At The Daily Telegraph’s Bradfield Oration on Friday 15 November 2024, Premier Chris Minns has announced that he will allow developers to bypass council approvals and to seek spot rezoning, in order to speed up approval and delivery times.

Premier Chris Minns announced he will allow developers to bypass council approvals and to seek spot rezoning so that developers can speed up approval and delivery times.

You can read Minns address to The Daily Telegraph’s Bradfield Oration on Friday 15 November 2024 BELOW.

Councils will be stripped of their powers to block certain large new residential developments in NSW, as part of major changes to the state’s planning system.

The Bradfield Oration is named after engineer Dr J.C.C Bradfield (1867 – 1943) who was the chief engineer for building the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Dr Bradfield lived in Gordon – now a TOD site.  His home and Memorial is located within 400 metres of Gordon Railway Station and under the TOD SEPP can be surrounded by 6-8 storeys apartments.  Dr Bradfield’s wife – Edith – played a pivotal role in helping her neighbour Mrs Annie Forsyth Wyatt form the Ku-ring-gai Tree Lovers’ Civic League that led to the formation of the first National Trust of Australia (NSW).  All this heritage is under threat.

Minns address to The Daily Telegraph’s Bradfield Oration on Friday 15 November 2024:

Thank you so much Ben, and for all you Sydneysiders thank you for coming out on a wet but still beautiful Sydney, spring day. And for all those people from all those other states, welcome to the most beautiful city on Earth.

And for all of you from Victoria, I hope you enjoy Melbourne’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in a couple of years’ time, it’s going to be very exciting.

This is all off the record, isn’t it, Ben? Thanks for that introduction. Thank you very much for having me.

Bradfield started as an idea, it turned into an event, and now it’s become an institution for New South Wales, and it’s very good to be back here.

On a day like this, we honour our history. Can I also acknowledge the Gadigal people.

Friends, one hundred years ago, in May 1924 John Bradfield submitted his doctoral thesis which became the first engineering PhD ever awarded at the University of Sydney.

In typically modest fashion, it sketched out nothing less than a new vision for Sydney, with a bridge spanning across the Harbour, and a system of trains branching out across that city.

By that point, Bradfield was already an experienced engineer, and he used this opportunity to set out his broader philosophy of planning in a modern city, it was beyond just what the city of Sydney would look like.

After years in the field, he had come to believe, and I quote:

‘That the highest plane of engineering can only be attained by the perfect blending of the utility of material things and the beauty of spiritual things.’

And that might sound a little bit high-falutin. And if I could, if Dr Bradfield will forgive me, I think interpreting his words, what he meant was, when he talks about spiritual things, the message is:

That when we build the concrete bones of our city. When we lay down the railway lines, when we pave the roads, and when we design our laws for new housing and infrastructure, all those decisions are there to serve a higher purpose, to make our city beautiful and liveable and allow people to write their own story in the history of this great town.

When it comes to housing, the reasons we make plans is to give order and establish rules. But its purpose is to give people a roof over their heads.

In a place where they want to live, with the chance to spend quality time with the people that they care about.

In other words, if a soul of a city is the life of its people, then the planning system exists to nurture that soul.

And if that’s our goal, and it has to be, the unavoidable truth for Sydney is that we’re not meeting the moment.

And our planning system in Australia’s largest city, it’s only international city, it’s most expensive city, is not working.

It’s not working if you’re trying to build something yourself, or if you’re looking to buy your first home, or if you’re a young person waiting endlessly on a Saturday morning for a rental inspection somewhere in Sydney.

Our system is not planning to help you live the good life.

Last year, I came to Bradfield and set out our principles for reforming this system, which led to one of the largest rezonings in the State’s history, led and designed by the Minister for Planning, Paul Scully, who’s here with us today.

A decision, which around train stations and transport hubs alone, will give us an additional 170,000 new homes in New South Wales.

It’s worth noting that those changes led to a sustained campaign of opposition from some Liberal and Independent Mayors – and some Labor Mayors.

It led to an attempt to reverse those changes in Parliament and the re-establishment, in parts of Sydney, of the NIMBY movement which had remained dormant for a period of time, because they felt the fight to stop progress had already well and truly been won.

But not withstanding those major changes and looking at the broken nature of the planning system, which was so graphically represented on the front page of the Daily Telegraph this week.

This year I’m here to say that we must go further, and we will.

Over the past twelve months we’ve been putting our shoulder to the wheel trying to shift our housing system in New South Wales, towards a culture that says yes, yes, to new projects.

But again, and again that wheel gets snagged against stubborn problems.

There are still too many delays, too many obstacles, making life too difficult to build housing in this state.

I’ll give you some statistics. In the three years from July 2021 to July 2024, the average council assessment time for medium density residential apartments grew by fifty percent.

So, in that period of time, things have gotten worse, not better.

And think it’s important to say that the fault just doesn’t lie with every council.

Some councils are taking on average, just 23 days to assess development applications.

Some are taking 462 days.

It’s clear for at least some councils, they believe that they’re curators of a museum, never to be changed.

Which gets us to the crux of the problem:

There is a disconnect between the state’s need to support new housing, and our ability to make it happen through the current planning system.

The state traditionally has built the trainlines and the schools, laying down the vision of Bradfield, as well as the hospitals and other basic infrastructure for a growing city, and we’ve left the question of where people are going to live up to local councils.

With few exceptions, decisions about residential development have largely been the domain of councils, clocking in at nearly 90% of approvals for Sydney.

And I think it’s clear to say that that’s led to our current difficulties and our huge problems.

It means that we can’t build enough homes in certain well-connected parts of our city, because councils in major parts of the city are just banning them.

And where good proposals are stuck in the planning system for just too long.

Consider this:

While the population across western Sydney has boomed in the last fifty years, the Woollahra LGA has experienced a 15 per cent reduction in its population since the 1960s.
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So, we’ve got one of the wealthiest local government areas in the country, one of the wealthiest in the world, nestled right next to Sydney’s CBD and on the other side, some of the most stunning locations on earth, and its population is declining.

While in Southwest Sydney, we’re been adding an extra street to its western fringe every other week.

Not only is this robbing people of the chance to live in places like Woollahra and those surrounding areas, if they choose to, but it’s an incredibly expensive way to grow a city.

Watching this system up close for eighteen months, it’s clear something’s got to give.


When Paul and I took office in our respective portfolios and jobs in March of last year we were faced with an unwieldy, complicated mess of a planning system.

Alongside inflation that peaked at almost 8% in late 2022, as interest rates were rising and financing and capital, for many important projects, important housing projects, were drying up for many firms.

However, I think it’s fair to say, in all honesty, with this, with this crowd today, that neither of us anticipated the reluctance of the system.

Both of us believed that the TOD changes, the R2 and R3 planning moves, the billions in social housing announced at the last budget, would shift the needle and speed up approvals.

As I said, neither of us anticipated the reluctance of the system to move quickly and allow the remaining capital that was willing to invest in New South Wales to build new housing, to flow.


Paul told me unambiguously that we couldn’t afford to wait any longer. and that the changes that we had already announced needed to go further, because we couldn’t wait for them to bear fruit.

We had to go further today.

So, today I’m announcing that Labor will make further changes to our planning system to give the state a significant and legitimate say in our housing future.

We will create a state led approval pathway for large new residential housing developments in New South Wales.

In addition to that change, we will allow this new pathway to assess and approve spot rezonings at exactly the same time.

Both assessments will be done by the state, and in the process bypass local councils, potentially cutting years off the approval process for much needed housing in New South Wales.

Broadly the policy development is following a simple principle.

We need to allow new housing in parts of Sydney and regional New South Wales where housing is currently most feasible.

The pathway will not be, and cannot be, for every single application above the threshold.

But if the NSW Government receives an application that delivers on the state’s housing priorities, then this process will allow for spot rezoning to get on and build those homes, and I need to say this, even if the application would not have been allowed under the local council’s planning controls.

At the same time the Government will create a new Housing Delivery Authority to head this process.

The authority will work with Government and industry to establish the criteria for projects that will be part of the new pathway.

But I want to assure you it will be a simple set of directions essentially what does New South Wales need for new housing and where does it needs to be built.

This new process will be open and transparent. Developments that are consistent with the state’s priorities will be given access to the new pathway. And it will begin in early 2025.

The Housing Delivery Authority will ask for expressions of interest for projects above $60 million in Sydney and $30 million elsewhere in New South Wales.

That equates to around 100 dwellings in Sydney and 40 dwellings everywhere else.

In order to meet strict probity standards these EOIs will be run by three very senior public servants in the state.

Now, I acknowledge that this is a big step forward and a significant change from the status quo.

Because of this reform, the state will be assuming a larger say over the direction of major housing projects within New South Wales.

And like any big change, I’m sure some people will push back against it.

But we’re making this call because we don’t have any time to waste.

Housing is the defining challenge of this age. A problem that breeds other problems.

And if you look at the statistics of young people leaving New South Wales and Sydney in particular, it is very, very troubling.

We’re losing twice as many young people as we’re gaining, at the same time as New South Wales is the drop off point, the largest proportion of inbound migration of any state in Australia, at 37%.

If there are unreasonable barriers out there to new housing, we need to pull them down.

I’ll finish as I started, with a quote from Bradfield’s PhD thesis, which still manages to ring true one hundred years later.

When approaching the problems of a growing city, he said:

‘The past of history of the city must be known, present day conditions understood, and the future visualised with imagination, originality, and sound practical judgement.’

As Dr Bradfield understood, no single problem is beyond us.

If we approach the future with the same sense of imagination and practical judgement, we can solve our problems plaguing the city. We can help people live the good life, here in the greatest city on earth.

References

https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/bradfield-oration

‘Developers will bypass council approvals in residential development overhaul in NSW’ by Alexander Lewis & Chantelle Al-Khouri, 15 Nov 2024, ABC NEWS HERE


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