Reactions to the violent authoritarian outbreaks in America, Russia and the Middle East are changing rapidly. Initial disbelief has spawned outrage, dismay, aversion, rejection and, finally, vigorous pushback. In evidence of the latter, reason is re-emerging as the proper foundation of policy action, thankfully displacing ideological belief. With luck, this trend could also improve urban policymaking.
The federal government’s just released Climate Risk Assessment (CRA) report confirms what was long predicted; that un-curtailed climate change will impose a broad and devastating impact on Australia’s whole way of life, and its security.
If we are to avert the worst consequences – due largely to us and all other developed nations kicking the policy can down the road – nothing short of urgent, coordinated, sustained ameliorative action is necessary.
The report sends a very clear message: if you don’t want to die from the fast-approaching bullet of climate disaster, then DUCK!
Spinifex is an opinion column. If you would like to contribute, contact us to ask for a detailed brief.
Governed by the implacable laws of physics, the universe is utterly indifferent to human persistence.
The contrary perspective – that the concept of climate change can be parsed as a matter of faith rather than fact – is analogous to insisting the tooth fairy exists.
Likewise, dismissing Australia’s contributed GHG emissions as minuscule also misses the point; our population of about 27 million people emits about 25 per cent of Africa’s entire 1.5 billion people.
Thus, any political party that continues to press denial should rightly be consigned to the purgatory of eternal opposition – too dangerous and perpetually unfit to govern, just like their petulant infantile “drill baby drill” confreres.
Previous policy practices will no longer cut it
A particular feature of the CRA report is its “systemic” risk analysis, which sets out the interdependence of policy topics.
Hitherto, policy problems were more often conceived as discrete and isolated for the purpose of analysis and resolution.
This practice entailed, firstly, problem simplification by whittling down interdependencies, often referred to as problem “right sizing”.
A second feature was then to define the problem within the terms of the dominant professional concepts of the agency charged with its resolution; often referred to as the man-with-a-hammer problem (for whom every problem is a nail).
When combined, these practices can be observed, for example, in policy treatment of the housing affordability crisis.
Problem complexity – a particular feature of housing – was discarded, leaving only economic concepts, followed by the application of standard concepts like supply and demand. Hey presto, a solution emerged: increase supply to sate demand until prices decline to an acceptable level.
So reductive was this analysis that even closely related concepts were ignored, like evidence of monopoly behaviour by for-profit housing providers to sustain demand by restricting supply, as uncovered by Emily Sims and Jesse Hermans.
Likewise, from a productivity perspective, planning and building regulations were conceived of as “productivity blockages that distorted market-led supply and must therefore be removed,” rather than value-adders.
(An aside, we’ve been down that road before. Soon after the last time regulations were relaxed for these reasons, there was such a rash of wealth-destroying building failures that the government was forced to re-regulate and appoint a building commissioner – David Chandler, who has written on these pages – to mop up the mess.
It also suggests that deregulation actually leads to wealth destruction, not its increase as productivity theorists claim.)
The CRA report emphatically demonstrates that these analytical and remedial practices will no longer cut it, simply because narrow, unintegrated “business-as-usual” solutions will condemn us and future generations to climate hell.
In effect, the CRA report demonstrates the correct way to “right size” a problem is by including – not omitting – its constituent interdependencies.
Path dependency and the sunk costs fallacy
Another feature of urban decision-making is the perpetual tension between “path dependency” and the fallacy of “sunk costs”.
To illustrate: the dominance of private vehicles in Los Angeles dates back to when commercial motor vehicle interests purchased and then demolished its extensive public tram network.
Eliminating competition enabled motor vehicle interests to thereafter dominate settlement patterns by increments (the “path dependency” of transport investment) to an extent that the city is obliged to continue investing in road infrastructure (“sunk costs”) even though it makes increasingly less sense to do so (the “fallacy”).
Largely due to the cumulative incremental nature of urban decision-making, it is extremely difficult for practitioners to distinguish between conditions that warrant re-investment or abandonment of particular policy settings.
The trick is to know when to switch between the two – the policy inflection point.
Sydney Airport expansion
This is the dilemma posed by the recent announcement of an expansion of Sydney Airport’s domestic terminal.
With its almost continual program of road upgrades, terminals and other facilities over the last few decades, Sydney Airport now has the ramshackle piecemeal look of a large family house in the grip of a serial home-improver.
As set out in the Sydney Airport draft Master Plan 2045 (draft MP 2045), this latest iteration would link the two domestic terminals into one larger facility and add “up to” 14 new gates.
Significantly, the upgrades seek to accommodate a projected 75 per cent increase in passenger numbers by 2045 and “compete” with (rather than “complement” as initially envisaged) the curfew-free Western Sydney airport, now nearing completion.
This author has previously questioned the wisdom of persisting with the main Sydney airport at Mascot for a number of reasons.
The airport’s seemingly advantageous proximity to Central Sydney also requires an operational curfew for the same reason (a condition it only shares with Adelaide), hampering the scheduling and growth of international air traffic.
Curfew restrictions are compounded by its small land footprint (in Australia it surpasses only Canberra’s), which limits growth further.
The airport hopes to host a land use that will see jet-fuelled aviation contribute up to 27 per cent of global carbon emissions worldwide (according to Eviation, a manufacturer of regional-range electric-powered aircraft), thereby exposing the industry to worsening global GHG reduction costs.
International airline carriers, particularly those long-distance carriers serving Australia, face steep carbon abatement costs that will likely see such travel confined to the very wealthy, unless alternative transport modes are incorporated into the mix.
For that reason, it would appear sensible to consider transferring the entire lucrative East Coast route to more carbon efficient surface modes while preserving the economic and carbon offset benefits in favour of those airlines.
The housing crisis has intensified competing demands for inner-city land, yet Sydney Airport’s facilities and noise impact militate against this use (see below).
Returning to the path-dependency vs. sunk costs dilemma, the proposed expansion marks a clear developmental inflection between the facilities constructed 25 years ago for the Sydney Olympics – effectively now wholly written off – and future ongoing expansion of Sydney Airport in this location.
If granted approval to invest its foreshadowed $750 million on new facilities, Sydney Airport would reasonably expect its use to extend for a further 25 years (a typical write-off time frame).
It follows that the national government (the owners of Sydney Airport land) would also forego any plans to find land within the areas bounded by the noise contours in order to fulfil its promises of “new well located affordable housing”.
Likewise, the prospect of capturing the value of this inner-city land to leverage other nationally significant projects would also be lost.
Value capture
But how could value be captured, and how much would it yield?
The draft ANEF 2045 map is a planning tool.
It is used to control development within contour boundaries and, in effect, encumbers the land so enclosed. Removal of this encumbrance (by relocating the airport) would increase the value of that land.
“Value capture” is the planning mechanism that transfers this benefit – the uplift – back to the agency that confers it, in this hypothetical, by removing the functional encumbrance.
As part of its Transit Oriented Development (TOD) initiatives to increase housing supply, value capture is currently employed by the NSW government to recover some of the benefit flowing to private landowners arising from public investment in new rail stations.
For Sydney Airport, an order-of-magnitude first-pass quantum of this value is fairly easy to calculate.
For example, one could ascribe a Floor Space Ratio (FSR) of, say, 4:1 to the Sydney Airport land (some 900+ hectares); say 2:1 to the land within the first ring out; say 1:1 for the next ring out and so on. Multiplied by land area and indexed to current land values, these figures would provide an indicative value uplift that could arise from the removal of the current ANEF “encumbrance”.
Relocating the current facility to Badgerys Creek – essentially accelerating its eventual long-term build out – could only be undertaken if its projected capacity could be achieved and the convenience of the current airport’s proximity reproduced with fast transport links.
Value captured from Sydney Airport relocation could be applied to fund this move and associated infrastructure; a high-speed rail link to Central Sydney; accelerated depreciation of Sydney Airport assets; joint (with airlines) development of east coast high speed rail; joint (with Sydney Airport corporation) development of new terminal facilities at Badgerys Creek; bridging finance between construction of new facilities and value capture recovery.
Whose problem is it?
Essentially, decisions around the development of Sydney Airport should entail the kind of problem “right sizing” illustrated by the CRA report.
The Sydney Airport Corporation cannot be criticised for not addressing the larger issues raised here simply because they fall well beyond its own remit.
Only the national government is charged with this responsibility.
Just as it did with the preparation of the CRA report, it is suggested here that a much richer and more beneficial picture of Sydney Airport redevelopment emerges only when the problems are “right sized” to include interstate rail assets, carbon pollution management by national air carriers, demands for more housing close to jobs, and the means to fund these interests.
There is a further lesson from the CRA report: the importance of comparing end scenarios – Option A (BAU) = climate hell; Option B = some discomfort for most.
When applied to Sydney Airport, Option A would see airline schedules perpetually hobbled by curfews, inner-city land blighted by aircraft noise, ongoing constraints to Sydney’s growth and affordability, considerable unreleased land value, and no cost-effective potential for environmental offsets from new surface transport modes.
Option B is outlined briefly herein.
Autocrats???
These days, analyses of almost any political initiative are routinely compared to America’s growing dysfunction – so too here.
Amidst its rapidly escalating chaos, internal contradictions pile up – for example, Charlie Kirk’s position on gun control essentially sanctioned his own murder – and the country hurtles towards violent self-destruction – for example, the increasingly unhinged former presidential Svengali, Steve Bannon, foreshadows civil war by stoking it, reprising Mussolini’s playbook.
Globally, nations are scrambling to dodge the splatter as its idiotic vainglorious pilot – an American Taliban elected by fewer than one in four Americans – nosedives their aircraft-of-state towards the rocky desert of autocratic neo-barbarism.
These events very powerfully illustrate the dire and tragic consequences of democratic incompetence and poor policy-making.
To resist America’s example, we should not pursue policy timidity but bravery, shot full of insight, imagination, optimism and transformational ambition in every endeavour.
