What's New
24 June 2016
The Smart Cities Plan sets out the Australian Government's vision for Australia's cities, and is focused around three key areas - smart investment, smart policy and smart technology. The Urban Taskforce raised concerns regarding the use of 'value capture' to fund infrastructure and provided information regarding the future urban form of cities.
August 2015
The Urban Taskforce reviewed the application and supporting documents for the proposed Crown Sydney Hotel Report, Barangaroo. UTF supports the proposal as the design and layout provides an excellent balance between the built form of the hotel and the natural environmental of the Barangaroo Reserve. The iconic location of the proposal requires a ‘landmark’ building and the design of the hotel should not be altered.
17 September 2014
The Urban Taskforce position is simple, and we have had the same position since 2004 – we advocate a complete national blanket ban on political donations from anyone—corporations or individuals. Such a ban would include developers, lawyers, doctors, trade unions, miners, tobacco companies or environmentalists.
08 April 2014
We strongly advocate for government policy and legislation that supports residential development. We argue that investment in new residential development projects assists in the delivery of much needed housing and also stimulates growth of our construction industry. While this review is said to consider foreign investment in residential real estate, we fear that the review will focus on Chinese investment. Focusing on a particular Country’s investment is counterproductive and dare we say, xenophobic.
16th October 2013
We are very concerned with statements made by the Minister for Planning made via media release of 19 September 2013. The Minister announced significant changes to the reform package detailed in the White Paper including a lessening of the focus on Code Assessable development, maintaining the existing thirty five (35) land use zones, introducing changes to the existing, successful Complying Development system and allowing local variations to State based codes. We see these amendments as being a major watering down of necessary and urgently needed reforms.
13 September 2013
Our primary concern with the major development assessment process comes from the fact that Australia has a number of pieces of State and Commonwealth legislation that control development while aiming to protect the environment. It is encouraging that the Commission's draft report highlights the problems with a duplicative assessment system and recommends changes consistent with those suggested by the Urban Taskforce.
25 March 2013
The Urban Taskforce has grave concerns with government processes that duplicate and overly complicate an already complex environmental assessment and approval process. We strongly advocate for reforms to the assessment and approval process that will deliver an improved, more efficient and transparent environmental assessment and approval system. We argue that the Commonwealth should implement improvements to the administrative processes associated with approvals pursuant to the EPBC Act particularly the development and implementation of a generic approval bilateral agreement relating to national and world heritage listed sites.
14 March 2012
The Urban Taskforce Australia has been approached by a number of our members expressing concern over the potential impact of the Draft National Airports Safeguarding Framework on development around airports. For over 30 years the ANEF system has defined where noise sensitive development should occur and state planning authorities and local governments have zoned land to allow urban consolidation to occur. Submission is available here
MacroPlanDimasi report Appendix Maps
CBRE report 1; report 2; report 3
Wilkinson Murray report
Gadens report
22 March 2012 - Reply from Mr Sam Haddad Director-General, NSW Department of Planning & Infrastructure is here.
