With much fanfare the Premier announced that the Greater Sydney Commission (GSC) will now report to her rather than the Planning Minister Anthony Roberts. I am more sanguine about this than many other commentators I have read over the past day. It could be like when the Premier took over the former Urban Growth which was proved to be fraught or it could be like the establishment of Infrastructure NSW that appears to have been a success.

It is important to understand the genesis of the GSC and the linkages with other government agencies within the NSW bureaucracy.  This is not a fight between Ministers it is more likely a struggle between agencies. I remember sitting with a group of people with Matthew Guy the former Victorian Planning Minister talking about setting up something like the previously successful Victorian Planning Authority. He had sagely advice and talked about strategy, implementation and delivery. He also said that we should set up a Commission that should extend from the whole Sydney basin encompassing Newcastle all the way through to Wollongong. We went back and wrote a discussion paper. The development industry's view was that there needed to be a delineation between strategy, implementation and delivery in the planning system. I recall that we wanted a Commission to do the strategy, the Department of Planning should do the implementation and that the functions of Landcom would change to enable it be involved in delivery by working with the industry to help with multi agency blockages.

Four years down the track, the GSC should be called the Western SC if you read what they put out in conjunction with the announcement with the Premier and there is no Landcom in the form it was in back then or what we anticipated it to be. The Department of Planning is the only constant. The interaction between these groups over the last couple of years tells the story and forebodes the task at hand. Property developers in Sydney have been subjected to pin balling between the Department of Planning and GSC. The Department of Planning wouldn't make a decision until the GSC produced its district plans, these plans took far too long to produce and nobody knew who had responsibility for what. It was a contrived chaos and the losers were the people of Sydney. In the midst of this, The Chairman of Landcom announced that the CEO had left and he had assumed the MD role in the interim (he now has the job permanently).  The past couple of years has been a dark period in property policy. 

So the Premier has given herself up to fix it. The key to success will be the delineation of strategy, implementation and delivery between the agencies. This will be where the game plays out in the bureaucracy. It looks like the Premier has started this process by handing over responsibility for the District Plans under S 3.1 of the EP and A Act to the Department of Planning. In a perfect world, The GSC should be responsible for strategy, the Department of Planning for implementation of the District Plans. It seems easy but this will be tough as the people that design the strategy always stick their nose into implementation and this should be avoided at all costs. That leaves one missing link - Landcom. There needs to be a flying squad in NSW to combat agency inertia. Landcom cant do it in its present form as it is focussing on affordable housing amongst other things. Give it back the flying squad mandate to untie the gordian knot.

The final piece is to get Cabinet backing. Former Premier and Brad Hazzard then the Planning Minister created the Housing Supply Sub Committee of Cabinet and it worked well. The Premier will need the support from her colleagues to ensure that good policy and justifiable politics prevail in the property industry.