Today I've written a few thoughts about this problem - and why I've decided to write a book about land reform in the Australian context, and how we have our own unique strengths, opportunities and weaknesses compared to others.
thefoghorn.substack.com/p/why-boundl...
Slowly, over the past few years, I've realised that the land use debate in Australia had an international generalisation problem. The economics of zoning and permitting reform on housing, energy and urbanism is global. The context - institutions, politics, history - is not.
If you're from Brisbane and you don't want to see all your friends move to Melbourne due to housing related cost of living differences, you should join Greater Brisbane.
greaterbrisbane.org
www.youtube.com/watch?v=24tC...
And 3.2% in Melbourne, a city that is currently (and frankly has been for decades now), the leader in Australia for housing supply growth that has successfully kept housing costs under control.
www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
And look guys, the correlation isn't hard here. You have 12.3% housing inflation in Brisbane, a city that has deliberately downzoned in the past decade has had a glacial response to the housing crisis...
www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06...
12.3% annual housing inflation in Brisbane is absolutely brutal, 8.6% in Perth is barely any better. It's an acute reminder that the contours of the housing crisis aren't uniform - some jurisdictions are doing a lot better than others.
www.abs.gov.au/statistics/e...
As you might have heard, I'm honoured to be one of the 4 ACT nominees for Young Australian of the Year! We have an Oscars style award ceremony announce who the ACT Young Australian of the year is (along with the other categories), which you can tune in from 6 pm.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=bnxV...
That is to say, RL617 Delenda Est
Some day, our city needs to face up to the fact that we have a CBD with a height limit of about 50 metres, and this has and will continue to have ongoing significant environmental, economic and housing costs, pushign a lot of activity out to the Canberra's outer town centres.
What does a proposal for a 55 storey tall tower in Woden Mean? It means that the height limit in Civic is far, far, far too low.
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...
A slow moving scandal in Canberra at the moment is that we launched a new public transport ticketing system which is *so bad* and unreliable that we no longer have any idea how many people are using transit or how.
Impossible to read this passage in Seeing Like a State and not picture Canberra from above
Unsure about this one, in my view the meta-brain gives you insight into the takes of others and arms you with the rhetorical tools needed to combat or support those takes, but only occasionally does this equate to intelligence.
In Canberra we are more exposed to this bargain than most, because Quenbeyan is closer to the centre of Canberra than some Town Centres, but by century old bargain its Country and therefore there's no question of building an apartment tower there (nsw exurbs orbiting Canberra is a different story)
This is why every time we discuss "New Cities" the idea is always to build a brand new city completely from scratch, rather than say, building out Ballarat or Wagga Wagga. Because a New City doesn't break the contract, but population growth in an existing town does.
And you can hear this whenever the discussion of regional population growth comes up - the view that people live in the Country to escape the City and that should be respected is dominant (especially given that every high demand part of the Country is dominated by tree/sea changers).
More broadly there's an unofficial social contract in pretty much every Australian state bar Queensland that the state is divided between the City (the state capital) and the Country - and that the City will grow and experience visible change and the Country will not.
@jonobri.com hits the grey elephant in the new city debate - that the vast majority of regional towns and small cities are determined to avoid growing any larger than they currently are.
I once went seat of my uber to seat of my flight in 8 minutes flat at Canberra Airport.
Like it's insane. We live on a continent where one of the defining features is that for most of the year, the sun will burn you where you stand if you are outside without protection, and instead our planning systems are acting like we live in Norway. For Australia, shade is good!
Potentially one of the weirdest things about Australian planning culture is how every planning department in the country is hellbent on ensuring that the public and private realm has the least protection from UV rays in the summer possible in the name of preventing "overshadowing"
One of the weirdest things about ACT Politics is that Light rail stage one ($675 million construction) is often cited as an example of unimaginable fiscal proclivity, when as time goes on we're reminded that it was actually a spectacularly good deal.
www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05...
The Problem with Urban Planning: a professional silo is gatekeeping our nation's growth.
My new essay w/ @inflectionpoints.work
The problem at the heart of planning is not political—it's professional. 🧵
If you think you have problems, spare a thought for this Rose Bay homeowner that is complaining that zoning changes have made her and her neighbours fantastically wealthy.
Australian journalism is defined by its low expectations of its readership, and so I'm super excited by @inflectionpoints.work and the potential for a masthead that treats its audience as neither stupid or likely to switch off at the 1000th word.
Talking about reform is our national ritual: white papers, inquiries, op-eds, post-election promises.
But too often, these calls create more process than progress.
So we’re launching Inflection Points—a new platform for longform policy writing that aims to cut through.
Sydney built the political coalition for the most ambitious public transport project in the Anglosphere - not off free public transport, but on public transport so good that everyone would take it. And it worked.
Having automated trains going 100kmph every four minutes, turning crossing the Harbour into a *three minute* journey from Victoria Cross to Barangaroo is a big part of this, but NSW also made the stations utterly gorgeous, cathedrals of public infrastructure that are a joy to travel through.
The Metro has ongoing near universal support in Sydney, despite being a fantastically expensive infrastructure project with cost overruns, precisely because it's by far the fastest form of transport. No matter how rich you are in Sydney, the Metro is your quickest option for getting through the CBD.
