Australian public attitudes towards town planning : towards a research agenda

Over the last 10-15 years a number of state governments across Australia have enacted reforms to their urban planning management systems. These reforms have been expressly aimed at streamlining and simplifying planning frameworks to improve efficiency by reducing regulatory requirements and delays in order to stimulate economic development. States across Australia have aimed to improve efficiency through such measures as: reducing the number of local government planning authorities; introducing key performance indicators to drive competitiveness through planning agencies; narrowing time limits for determining development assessment; expanding private certification; establishing development assessment panels, and/or introducing permitted developments. In addition to these reforms being justified on the grounds of efficiency to facilitate economic activity they have also been motivated by the need to better reflect the needs and wants of the public and by default the 'public interest'. Planning reforms made in the name of the public interest need to be verifiable. The assertion that these changes are reflective of the desires, wants and needs of the wider society' is highly contested. There is an absence of comprehensive and systematic study of public dispositions, expectations and desires of state/local planning systems. Subsequently, the concepts of the 'public interest' and the 'public good', when used in policy utterances about planning reform is left wanting and more a product of political construction than a theoretically and empirically-grounded one. Justifications for planning reforms across Australia which have relied on a claim to represent the wishes of the public evoke a sense of policymaking being undertaken within a collaborative planning framework. In light of the egalitarian and democratic aims of planning theory and practice plus recent planning reforms based on claims and desires to improve the conditions of the general public, there is a clear case for a rigorous and objective investigation into the construction, and contestations, over who and what constitutes the 'local community', the 'public interest' and the 'public good' in planning policymaking and what the general public expect and want from their planning systems. This research presents a sketch of a comprehensive scheme that can be used to study the nature and extent to which planning reform processes have adopted collaborative planning and deliberative democracy frameworks to inform the reform process.