Melbourne cries out for new powers

22 April 2009 | by Gemma Battenbough

Melbourne needs to overturn 200 years of city building and reinvent its attitude to public land if it is to become a more sustainable city, a leading professional has said.

“A sustainable Melbourne is a more compact Melbourne,” Marcus Spiller, director of SG Economics and Planning, said in a speech yesterday at a conference on the Brumby government’s Melbourne@5Million planning policy.

The city’s current urban structure is defined by injecting space between buildings, with each home being a cottage in a rural village, rather than designing buildings around central public spaces, Spiller said. In this sense, public space is being treated as a “residual asset”, he said.

There needed to be “major intensification” around public transport corridors and suburban areas should be transformed into “energy farms”, he said at the Public Land @ 5 Million conference yesterday.

But, despite densification being of “metropolitan significance”, local councils and state governments were not up to the task, Spiller said, calling for the return of a Greater Melbourne Authority.

“Our current institutional arrangements are not capable of delivering this revolution,” he said.

To a large extent local councils were in charge and would favour local needs over metropolitan ones, Spiller said.

Added to the broth are the powers of state government institutions, such as the Priority Development Panel (PDP), the Development Assessment Committees (DAC) and the Growth Areas Authority (GAA), he said. State governments are “hopelessly compromised” in making decisions at city level, the said.

The government should “reinstate real metropolitan governance”, Spiller said, in the form of a Greater Melbourne Authority that should be responsible for the city’s highway system, invest and manage public transport, maintain city parks and oversee the city’s water, sewerage and drainage systems. The authority would be democratically accountable, have rating powers, the capacity to issue infrastructure bonds and be responsible for creating a metropolitan planning scheme, he said.