Canberra Airport boss Stephen Byron: change is coming. Photos: Michelle Kroll.
Federal and local public servants need to be unshackled so they can make decisions more freely about issues that affect the development and progress of Canberra, an industry and business forum on the future of the national capital has heard.
Public servants were too inclined to say “no” as a first option rather than finding ways to make things happen, Canberra Airport and Capital Property Group boss Stephen Byron told the RSM Australia Leading Cities event, which launched a new report Canberra Rising: Shaping a connected and sustainable capital.
The forum heard how red tape, regulation and risk aversion were holding back Canberra.
Mr Byron said the ACT Government was on the right track policy-wise but the bureaucracy was often getting in the way or not making decisions.
“We blame governments for everything but they’ve got a bunch of policies that are coming through that are really heading in the right direction when you think about the convention centre, the missing middle [housing], the reforms to planning and approvals,” he said.
“We need to support our politicians calling the public servants to account to deliver on their outcomes. The public servants need to be encouraged to make decisions and get on with delivering the agenda that governments want.
“It’s the same at the federal level, as a public service they need to be held to account to make decisions, not wait … if things are made to happen then this town will hum along.”
RSM Australia managing partner Canberra Andrew Sykes said the city’s public servants should work in a safe environment where it was OK to fail and which allowed them to make decisions more quickly and more readily.
RSM Australia’s Andrew Sykes: “It’s OK to fail”.
But change was on the way, with big machinery of government changes, as well as a cultural shift, locally.
Mr Byron said that before COVID, the ACT planning approval process was really struggling but since then there had been a slight attitude change towards favouring a need to approve some things.
“They’ve got to be complimented, supported and embraced, but they’ve got to be challenged,” he said.
“The public servants who are supposed to approve the DA, their first rule is to give approvals. It’s not to stop everything.”
But Mr Byron said approval was not the end of it because often that came with so many conditions that it was impossible to actually start a project.
“They might give you a DA, but the conditions are like, you know, fly to the moon and back within a record time,” he said.
Mr Sykes said this was not only for big developments but smaller ones as well, such as 23-bedroom duplex developments that were taking six to nine months to get approval “because the first answer is no, rather than the first answer is yes, and that’s on a complying development”.
Change looks like it is also coming federally with Treasurer Jim Chalmers telling Michelle Grattan’s podcast that regulators will be asked where red tape can be cut as part of his drive to boost productivity.
“A lot of regulation is necessary,” Mr Chalmers says. “So we talk about better regulation. But where we can reduce compliance costs and where we can wind back some of this red tape in ways that doesn’t compromise standards, of course we should seek to do that.
“One of the things I’m really pleased I got the cabinet to agree to earlier this week is we’re going to approach all of the regulators and we’re going to say, ‘please tell us where you think we can cut back on regulation and compliance costs in a way that doesn’t jeopardise your work’ … We’re not talking about eliminating regulation. We’re talking about making sure that it’s better.”
Mr Byron also raised the working from home issue, warning that Canberra as the national capital has a big issue if work could be done from anywhere in Australia.
“If all of the work can be done outside of Canberra, then we’ve got a real long-term problem in the public and the private sector,” he said.
Mr Sykes said the election result showed how much support there was for working from home.
“But how do we make sure in Canberra that that work from home is work from the ACT, not ACT jobs or federal government jobs being done, you know, in Noosa.
“Nothing against Noosa, lovely place if you like to holiday there, but we would rather have those workers here as part of our community, while you can work from home.
“How do we make sure that we can keep people here in the ACT and not lose jobs?”
