Smart Growth

Media Release 14 August 2008

By Kellie Tranter

Social capital and human and community services can be –and in Maitland's case urgently need to be--quantified and included in an assets register that will provide an essential foundation to achieving social and environmental goals.

We don't want a "can-do" Council if it only focuses on growth, development and furthering the interests of individual stakeholders but doesn't identify and address the very real social and environmental problems that affect us and are supposed to have at least an equal footing, according to the Council's draft Community Strategic Plan. What good to us is a Council that proudly announces the carving up for housing of more valuable rural land without appropriate infrastructure and at the same time does nothing about children sleeping under bridges? Newcastle City Council takes the initiative on an issue like climate change by inviting Professor Garnaut to address it: shouldn't our Council be doing the same?

At the very least we need an assets register that places a value not just on hard infrastructure but also on social and environmental assets. That will help ensure that planning decisions go beyond individual interests and address whether or not proposed developments add to or detract from our community assets. As things stand, development decisions seems to be made on an ad hoc basis without taking proper account of serious long-term consequences -- and costs -- for the wider community. Unless these externalities are factored in as part of the cost of development before decisions are made we are all likely to end up living in a dysfunctional suburban sprawl beset by even more social problems than we have now.

And it shouldn’t stop with an assets register. Council needs to immediately develop and implement a community consultation policy and feedback policy aimed at finding out what the community really thinks and wants. Together we are the people who are going to have to live with the consequences of these decisions, so it is important that they be made properly with our input.

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