Ross Solly:
Dr Leigh joins us on the Breakfast Show. Good morning to you Andrew Leigh.
Andrew Leigh:
Morning Ross, great to be with you.
Solly:
And you too, look, I’m sure for many people listening this morning and maybe even a lot of public servants listening, they’ll be cheering on, saying ‘for goodness’ sake, yes! Can you release, can you actually untie some of the red tape that is holding us back at the moment?’
Leigh:
Well Ross, I’m not anti‑regulation, but I think what we need to do is to think carefully about how regulations interact with one another. And I worry that with areas like housing and infrastructure and maybe even clean energy, the thicket of regulations has made it too hard to build. And it’s one of the reasons why from the 1960s to the 1980s the typical house cost 4 years of earnings, and now the typical house costs 11 years of earnings.
Solly:
Yeah, so why have we managed to get ourselves into this difficult situation where, we are actually making things harder when we should be trying to make it easier?
Leigh:
Well, part of the answer is that the development applications have gotten a whole lot more complex. So, if you go back to 1967, if you wanted to build a 3‑storey block of apartments in Sydney, it was a 12‑page development application. Now it’s hundreds, if not thousands of pages. What we have is a whole lot of opportunities for third party appeal, and the result of that is we don’t get enough built.
The ACT Government has acknowledged this. ACT Planning Minister Chris Steel has acknowledged that it’s too hard to build medium density in many parts of Canberra, they’ve got a ‘Missing Middle’ report. So, they’re looking at ways in which they can work on this problem, because housing affordability is a central challenge to Australia, and building more homes is the central answer.
Solly:
You’re also talking today about the culture of risk aversion, which is holding the country back. I mean, when did this start happening? And how do we remove that sort of culture?
Leigh:
Yeah I mean, I think it’s partly a tension between the need to allow people to have their say, which is absolutely critical in a democracy, and the need to get things done, which is vital in a country which is in need of more clean energy infrastructure and more homes. We need to ensure that we’ve got that balance right. And as a progressive I’m a strong supporter of the ‘YIMBY’ movement, the ‘yes, in my backyard’ movement, which prioritizes quality builds, particularly around transport nodes.
Solly:
Did the culture of risk aversion come about once public servants were no longer feeling that the advice they were giving was frank and fearless anymore, and they were sometimes carrying the can for poor government decision‑making? I mean, when did we all of a sudden have this situation where people were no longer willing to speak up and to be able to take risks?
Leigh:
Ross, I think this is probably more a problem that lies at the feet of politicians more than public servants who are simply administering the rules that they’re given. So let me not try and blame another person’s profession, let me focus the blame on my own profession. I’m really heartened by the fact that there is a conversation now about speeding up approval times, that there’s a lot of work going on across states and territories.
Now, my colleague Clare O’Neil talks about the fact that it is just too hard to build in Australia. So, I’m very keen to be part of that conversation. The talk is sparked in part by a book, ‘Abundance’ in the United States, which is focused on the challenges of building in that country, and the way in which the thicket of regulations has slowed down the building process.
Solly:
One of the – you’re going to outline, I believe in your speech today, 5 recommendations that that you hope will be able to turn things around and get everything on the on the right track, including holding decision makers who caused delays to account. How do you do that, Dr Andrew Leigh?
Leigh:
One of the ways is through league tables. So, in New South Wales, councils have a league table setting out how many homes they are expected to deliver under the National Housing Agreement and how many they actually have delivered.
Sitting towards the bottom of that table for example, is North Sydney Council which in the most recent period was expected to deliver 787 homes, and in fact approved just 44 new dwellings. I think that sort of league table can be useful and can focus policymakers’ minds on where the challenges are.
Solly:
How do you think the ACT would come out on such a league table? Because we’ve had a couple of policies recently which have been in place and have only delivered minimal results.
Leigh:
Yeah. I mean, so we understand the challenges there that the approvals for significant development applications, like townhouses and other medium density formats don’t seem to be approved within the statutory timeframe. Chris Steel has been very clear about that. And Andrew Barr has been, very, very forward leaning in terms of recognising the challenges that we face. So, it’s a challenge.
I live in Hackett, a suburb which was built with contracts in which builders had 6 to 9 months to deliver homes. Now in some parts of Canberra, you wouldn’t get through the paperwork in that period.
Solly:
Well yeah, we are constantly hearing from people who are faced with those sorts of hurdles. So how would you hold them to account? What would be an appropriate way to hold councils and governments who are dragging their feet to account?
Leigh:
Look, I don’t think there’s a single cookie cutter answer to this Ross. If there was a simple answer, someone would have found it by now. What we need to do is recognise that regulations interact, and that a one‑stop‑shop can often be a straightforward way of allowing development approvals to proceed in a more timely fashion.
People need procedural fairness. But we also need to make sure that that procedural fairness isn’t holding up what 94 per cent of Australians say they want, which is more homes around transport nodes.
Solly:
Yeah, 10 to 8 on ABC Canberra Breakfast. Before I let you go, Dr Andrew Leigh, do you have any sympathy for those on a defined benefits pension? About the changes to the super?
We spoke this morning to the boss of the Australian Council of Public Sector Retiree Organisations. They’re going to mount a legal challenge, well they say they are, to the scheme. Do you have any sympathy for them at all? Are they going to be hard done by these changes?
Leigh:
We’ll treat defined benefit pensions in the same way as regular super funds through these reforms, just as the previous government did with their changes to superannuation. That’s a consistent approach. It’s carefully set out in the regulations, and it ensures parity across the different types of retirement benefits.
Solly:
Do you feel that they’ve got a case though, that they are being hard done by? That they are going to be singled out for tougher measures than everybody else?
Leigh:
Ross this is a measure that affects a very small number of superannuants. The top 0.5 per cent with more than $3 million in their super accounts, or the equivalent with defined benefit pensions. Those people have significantly more savings than many Australians, and it responds to a concern that people have had for decades that our superannuation tax concessions aren’t fair and aren’t sustainable.
Solly:
Andrew Leigh, thank you for your time this morning, appreciate it.
Leigh:
Thank you, Ross.