Australia's Metropolitan Imperative: An Agenda for Governance Reform

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Overview: a metropolitan reform agenda for Australia’s cities

Richard Tomlinson

Introduction

The possibility that the residents of cities might themselves know what is in their best interests is not a consideration. State governments have the constitutional right to assert what is in their best interests. In practice, the extent of fiscal centralisation and of Commonwealth funding of projects and services in cities has led to the Commonwealth often presuming to know where the best interests of the residents of cities lie.

Formally, state governments are responsible for metropolitan governance. ‘Australia has a unique model of metropolitan governance, in which state governments are directly responsible for all the key elements of planning and major infrastructure and service delivery’ (Sansom et al. 2012, p. 5, emphasis in original). However, as a result of accumulating much more tax revenue than it needs for its own expenditure responsibilities, which is referred to as vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI), the Commonwealth has considerable influence over policies, projects and services for, and the planning and management of, cities. Helen Silver (2010), formerly Secretary of the Victorian government Department of Premier and Cabinet, explains that VFI ‘creates a perverse incentive for the Commonwealth to operate in areas of state and territory responsibility, without due regard to the principle of subsidiarity’ and that ‘centralisation is especially apparent in respect of housing, transport, infrastructure and the liveability of the cities’.

The contrast is with, perhaps, all countries with which Australia might choose to compare itself, for example Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, India, Italy, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA (see Kübler and Heinelt 2005; Salet et al. 2003). Since the early 1990s they have engaged in the ‘global trend’ (Warner 2016) towards public sector reform coupled with decentralisation, leading to a metropolitan ‘renaissance’ (Lefèvre 1998). The renaissance follows the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the seeming demise of a socialist alternative. In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama (1992) suggested that we are witnessing the end of ideological evolution and the hegemony of Western liberal democracy. The absence of a credible alternative to neoliberalism removed the breaks on the neoliberal policies of the Thatcher and Reagan era during the 1980s (Dardot 2012). It was in ‘the early 1990s that a genuine post-Keynesian, neoliberalized global rule-regime was consolidated’ (Brenner et al. 2010, p. 338).

Both the Labor Party and the Coalition, at all levels of government, embraced public sector reform and increased competition, deregulation, privatisation and the outsourcing of infrastructure and service delivery (Phillipmore and Harwood 2015). While the responsibility of government remains that of ensuring the delivery of hitherto public goods and services, the role of government changes substantially: while government may be responsible for ensuring delivery, it can choose to outsource delivery. Neither the Labor Party nor the Coalition has embraced intergovernmental decentralisation and metropolitanisation.

Elsewhere in the world the backdrop to metropolitan reform is that it was viewed as necessary for the ‘global structural competitiveness of a given urban region’ (Brenner 1999, p. 440).¹ That is, underlying the metropolitan reforms is globalisation, by which is meant the spread of information, innovation and ideas, the hypermobility of capital, globally integrated management of the production and distribution of goods and services, global competition for investment and for ‘knowledge workers’, and globally propagated notions of ‘best practice’, including therein the governance of cities.

The metropolitan impetus arising from globalisation has seen the emergence of a default policy of global city strategies. The strategies have been abetted by an industry of ranking systems concerning the global status and specialisations of cities,² with the same being true for the liveability of cities. Global city strategies have been embraced in Australia. All of the states, except Tasmania, and the Northern Territory believe that their capital cities are, or should become, global cities (‘world city’, in the case of Brisbane).

The enthusiasm for neoliberal public sector reform and the adoption of global city strategies has not, we have seen, been accompanied by intergovernmental decentralisation in Australia. The contradiction lies in Australia’s commitment to subsidiarity: ‘Subnational governments should be responsible for those services whose benefits are confined primarily to their geographic area and for which residents should have a choice over both the quantity and quality of service’ (Warren 2006, pp. 6, 7). No consideration is given to the possibility that there are purposes that might be best served by metropolitan government.

Australia is different. Is this bad? From whose point of view should one answer the question? By what criteria might one answer the question? Is metropolitan government desirable in Australia? As might be expected, answers are seldom straightforward.

For example, global city strategies invariably entail a commitment to inner-city agglomeration economies and life-styles. Using the currency of liveability indices, Australia’s cities do very well. However, these strategies are especially given to social and spatial divides (Sassen 2009), an outcome that is now part of the everyday media commentary in Australia. After The Economist again ranked Melbourne as the world’s most liveable city, a newspaper announced the ranking with ‘Melbourne is most liveable city again. But it’s also harder, crueller, out of reach’ (Delaney 2017). The 2016 census tells the story. ‘Income growth was high in areas close to the centre of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. But suburban parts of these cities did not fare so well – areas in Sydney’s west and Melbourne’s outer ring had some of the lowest income growth in the nation’ (Daley et al. 2017).

Is one to forsake a global city strategy and the driving concern with economic competitiveness in favour of a strategy more attentive to, say, fairness and climate change adaptation and mitigation? Who should answer the question? Presently, for the residents of cities the questions are irrelevant as, choreographed public participation aside, they have no say in the matter. Criteria many residents might consider, like affordable housing, access to jobs and social services and environmental amenities, fare poorly in a context of Commonwealth and state and territory governments committed to economic growth and, of course, to winning the next election. For the Commonwealth and state governments a metropolitan perspective is charted by the location of political constituencies.

Political interests supplant nominally objective criteria for the allocation of spending. For example, seeking to rationalise the allocation of taxes to projects, in 2008 former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd created Infrastructure Australia with a view to assessing projects based on their supposedly neutral ‘business case’ (a benefit–cost ratio greater than 1). Other states have followed this path, albeit not necessarily adroitly. Infrastructure Tasmania seeks ‘to ensure the right infrastructure is built at the right time, in the right place, and as efficiently as possible to support productivity, economic growth and community amenity’ (Tasmanian Government 2017). Seeking to identify what is right, right and right highlights the futility of distancing taxes from politics. During the 2016 federal elections, projects prioritised by Infrastructure Australia were largely disregarded by politicians parading trophy projects where electoral threats/opportunities were evident (Terrill 2016).

Even were the ‘business case’ to prevail above politics, should it? The answer here is unequivocal. A business case is notoriously subject to the assertion of power and influence. What are the facts? Whose facts count? What facts are relevant? Are the projections credible? It is inevitable that major projects are political – and they should be. The issue centres on the level of government at which the politics plays out and whether that level of government coincides with users of the project who pay (taxes and user charges) for the project, others who are affected by the projects and the opportunity costs of the project. Might it be the case that the allocation of resources to other uses would better serve the priorities of a city’s residents?

For example, city-shaping infrastructure investments such as the WestConnex toll-road and tunnel project in metropolitan Sydney have been strongly opposed by the mayor of the City of Sydney, the Labor Party and the Greens, an active citizenry and the influential Committee for Sydney (2016, p. 6) that calls for ‘Work to improve infrastructure appraisal methods, learning from global best practice, so the right projects for the city are prioritised’. The project proponent is the Coalition government of New South Wales, and it is a Coalition federal government that allocated funds for the project. Infrastructure Australia (2016, p. 5) has found a WestConnex benefit–cost ratio exceeding 1 that primarily comprises ‘Travel time savings ($12.9 billion net present value, 58% of core benefits … [and] Vehicle operating cost savings ($6.2 billion net present value, 28% of core benefits)’.³ What weight was placed on environmental and social costs? What weight was placed on the views of metropolitan residents and building the type of city they want? It is for good reason that Gleeson, Dodson and Spiller (2012) refer to a metropolitan ‘democratic deficit’.

Attention to commuter travel time savings and vehicle operating costs for a project whose total cost will possibly be more than $45 billion (Saulwick 2017) represents a considerable opportunity cost in respect of city-building alternatives, devalues metropolitan strategic considerations and disempowers Sydneysiders in determining those considerations. A business case, project by project, decided by different ministries in different levels of government, does little for strategic decisions regarding urban productivity, competitiveness, fairness and climate change.

A strategic vision for city-building and the considered and coordinated timing of the allocation of resources to achieve that vision are desirable. Who might be held accountable for the allocation of infrastructure and services expenditure in this manner? State government strategic plans for cities are notoriously short-lived and ineffective in, say, steering investment by property developers and by state government transport departments. At the time of writing, while showing deference to Infrastructure Australia and greater deference to vulnerable constituencies, the Commonwealth promotes the allocation of resources for infrastructure through adjudicating between City Deals project proposals from around Australia. For cities, the future is random.

Thus, it is that with a view to the considered and coordinated timing of the allocation of resources, one turns to metropolitan governance and the possibility of metropolitan government. The authors’ interest in metropolitan governance does not walk a lonesome path. The influential Committees for Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, which comprise primarily private sector interests, call for metropolitan governance ‘in order to effectively compete with other metropolitan regions throughout the world’ (Committee for Perth 2014).

The editors agree with the focus on metropolitan governance, but argue that it best takes the form of metropolitan government. Again, the editors are not alone. Lucy Turnbull, Chief Commissioner of the Greater Sydney Commission, former Lord Mayor of Sydney and former chair of The Committee for Sydney, holds that ‘In an ideal world, there would a one metropolitan government, like they have in other major cities’ (Coultran 2015). The backdrop to these comments is her view that governments have failed to integrate land use planning with other government agencies in respect of transport and social services. Commenting specifically on Sydney, ‘I support the idea of a greater metropolitan government for Sydney. It’s a pity it didn’t happen ten years ago’ (Back 2017).

The editors do not presume to prescribe a specific model for metropolitan government except to note the obvious: the government should be democratic and autonomous. There are many metropolitan models against which the governance of Australia’s cities could be compared. Instead of unreservedly endorsing a particular metropolitan model, we proceed through the looking-glass of an idealised metropolitan government. As a generalisation, it is held that a metropolitan government should be characterised by:

(1) strong political legitimacy, obtained by the direct election of its political representatives; (2) meaningful autonomy from both ‘senior governments’ and basic local authorities, acquired as a result of adequate financial and human resources; (3) wide-ranging jurisdiction; and (4) ‘relevant’ territorial cover, consisting, roughly speaking, of the functional urban area (Lefèvre 1998, p. 10).

The merits or otherwise of metropolitan government are assessed in the following chapters by contributors who, in various ways, ask whether the issue they address would be better served by a metropolitan government. Again, is metropolitan government desirable in Australia?

Organisation of the book

In addition to the concluding Chapter 16, the book has three sections – ‘Australian backdrop’, ‘International precedent’ and ‘Assessing the rationale for metropolitan government in Australia’.

Australian backdrop

The Australian Backdrop introduces the relevance of resurrecting the metropolitan question. The question has been debated in Australia since the late 1800s and a metropolitan government was adopted in Brisbane in 1925. Since that date there have been occasional official inquiries and, on occasion, recommendations favouring metropolitan government. Clearly the metropolitan question is not new to Australia, but there is a new urgency to it. In the past, in Australia and around the world, the question centred on the presumed efficiencies and scale economies of metro-scale infrastructure and services. For example, ‘The pattern of metropolitan government in Western Australia is indeed complex and, in many aspects, irrational. Of the metropolitan services discussed, not one is provided solely by a single authority’ (Johns 1950, p. 72, emphasis in original). As has already been noted, since the 1990s, elsewhere in the world, the metropolitan question centres on the role of cities in the global economy and on whether metropolitan governance enhances the competitiveness of cities. Infrastructure and services remain central, but the lens through which they are assessed is that of global competitiveness.

Graeme Davison and David Dunstan, in Chapter 2, provide an absorbing history of the ‘greater city movement’ and of how close Australia’s major cities have, at various times, come to the creation of metropolitan governments. Referring to the mid 1800s, the prevailing view was that in so young a country, the colonial government would have to provide infrastructure and services in urban areas. Colonial efforts to create local governments confronted local reluctance to pay for infrastructure and services. Local governments were created with substantial grants and they competed for central largesse. Local governments could afford to be weak because the central government was so strong. Following decades of rapid urban growth, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, observers commented on the ‘gross incompetence’ and ‘stupid mismanagement’ of Sydney City Council and the ‘complexity and chaos’ of Melbourne’s city government. It is in this context that Davison and Dunstan ask whether Australia’s cities, lacking a strong metropolitan tier of government, have been hobbled by their history. They refer to the ‘Greater City Debate’ that occurred among a small group of reformers in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. The advantages of metropolitan government were argued mostly through comparison with cities in the UK, in response to epidemics arising from the inadequacy of municipal services, and then in respect to the argued efficiency, economic, democratic and other advantages of metropolitan governments. Early in the 1900s, ‘In every state, select committees and commissions have recommended the adoption of the metropolitan principle, and bills proposing it have reached the parliaments, sometimes failing to pass by only a handful of votes’. The exception was Brisbane that, in 1925, was transformed into a metropolitan government. Decades later, in the 1950s, interest in metropolitan government briefly returned, with Sydney considering and Melbourne failing, by one vote, to create metropolitan governments. Aside from seemingly forgotten inquiries and recommendations regarding metropolitan government in the 1970s, the waning of interest in metropolitan government coincided with recognition of the need for metro-scale integration of transport and land use planning and services. In and since the 1990s, in a context of neoliberal enthusiasms, the metropolitan role would end up more in the hands of the private sector than government, with community protest a surer route to democratic participation in metropolitan planning and decision-making. Nowadays, with confidence in the asserted private sector efficiencies in transport, energy and other services waning somewhat, one returns to the Greater City Debate. Davison and Dunstan ask whether the time has come to again ‘start thinking about how the ideals of the greater city reformers – of functionality, social justice, and democratic responsibility – can be realised in the radically altered circumstances of today’s metropolis?’

In Chapter 3, Richard Tomlinson carries the candle for metropolitan democracy. He asks the question whether there is a class of infrastructure projects and services for which decisions are best made at a metro-scale, and then also whether these decisions should be made in the light of a strategic vision for the metropolitan area. His focus is on representative and accountable metropolitan government pulling down roles, responsibilities and resources from the Commonwealth and state governments; he does not propose doing away with local government. He envisages metropolitan governments working with other levels of government, the private sector and civil society, but in a manner dictated by metropolitan voter mandates and made possible by relative fiscal independence. The words ‘representative’ and ‘accountable’ are found to be more easily sloganeered than applied, and he consequently spends time investigating what the words mean in practice. An additional claim made by Tomlinson is that, along with a democratic deficit, Australia’s metropolitan areas are being governed with a knowledge deficit. The primary conduit to cities gaining knowledge and working out how best to respond to a rapidly changing environment is other cities: peer-to-peer horizontal knowledge exchange commonly organised through transnational municipal networks. In Australia, the metropolitan areas are managed in a top-down fashion by the Commonwealth and state governments presuming to know what is in their best interests. Tomlinson argues that the consequence of not having fleet-footed metropolitan governance is the retarding of effective responses to, for example, disruptive technologies, climate change, migration and population growth, and economic eventualities.

Noting the shift away from government providing infrastructure and services since the early 1990s, in Chapter 4 Sophie Sturup describes the project mentality that has emerged from the Commonwealth and state governments and private sector infrastructure experts supporting projects that are prioritised according to, nominally, the perceived merits of the project itself. Projects are viewed as stand-alone undertakings, not from a strategic perspective. Sturup draws attention as well to the role of large companies in proposing and, occasionally, obtaining approval for metro-scale projects without consultation with users. For politicians, a significant stakeholder is a large company, not a metropolitan constituency for whom consultation protocols have few consequences. Sturup documents infrastructure misadventures where projects have proven to be extraordinarily contentious and to have failed or succeeded after exhausting alternatives. She also ventures that, were the projects to have emerged from a strategic framework for metropolitan projects supported by prospective users, they would not have generated such extensive opposition. She concludes there is significant evidence that ‘experts’ in infrastructure are ill-suited to select suitable major infrastructure projects.

International precedent

Chapters 5 to 9 comprise the section ‘International precedent’; they demonstrate both the shift to metropolitan government and its complexity. While there is no one model for metropolitan government, there is a shared commitment to subsidiarity, with interest in applying the concept to governance accelerating in the early 1990s. The purpose of the five chapters is to provide insight into the diverse forms of metropolitan governance and government. The selection of case study cities is based, in part, on the comparison being credible to Australians. Toronto, Vancouver, Manchester and Auckland are of a similar scale to Australia’s larger cities and have undertaken far-reaching and different metropolitan reforms. The case studies alert the reader to alternative forms of metropolitan governance and government, and to difficulties with, and the potential benefits of, metropolitan government.

Daniel Kübler, in Chapter 5, provides the international comparative context for the discussion of metropolitan government and potential reforms in Australia. He first explores a theoretical model of metropolitan government and explains its underlying rationale. Pointing to the metropolitanisation of cities arising from economic and technological developments at a global scale, he notes that metropolitanisation ‘expands the functional space of the city, and therefore also requires a rescaling of government institutions’. To be successful, the metropolitan re-scaling should give effect to Lefèvre’s (1998) four defining principles of metropolitan government: ‘relevant territorial cover, wide-ranging jurisdiction, meaningful autonomy and strong political legitimacy’. In practice, metropolitan re-scaling can take many forms. He first conceptualises them in terms of low and high indices of autonomy (‘the extent to which they can act independently’, including therein funding autonomy) and authority (‘the extent to which they can and do independently make decisions and set rules that are of binding nature’). He then provides case studies of the city-regions of London (UK), Stuttgart (Germany), Lyons (France) and Bern (Switzerland) as well as decision-making processes both within the cities and between the cities and other levels of government. Of especial interest for Australians accustomed to highly partisan politics is his noting that the ‘up-scaling of government at the metropolitan level’, and this being (using American slang) ‘where the rubber hits the road’ it leads to collaboration between political parties and more effective governance.

A concern with subsidiarity underlies most chapters in this book and in Chapter 6 Marcus Spiller and Rhys Murrian review the relevance of the concept in trying circumstances, focusing on intergovernmental roles, responsibilities and resources in the USA. Perhaps more than in any other English-speaking nation, urban governance in the USA is characterised by strong judicial and popular commitment to the subsidiarity principle. A ‘bottom-up’ approach to many infrastructures including public transport, school education, health and policing, which, in otherwise comparable countries, are governed by provincial/state or metropolitan jurisdictions, would seem to pose intractable challenges for efficiency and equity in service delivery. Great innovation has been generated in US communities in responding to these challenges, albeit with mixed results. What explains the abiding adherence to subsidiarity in the USA, and what models have evolved to deal with law-making and services which occupy the ‘interstitial zones’ on the subsidiarity spectrum? Much of Spiller and Murrian’s discussion concerns a topic little addressed elsewhere in the book, notably the potential for institutions of governance, special-purpose authorities, at a metro-scale that are accountable and fiscally independent but also are sector-specific, such as a transport authority.

Manchester is of particular interest since it is the exemplar of the UK’s ‘City Deals’ program that has, in the UK but not in Australia, advanced to a ‘Devolution Deals’ program. In Chapter 7, Iain Deas describes the creation of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) that is governed by the 10 leaders of the constituent boroughs, with the metro mayor as an 11th member and the only directly elected city-region office-holder. He explains that the ‘principal aim underlying these efforts to develop city-regional governance has been to reverse the city-region’s protracted post-industrial decline and develop an institutional and policy infrastructure that can underpin new economic growth’. The ongoing process of devolving powers, responsibilities and resources to the GMCA, and the creation of the position of a directly elected mayor, has been called DevoManc. Of particular interest to Deas are the ways in which citizens have engaged with metropolitan reforms in regard to the election of a metropolitan mayor and the upsurge of citizen activism linked to DevoManc. Whereas Greater Manchester has been characterised by political stability and a political and administrative policy elite, the metro mayor function broadened participation in the governance of the city-region and extended the debate about the substance of policy beyond the economic issues that underlay the creation of the GMCA. Deas describes the ‘People’s Plan’ and the role of social media in funding, formulating and attracting support for a model of metropolitan politics in which citizens seek to influence metropolitan policy. The economic success of Manchester, the influence of metro-scale democracy and the role and success of citizen activism in Manchester are of immediate interest to the rationale for metropolitan government in Australia and the form that government might take.

Unlike the UK, which does not have a federal government, it is often held that Australia should look more to Canada for examples of metropolitan governance and government. In Chapter 8, Martin Horak and Andreanne Doyon consider the governance of Toronto and Vancouver. Toronto used to be upheld as an example of metropolitan government – the ‘Toronto model’. However, the province of Ontario, which created the metropolitan government in 1954 and extended it in 1967 with a view to coordinated land use planning and scale economies in service delivery, dissolved it in 1998 in the face of vigorous opposition from the metro’s component municipalities and with the support of largely suburban local governments outside the metropolitan area. The municipalities in metropolitan Toronto were combined into one unitary government with a population exceeding 2.7 million (in 2016) and the local governments outside the metropolitan area were left alone. A lesson lies in the failure to extend the metropolitan boundaries as the growth occurred, but this would have led to the creation of a metropolitan government whose scale (~5.9 million persons) would diminish the role of the provincial government. (Here the comparison is obvious in respect of the proportion of Australia’s state populations that are located in one metropolitan area.) In contrast, the ‘Vancouver model’ is heralded as a success in metropolitan governance and is frequently referred to in Australia. Only a quarter of the metropolitan area’s population of 2.5 million persons lives in the City of Vancouver. In 1967 the Government of British Columbia created the Greater Vancouver Regional District, which was subsequently renamed Metro Vancouver. Metro Vancouver integrates infrastructure and land use planning, and housing, through four corporate entities. The boards of these entities comprise elected officials appointed by their respective municipal councils. They are accountable to their respective municipalities and not to the provincial government. Underlying the success of Metro Vancouver is a history of cooperative governance and trust among the local governments that dates back to the early 1900s. Metro Vancouver is often viewed as an ideal form of metropolitan governance; however, the ‘ feasibility of the Vancouver approach in Australia … likely depends heavily on the extent to which any metropolitan region has a pre-existing history of regional-scale cooperation’. The same point was made in the Manchester case study.

Christine Cheyne’s Auckland case study, in Chapter 9, has striking parallels with Australia and Canada in respect of the size of the economy, and the proportion of the population located in Auckland relative to New Zealand and the same in respect of Australia’s and Canada’s metropolitan areas relative to the state and provincial governments. Forsaking control of the largest cities does not come easily to higher levels of government. The metropolitan government, Auckland Council, is not constitutionally autonomous and is the latest iteration of the periodic reworking of the governance of the Auckland metropolitan area. The Auckland Council was created in 2010 in response to a lack of coordinated and strategic planning, and with a view to positioning Auckland as global city. The Council has an elected mayor and 20 councillors elected from 13 wards. Notably, infrastructure, service delivery and asset management are undertaken by council-controlled organisations that are accountable to the Auckland Council, but operate as businesses at arm’s length from the Council. The relative power, it seems, lies with the organisations. Nonetheless, Cheyne concludes that ‘Auckland’s new governance arrangements have delivered much-needed region-wide strategic and land use planning and coordination of key areas of service delivery and asset management’.

Assessing the rationale for metropolitan government

In Section 3, ‘Assessing the rationale for metropolitan government in Australia’ which comprises Chapters 10 to 16, the questions asked are whether the present form of state-derived metropolitan governance and the role of the Commonwealth compromise measures to address economic competitiveness, a ‘fair go’ and housing, climate change, fiscal decentralisation and transport and land use planning. In addition to democracy, these topics are central to assessing the desirability of metropolitan government in Australia.

In Chapter 10, Marcus Spiller and Laura Schmahmann discuss why questions of metropolitan governance have elevated importance and urgency given the ever-accelerating shift to the knowledge and services economy. They argue that up to and including the long post-World War II boom, strong central governments were effective in promoting productivity and economic growth by deploying a range of macro-economic levers, public sector ownership of economic infrastructure and direct market regulation. This policy apparatus was reliable in a world where economies of scale, vertical integration and suburban production dominated competitiveness. Contemporary conditions, however, demand a spatially nuanced approach to competitiveness, reliant as it is on urban agglomeration and liveability. Spiller and Schmahmann contend that state governments are not up to this task and that metropolitan governments need to be commissioned to ensure continuing productivity growth in the Australian economy.

A ‘fair go’ is the value closest to the hearts of Australians. A fair go refers to the creation of a ‘level playing-field’ whose essential features are education, health, workers’ rights and housing. These features involve a proactive role for government as each is influenced, if not determined, by government policy and legislation and budgetary priorities. It is in the case of housing policies and policies that affect housing, that the role of government is ill-defined. Richard Tomlinson and Marcus Spiller, in Chapter 11, focus on how measures within each level of government and within each level of different departments, exacerbate unfair housing (ownership and rental) outcomes. They explain the essential features of a housing fair go – access to affordable housing located in proximity to jobs and social services. An ever-increasing number of households struggle to afford housing, and compromise on the cost and time of access in order to find somewhere to live. The authors dispute the merits of blaming supposed supply-side planning and other constraints to affordable housing, and turn to fiscal and monetary policies that incentivise demand and to city-shaping infrastructure funding that seldom serves the purpose of enhancing access to jobs and services. To this mix they add local government and the obvious issues of NIMBY-ism, and the seldom-realised potential for inclusionary zoning. Finally, they propose the most obvious areas for metropolitan intervention. These include reforms to land taxation and development licensing to improve housing supply in the right locations, better-integrated transport and land use planning, investment in city-shaping transport infrastructure and services, and inclusionary zoning.

When presenting the case for a metropolitan reform agenda, the editors inevitably confront questions regarding the plausibility of metro-scale fiscal reform. Vincent Mangioni argues in Chapter 12 that the question of whether it is desirable for metropolitan government to be fiscally autonomous is driven by the objective of better aligning tax revenue to the goods and services of communities from which taxes are collected. He makes the case for fiscal reform that embraces the refinement of existing taxes while introducing new taxes that are held to be the domain of a metropolitan government. He explains the role of the benefits received and capacity to pay principles, as the basis for determining which revenue sources follow services and which are best defined as consolidated revenue. He notes that, while there is no single fiscal utopia for funding Australia’s cities, a metropolitan structure would define a rationale for tax reform driven by taxpayer understanding and acceptance in line with the principles of ‘good tax design.’ His view is that when the link is made between goods and services, and taxes levied by metropolitan government, the process of reform and the objective of fiscal realignment will succeed. This in turn paves the way for additional revenue to be raised and earmarked against the goods and services that are delivered or are outstanding in Australia’s cities.

Peter Newton, Nigel Bertram, John Handmer, Nigel Tapper, Richard Thornton and Penny Whetton observe, in Chapter 13, that the ecological and carbon footprints of Australia’s cities are among the highest in the world, and urge the adoption of transformative strategies for carbon mitigation and climate change adaptation in the cities. In the case of mitigation, they write that most solutions have a sectoral focus as they require a range of policies and instruments that are directed at particular ‘polluting’ industries and activities (e.g. electricity generation, transport). The role they identify for metropolitan and local governments involves, for example, promoting energy efficiency and uptake of distributed technologies for renewable energy generation. In the case of adaptation, they hold that solutions are primarily place-based due to the spatial variability in the impacts of climate change on particular local areas, their infrastructures and their populations. Adaptation planning and management requires governance structures that have transformative capacity for dealing with problems that are multi-level, multi-scale, multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary in nature. A feature of the chapter is that it is data-rich, providing an empirical backdrop to, and projections of, the effects of climate change and the energy transition and carbon mitigation needed at a city scale. Using Melbourne-based case studies, the chapter contains material on urban heat, bushfires and sea level rise and coastal flooding. From the perspective of metropolitan planning, the authors identify challenges such as the incorporation of climate change projections into metropolitan strategies that survive a change in state government; urban infill and the densification of development without the extensive loss of green space, tree canopy and permeable surfaces; building codes for new and existing structures that deliver high levels of energy efficiency and carbon neutrality combined with distributed renewable energy generation; and enabling the emergence of new distributed infrastructure systems for cities. While the authors emphasise the need for integrated metropolitan land use/transport/environment planning to guide future development and venture that metropolitan government might contribute to the better governance of climate change, they do not make definitive claims in this regard.

In the case of integrated transport and land use planning, Peter Newman comments in Chapter 14 on how obvious it is that this is necessary, and how poorly the job is being done. He draws this conclusion in respect of both state interventions in strategic planning and investment in transport infrastructure and, at the time of writing, the Commonwealth’s promotion of City Deals. He observes that ‘the integration of land use and transport was not happening even in places where the powers of government could require it and where Plans for it suggested it should happen’. He then explains the need for democratic, metro-scale planning and governance in order to achieve integrated transport and land use planning. Newman builds up to this conclusion with a history of transport and land use planning: from walking to trams to trains and cars and now to a search for a post-automobile urban fabric within which trains will be central. Of particular interest is his thinking that mentions of ‘integrating transport and land use’ should change to ‘integrating transport, land use and finance’. In particular, property developers need to be involved in planning from the beginning and, equally, in the financing of what Newman calls the ‘entrepreneurial rail