Mr Betts at lunch
Photo: Urban Taskforce
The Secretary of the new Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, Jim Betts, has set out on a mission to draw competing planning pressures together in readiness for the hundreds of thousands of new residents expected to move into Sydney in the next 25 years.
Speaking at an Urban Taskforce lunch and reported by Government News, Mr Betts said his mission was to break down the bureaucratic silos and replace them with a ‘natural tension’ between the needs for property development and the need for environmental sustainability.
Referring to his Department’s ‘mega-cluster’ of six Ministers, 11,000 staff and responsibility for the environment, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, food, farms and energy, Mr Betts said the rationale for such a cluster would be to reconcile the ‘cultural war’ that had arisen between ‘green’ and ‘brown’.
“Our endeavour as a cluster is to ensure that we find the appropriate trade-off between a prosperous society on the one hand, and an environmentally sustainable one on the other,” Mr Betts is reported as saying.
“I don’t buy the argument that there has to be conflict between the two.”
He said 1.7 million people were expected to move into Sydney over the next 20-30 years and there was no way it could cope unless priority was given to public space, active transport and the management of urban parks.
“We have a lot of surplus and under-utilised land and we should not be simply flogging that off,” he said.
“We should be pressing that into service to improve the quality of our neighbourhoods, or we’ll lose the social licence to continue to grow.”
The former head of Infrastructure NSW said he also wanted his Department to be more transparent and certain on Development Applications and rezoning.
He said he did not believe the existing planning system was broken but accepted it was in need of reform.
“The cultural signal is that the silo wars are over, the green versus brown is over,” he said.
“We need to step up within the planning portfolio and take accountability for delivery.”
The full story of Mr Betts lunch in Government News can be accessed at this PS News link.
