The planning profession has a particular responsibility to advance the nation’s search for resolution of the tensions inherent in joint stewardship of land development rights.
As friends, families and corporations begin to engage with the Referendum debate in earnest, those who make their living in the built environment might turn their attention to how their professional lives intersect with the question of the Voice.
Planners, in particular, have a lot to think about.
The planning profession is inextricably tied up with the dispossession of First Nations. Because of this legacy, planners are uniquely placed to play a leading role as Australians of all origins search for a just and harmonious way forward.
Land use planning and development regulation are premised on the unassailable logic that left to their own devices markets cannot produce efficient and sustainable patterns of settlement. There are many externalities involved in city building that market transactions cannot resolve. And without planning, timely and adequate provision of urban infrastructure could not happen.
So, when the British Crown unilaterally assumed ownership of Australia, despite millennia of prior occupation, ownership and governance of these territories, it permanently
reserved to itself ownership of development rights. Settlers were duly awarded freehold and leasehold title to much of the newly commandeered land. But the Crown retained the right to decide how that land could be used and developed.
The power of planning
In modern times the Crown – or its delegates, the states – largely transact(s) this power through planning legislation.
In effect, planners advise the Crown on how the allocation of land use and development rights might be best managed to deliver sustainability and prosperity for communities.
However, an outworking of the 1992 Mabo decision is that development rights – the stock in trade of planners – can no longer be regarded as the exclusive property of the Crown.
Morally, if not statutorily, First Nations may claim co-custody, if not full ownership, of these rights. These rights represent a continuing unalienated Crown interest in land otherwise unjustly redistributed to settlers and their corporate heirs.
While the return of freehold land is a bridge too far, the return of unalienated Crown “property” to its rightful owners is not.
The mandate of planners in modern Australia, therefore, links directly to the dispossession of First Nations. This may come as something of a shock to many in the profession. By and large, planners are called to the job by a fervently held desire to work with the community and policymakers to create sustainable, prosperous and inclusive towns and cities.
But they ought not allow themselves to become the unwitting enforcers of what is now recognised as a structural and continuing injustice in the formation of our country.
As planners everywhere and everyday deal with development rights, which are at least in part the property of First Nations, they have a solemn duty of care to those Nations, as well as to the wider community which has formed under the auspices of the Crown.
If follows that the planning profession has a particular responsibility to advance the nation’s search for resolution of the tensions inherent in joint stewardship of land development rights.
Indeed, the profession can help the nation unlock the latent benefits that all Australians would enjoy through just and shared stewardship of development rights.
Our planning schemes would continue in their established role of mitigating externalities in urban development and allowing the efficient roll-out of the infrastructure we all need.
They would also, hopefully, embed the principles of connection to Country, producing future towns and cities that are truly and distinctively Australian.
