By the 1970s it was clear that planning in NSW had become cumbersomely bureaucratic and in need of major overhaul.
Revitalisation took the form of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act of 1978. Environmental impact assessment processes were formalised and the act, along with subsequent amendments, established a hierarchy of regional and local plans to be formulated with extensive consultation.
Despite the apparently robust statutory framework and provisions for clear planning policies to guide individual decisions, ICAC and other investigations over the past 30 years have demonstrated many vulnerabilities.
Quite apart from the criminal behaviour uncovered in some instances, the various investigations showed a planning system struggling to find the right balance between efficient assessment of individual project proposals and protection of the public interest.
Good planning always needs to provide for private sector investment if it is to deliver results and overall community benefits.
The ongoing challenge is to find the right balance, ensuring that the plan and the private sector investment projects it facilitates actually deliver real and sustainable public benefit.
Of course, the plan also relies on the provision of infrastructure such as transport, water and sewerage as well as energy and telecommunications.
History tells us that major infrastructure investments are only of interest to the private investor if there is a more or less assured dividend in the short to medium term.
Major upfront capital investment in water and sewerage infrastructure for an urban release area is of little interest to private land developers because there are only returns on the investment as individual blocks of land are sold, built upon and connected to services.
The time lag can be considerable.
This is a major reason why agencies such as Sydney Water and Hunter Water may have been corporatised to improve their operating efficiency, but have not been privatised. There clearly is a role for both government and the private sector in building communities.
In some developing countries, efforts to have international funding of private corporations to provide water and sewerage infrastructure in poor communities have failed because the private corporations are drawn to providing the services in relatively wealthy areas where people can afford to pay their bills, rather than servicing poor areas where income streams and returns to the service provider are much less reliable.
Thankfully, in all but remotest parts of Australia, we are spared the worst excesses of such inequality and dysfunction.
However, are our regions and communities planned and developed in a systematic way?
In the Hunter Region what has been presented as a strategic plan has looked very much like a cobbled together amalgamation of proposals from major developers rather than a comprehensive and balanced strategy to deliver well designed and sustainable communities.
We have some very capable and innovative developers who, I can only assume, must feel somewhat embarrassed to be expected to deliver residential subdivisions that may all have the same coloured roofing, Colorbond fences and mandatory water tanks, but are cramped against one another with minimal eaves or any other concessions to commonsense passive solar design or site-specific considerations.
The standard formula seems to rule regardless of orientation or aspect.
It seems we have drifted into a situation where there is an unfortunate disconnect between government planning processes and housing industry delivery.
We have drifted into a situation where there is an unfortunate disconnect between government planning processes and housing industry delivery.
Can planning provisions be revamped to give us more confidence that government planning protocols and decision making will deliver liveable and sustainable communities, or have our planning processes drifted so far off track that we have to rely almost entirely on the commitment of private developers to give us good sustainable design?
Private developers and housing industry businesses are understandably driven by corporations law obligations to act in the best interests of shareholders.
One can only hope that medium term brand value is a sufficient focus in business decisions to stimulate genuine innovation.
We are collectively capable of doing so much better than our recent record would suggest.
