The several drafts of an earlier version of this article — AARGGGHHHH WHAT HE’S RESIGNED ARE YOU KIDDING ME — looked like one of those houses you used to see around the inner- or mid-city back in the great sharehouse days. You know the type. They’d started out as a California bungalow in the ’20s, with rubble piles for pillars. Then someone thought Roman columns would look good. At some stage the verandah was enclosed with post-war yellow brick to create an extra room. Then the thing had been faux-aluminium cladded. The living room was authentic ’20s; the kitchen was ’70s lemon yellow and sky blue. And so on. Then one day they were gone, knocked over, vacant lots waiting for the home of someone’s dreams. Or slab-tilt shoeboxes.
Why did a piece on the Andrews government’s new housing policy, now become his final flourish, turn into such a folly — a bit on audacious ambition here, an extension on neoliberalism there — before I decided to demolish the whole thing and start over? It’s because I couldn’t really accept what the plan represented. It’s the simultaneous enactment of ambition by a government that is really willing to make something happen.
And by that very process, it is a new and comprehensive assault on what remained of civic life and social democracy in what was once a place that had achieved both. With its removal of local planning powers on larger developments, it deals a killing blow to the idea that communities might shape where they live, while the vast sell-off of public land on which 44 housing towers sit removes any basis for new forms of land tenure in the inner city. Rainbow bulldozer? It’s a little more than that — some sort of P-flag six-storey solid rock tunnel boring machine.
With the promise — the promise — of 800,000 new dwellings in a decade, the plan looks audacious and ambitious. But it’s more like the sky-blue California bungalow, something arrived at by improvisation and patches on patches. The “planning” of Melbourne, Sydney and other capitals to a lesser degree over past decades hasn’t been anything you could realistically use that word for. In these two biggest cities, we’ve been caught in the federalism trap: our immigration policy and numbers have been set at a Commonwealth and federal level, with a bipartisan commitment to keeping the numbers hugely high. Dealing with these new arrivals, and their overwhelming preference for the biggest cities, has been left at the state level.
Thus our urban planning has been determined by the fiscal crisis/disjuncture of the state or states. What we really needed to do, decades ago, was match planning and urban development to demographics. That would have meant the development of long-term bipartisan plans — plans with 50-, 75-, 100-year arcs, taking in climate change and other factors as well as growth — with real investment in second, third and fourth CBD foci within our urban sprawl to create densification and public transport hubs. Instead, since the collapse of social democracy and the legitimacy of planning in the 1970s, we have put one extension on after another.
There’s no point getting into a lament about this. Even partial social democracy has been gone for half a century now, at least in urban planning matters. There was a lot wrong with it, and it discredited itself, as those 44 hulking towers on the horizon — simultaneously magnificent and ghastly — demonstrate. But in the last phase of genuine development planning, we had begun to incorporate processes of reflexivity and public involvement into the process of developing cities. It would be silly to uncritically praise the big planning era. What was proposed for Melbourne in the 1960s was hundreds of the towers we now have, with the inner suburbs eviscerated, and connected by dozens of freeways that were never built. The plan was hybrid: the freeways were in the service of capital, the tower proposals were part of a whole series of rather daunting, mildly utopian development proposals.
They were stopped by a massive social movement, a class alliance of inner-city working-class and proto-knowledge class that has ensured that Melbourne did not go the way of hundreds of American and British cities. But what was never developed was the “next plan”, one which would reflexively deal with the challenges of growth while incorporating the new thinking about cities — which was the old “unthinking”, that they should be on the ground, various, irregular, local, textured and layered. Instead, as states everywhere suffered mini-fiscal collapses in the late 1980s, urban development was handed over to the private sector, and genuine planning ceased.
That is the situation we have today, and in which the Andrews plan has been enacted. In a continued “public” era, we would have built whole new centres, real ones, at Werribee, Clayton etc, and with public involvement in the planning. Instead, we have allowed for a new sprawl that learnt nothing from the post-war one. Dan, with his usual chuzpah, muttered something a couple of months ago about how maybe building endless low-density estates on the ever-expanding urban edge wasn’t the best way to go. Oh, ya think?
Like everything, this was staged and less than honest. Labor has ruled Victoria for a generation. In that time it has permitted the worst sort of low-density carve-up going west and east — treeless, cul-de-sac private estates of detached homes, lacking centrality, topography, shops, civic offices, the lot.
The centre of these new placelessnesses is often as not a Woolies or the Dan Murphy’s car park. They’ve been allowed to develop this way for the simple reason that, before the recent change in political funding laws, Labor had to keep the developers sweet at all cost, lest they mount a campaign against them through the Liberals. It’s in the context of that absence, that failure, that this plan has taken shape. It’s not an audacious leap into the future. It’s a series of improvisations made to look as such.
Indeed, much of it is a plan led by PR, and the need to find an enemy for the housing crisis. This has come down to local councils, which is grimly hilarious. The flurry of stories in the press about the shiny new YIMBY movement was part of that push, recycling the same half-dozen stories of planning snarl-ups. Anyone want to hear about the great Nightingale height-limit refusal in Merri-bek (the Brunswick Soviet) again? Surely six times isn’t enough. The truth, as I and others noted, is that councils approve 90% plus of planning applications, that VCAT waves through 70% of the 5% or so that are disputed, and that the notion that six-month delays to a minority of applications is what’s creating a housing crisis is ludicrous.
In Victoria, it’s also an alibi. As a series of later YIMBY-critical stories in The Age and Guardian Australia made clear — there are clearly pro- and anti-factions slugging it out inside both publications — there are approved permits for more than 100,000 units floating around. There are also masses of land banking, with some rezoned areas lying undeveloped for a quarter of a century now. Why hasn’t the demand for new homes prompted a building explosion in which every permit and lot is used? It’s a funny thing to have to teach neoliberals about capitalism, but the point is that in a rocketing market the land and the permit is the main asset. You don’t need to build anything to make money. Indeed, there are disincentives to do so. All that expenditure, risk, project management? Why not let the blank lot simply appreciate? All the more so when there is a global shortage and price inflation of building supplies. And a grievous shortage of skilled tradespeople.
The tradies shortage! That’s where the Andrews government has really screwed up, and is trying to cover its tracks with council blaming. Long before COVID hit, Labor was walking the edge somewhat, running high deficits for big projects, to keep the state economy ticking over. COVID hit, and in the aftermath of lockdowns a redoubled effort was required. Keynes famously suggested that you get yourself out of a depression by digging a hole, burying money and tendering out the recovery of it as a way of keeping demand going. Victoria simply dug the holes and threw the money down it — West Gate Tunnel, Metro, North East Link, all with vast payments going to private contractors who passed on the vast wage bills resulting from cosy contractor-union arrangements.
Good luck to everyone working on these sites, and getting great wages, but the misallocation of human resources has been vast. From the level-crossing removal program on, this has been real Latin American banana-republic stuff, in which necessary programs have been wildly overextended as a sort of concrete propaganda. The Metro tunnel was largely a value-capture project, including handing Lendlease, as part of the Cross Yarra Partnership, the central city commercial block for which it has been angling for half a century, since it tried to demolish Flinders Street Station. The Suburban Rail Loop is the crowning glory — genuinely post-modern planning: an entity that will never exist as a rail loop, that was acknowledged as such from the start, but whose purpose is to create 16 “activity zones” exempt from any planning laws.
Now this mix of hapless and engineered crises have been yoked together to create a pretext for the double whammy: a comprehensive removal of local councils from key planning decisions, and a huge sell-off of inner-city public land under the pretext of removing the 44 towers. Whether all or only some of the towers need to go, in physical terms, is a matter for debate. But that’s beside the point. The real purpose is to get the proceeds from the land sales to help pay down the spiralling deficit. It’s not even an asset recycling program. It is fiscal shock doctrine treatment, administered by Labor itself.
Should this go ahead, it will be the final killing of public housing in Victoria, a “socialist left” government shooting well beyond many American and British cities in its neoliberalisation of the city. The “social and affordable” housing mandated in return for the public sell-off will be provisional, and, over time, dependent on the kindness of developers. Labor will say that they do this, because otherwise “the Tories” would do it anyway, and with less social trade-off. But what it really does is remove the major line of resistance against such moves from the right. Labor’s logic on this was the same during the great privatisations of the early 1990s. That’s what gave us the Qantas we have now. The “social and affordable” housing will be returned to the private market. We will end up, down the line, with Los Angeles-style homelessness, i.e. mass rough sleeping. The final exclusion of the low-income and the newly arrived will occur. Quite aside from the injustice to them, in terms of denied access to centrality, it will eventually make the inner city a dull, bland and monotonous middle-high-income place.
With a less sweeping, less compromised plan for urban transformation, of which more later, this could be the moment when a Labor government stages its Battle of Salamis against the final drive to the comprehensive privatisation of everything. We wouldn’t do public housing again, the way we did it last time ’round, but land is land, for God’s sake. Two-thirds of it is slated to be privatised. So it will all go eventually. There are myriad ways to keep it, and still let developers make out like bandits. Without it, that’s the end of “the social”. Using the need for council reform (which is genuine) as an excuse for disempowering any form of local community shaping is a demolition of democracy.
Hence, the efforts writing and rewriting an earlier version of this piece, one turned into a carve-up by an unwillingness to accept the clear evidence of what was being done to this city, this state, by a Labor government, its leader departing on it, and summoning the spirit of Labor as his justification. T’would have been better to stick with the sky-blue bungalow, and steadily remodel. Instead we’re promised the dream house and await the great vacancy.
