils and give them to a Government authority, with the intention of a free for all in high rise developments in those areas. The number of trips diverted to public transport by the Suburban Rail Loop is estimated to be a net 230,000 trips per day.
Given that the Government intends to have Melbourne’s population increase to 8.8 million people by 2050, which would require an extra 10.4 million trips per day, this is a miniscule amount. And the Victorian Parliamentary Budget Office has now estimated the total cost of the project at $200 billion.
John Menadue was Australia’s top bureaucrat – Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet – under both Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser. He was very heavy duty. He now writes a Public Policy Journal called Pearls and Irritations. His recent article on infrastructure projects in Sydney and Melbourne finds that, in the last decade, Australia has spent or committed over $530 billion in highly dubious Sydney and Melbourne transport megaprojects.
He writes that “For over 15 years, a cocktail of ever-cheaper debt, the unchecked influence of our transport infrastructure lobby and a seduced senior bureaucracy underpinned a drunken feast of road and rail megaprojects”. At a time when the focus is on how to repair Government balance sheets and bottom lines, it is time to end the infrastructure extravagance.
So where to from here?
Obviously Planning Democracy will continue to motor on with the issues I have been talking about – heritage protection, tree canopy cover, protecting open space, and giving people a say in planning decisions.
But I have two other thoughts I would like to submit for your consideration. The first is a bit out of left field, though not really for people who know me. We need a war on plastic. Some of us are old enough to remember a time before plastic, and before 1950 it wasn’t really a thing at all. But a few years ago experts told the World Economic Forum at Davos that at the present rate, by 2050, the weight of plastic in the world’s oceans will exceed the weight of the fish. This estimate now appears in official government publications. Such an outcome would be scandalous, and needs to be prevented.
And of course we’ve had heavy rains and flooding in metropolitan Melbourne recently. As I’ve ridden my bike along the Moonee Ponds Creek, Merri Creek, and the Maribyrnong River, I’ve noticed, not for the first time, these important and valuable waterways have been literally trashed by debris from upstream. While the vegetation will melt into the landscape in time, the plastic is another matter altogether.
You will all know that this plastic ends up in Port Phillip Bay, and out in our oceans, where it kills marine life. I am aware that Federal and State Governments have been announcing various initiatives in recent years to tackle this problem. I am also aware the situation doesn’t seem to be improving, but rather to be getting worse.
I want to bring together like-minded people and groups to tackle this problem in 2 ways. First, in the practical way of initiating and supporting clean up activities in our waterways and beaches. Second, by getting to the bottom of what policy changes and initiatives are needed to tackle this problem at the source, and by holding Governments and corporations to account and requiring them to follow through on the promises they make concerning action on plastics. I am sure that Protectors of Public Lands have always included public waterways in their area of concern, and hope you find this issue of interest.
The second thought I want to submit for your consideration is that we bring together the like-minded groups from time to time. I have wondered whether there might be an advantage in combining our forces with amalgamations, but at least for the time being I can see that organisations like Planning Democracy, Green Wedges, Protectors of Public Lands and the Australian Heritage Advocacy Alliance are performing distinct roles. So it might make more sense simply to meet from time to time to exchange ideas and look at ways of supporting each other.
While I have been around long enough to know that it is naïve to expect everyone to agree on the best way forward, and that we all have differing objectives, I also know that we are most effective when we work together and are giving decision makers clear and re-enforcing messages.
Thanks again for the work that you do. When Julianne Bell passed away, I did not know whether Protectors of Public Lands would survive her, and it is a great credit to you that it does, and continues to play a role in the life of this great city.
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