NSW Premier Chris Minns let slip what we can only assume are the whisperings from certain parts of the development industry that we can well do without environmental and community consultations for major projects.
Minns told a gathering on Monday to announce upgrades to Carramar and Yennora stations in Western Sydney that “unnecessary box ticking” was holding back election promises and overdue building works”.
“My view is there’s way too much red tape,” Minns said.
“It’s just insane that we’re in this situation where so much basic work needs to be clogged up with unnecessary regulation just because the rule book says, well, you need to go through steps a and b to get to c.”
Yet as we know from the data, developers are not building because of a lack of planning approvals, but because most developments are not financially viable.
As Tim Sneesby put it last week in an article that’s on the way to going viral – 95 per cent of development applications are approved. But most are not getting built.
Minns said the abandoned housing redevelopment of the Rosehill Racecourse “self evidently” needed community input otherwise, “we can probably skip community consultation because we know the answer will be.”
The Sydney Morning Herald said Minn’s comments were “unprompted”.
The Fifth Estate notes that they were completely left out of the press release announcing the two station upgrades.
Greens MP and spokesperson, Sue Higginson, said Minns has a complete disregard for the law or the planning system, saying it has “become apparent over the last three years…that he just doesn’t care”.
“The Premier has demonstrated that he has the capacity to act dangerously and lawlessly. He has been willing to foist unconstitutional laws on the people of NSW on two occasions already, with significant impacts on our civil liberties and at great cost to the public purse.
“This lawlessness is now leeching into the way our community and environment are considered when it comes to big new developments.”
This echoes observers who say the housing debate is increasingly the thin edge of the wedge for more widespread and wholescale deregulation, which is a core to the goals of many tech/AI industry billionaires and accompanies an aggressive anti-regulation free market and anti-environmental push in current US politics.
In Australia, many keen advocates of solving the housing crisis have fallen under the YIMBY banner, without a deeper understanding that planning is a community and economic protection measure.
Melbourne YIMBYs, for instance, have been significantly funded by US tech billionaires, under the “abundance” trope, following publication of a book by that name and now at least partly disavowed by one of its authors. See the Sneesby article referenced above.
Higginson suggested the impending NSW election next year might have played a part in the premier’s statements.
“I think it is clear … the Premier has realised it’s 11 minutes to election eve and he knows that he can’t deliver on his promises. He has spent the past three years talking housing, housing, housing with developers with the big end of town rather than focusing on his job to deliver the infrastructure, because you can’t have successful housing if you don’t have schools, hospitals and transport projects.”