The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, says he does not believe “Sydney is full” – as the former Labor premier Bob Carr famously declared in 2000 – but he is going to rebalance development away from the city fringe toward the CBD.
Speaking to Guardian Australia after 100 days in office, Minns says even if Sydney was full, there is little he could do about it, as people will continue to arrive and settle in the Sydney basin.
“I believe that it’s important for the economy and our diverse multicultural community to have inbound emigration into NSW and Sydney in particular,” he says.
“So we’ve got to get on with allowing more appropriate development and more supply into Sydney over the next three or four years. We want more infill, closer to the CBD on public transport corridors.”
The previous decade of Coalition governments has seen development shift toward greenfield areas on the fringes, despite this often proving more expensive because of the need to build new roads, sewers and schools.
Labor is planning to return to greater reliance toward infill – though this is likely to be controversial.
The Greater Cities Commission, which the government announced last week will be folded into the Department of Planning, will be charged with rebalancing development, and will soon publish targets for regions, Minns says.
“If we just sort of add another street to the western fringe of Sydney it’s just not going to work because I’ve got to stretch social infrastructure over a greater plane and I won’t have the balance sheet to do that,” Minns says.
The NSW state budget faces “severe challenges” as the economy slows, and rising interest rates mean that debt repayments will consume almost one-sixth of government revenues within three years, according to treasurer Daniel Mookhey’s special economic statement released two weeks ago.
Minns points out that most of the infrastructure built by the previous government was east of Parramatta: Metro City, Metro South West and the new light rail lines.
An added complication is that within the south-west and north-west growth areas there are many hobby farms and small holders, which makes productive land release complex, he says.
“So it’s part of the reason we’re sprawling but we’re not meeting our housing targets, and the prices just keep going up, and it’s hurting our ability to attract and keep young people.”
Last week the planning minister, Paul Scully, told a series of conferences in Sydney’s west that if NSW is to meet its population-based share of the national housing accord, it should build around 314,000 new dwellings over the five years to 2029.
That’s an average of 62,800 new dwellings a year compared to recent completions at around 46,000 in the year to last December.
Scully says density does not have to mean skyscrapers.
He wants councils to explore different housing types, noting that 85% of Low Density Residential R2 zones across metropolitan Sydney prohibit either or both manor houses – a single building comprising of three or four dwellings – and terraced houses.
“Let’s just say we were able to put a semi on 5% of those lots, we would have 67,500 new homes, which is more than 20% of what we need to build by 2029,” Scully told his audience of developers.
‘We’ve got to get on it’
But while Minns and his team are talking up their plans for housing, other election promises are going a little more slowly.
During the election Minns promised a trial of a cashless gaming card in 500 poker machines to counter the Coalition’s promise to implement such a card.
But he is yet to announce the committee to oversee the trial with concerns from some that the powerful gaming lobby was having too much influence over the process.
“We’ve got to get on it. I mean, it’s not easy to balance the people that we need on that committee, but the minister has been working hard on it,” he says.
“I want to make it clear that if we were starting from scratch, there’s no way we would distribute 80,000 pokie machines across NSW.
“We want to make an intervention. But it’s it’s a tough public policy area.”
Asked if the trial would definitely lead to NSW going down the path of cashless gaming, Minns says he does not want to prejudge.
“We haven’t committed to that as a policy. We committed to the trial, we wanted to see what independent analysis of that trial looks like, and then what recommendations to government were, so given that … I haven’t committed to 100% cashless gaming,” he says.
“But I want to make sure that we have a big policy intervention when it comes to problem gambling, and [that] whatever we do, in fact, works. I’ve spoken a lot about other jurisdictions, and the potential to make it worse, particularly if you don’t have a daily limit.”
Drug laws ‘on our agenda’
And further down the priority list is any reform of NSW drug laws pushed by some within the cabinet including the housing minister, Rose Jackson, and others on the cross bench like the newly elected Legalise Cannabis upper house member Jeremy Buckingham.
“We haven’t set a date for [the drug summit] yet, but it’s definitely on our agenda. And we’re committed to doing it. We will do it this term,” he says.
“I think there’s been major changes in the experience of cannabis users in NSW, even in the last five years, that maybe aren’t apparent to everybody that doesn’t have a closer interest in cannabis law reform – namely, the ability to get medicinal cannabis via prescriptions,” he says.
“The numbers are huge. I think there’s something like over 100,000 prescriptions have been issued and subscribed by users in NSW compared to maybe 1,000 when it first got going.
“People are going and getting a prescription for a condition like anxiety. It means that the ability to access cannabis is on a different level legally,” he says.
But Minns says resolving how people using medicinal cannabis can drive without breaking the law is difficult.
“It’s hard because impairment is really difficult to determine. I’ve just looked at road tolls that suggested that this year the road toll is 160 for the year. Same time last year [it] was at 140. So it’s really difficult policy area,” he says.
The passion project
Some election promises are due for delivery in January.
The reform of demerit points for traffic offences will start earlier than planned in January 2024. Drivers who avoid a traffic offence for a year will get one point back, instead of having to wait the full three years.
The promised toll relief, which will cap tolls at $60 a week, will also be introduced in January 2024. A broader review of tolling by the former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission boss, Allan Fels, is under way to look at ways to make tolling fairer in Sydney. It has already ruled out a London-style congestion tax.
Asked what his passion project for the next four years will be, Minns nominates public education.
“I just think that’s the DNA of Labor. For us, this is the great legacy,” he says. “Two-thirds of teaching positions for graduates are now in the public education system, but only one-third of graduates went into public education in the last 12 months.
“So unless we can start attracting young people to do teaching as a profession, we’re not going to get the next generation ready, so it’s going to be a massive focus for us.”
