Town Planning Disasters - The need for consquence planning, not risk planning

In this episode of the Risk! Engineers Talk Governance podcast, due diligence engineers and Co-Directors at R2A Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis, discuss town planning disasters and the need for consequence planning. 

This follows Gaye’s recent conference paper at the International Public Works Conference where she detailed the VCAT decision around the major hazard facility and the planning law associated with it. But in this podcast, they reflect on other natural hazards like floods, bushfires, dam breaks and how town planning can address (or fail to address) these before they happen.

The biggest question they ask is rather than a focus on recovery, why aren't we building resilience into our infrastructure and/or seeing how we, as a community, build to be able to withstand some of these disasters? And how this is a shift from thinking from risk planning to consequence planning. 

They also discuss the mismatch between town planning requirements and WHS/OHS legislation. 

If you’d like to learn more about Richard & Gaye’s work, head to R2A at https://www.r2a.com.au

Transcript

Megan (Producer) (00:00):

Welcome to Ep 9 (S3) of Risk! Engineers Talk Governance. In this episode, Richard and Gaye discuss town planning disasters, especially in relation to natural hazards. We hope you enjoy the episode. If you do, please give us a rating. Also subscribe on your favourite podcast platform. If you have any feedback or topic ideas, please email us at admin@r2a.com.au.

Gaye Francis (00:31):

Hi Richard, welcome to a podcast session.

Richard Robinson (00:33):

Morning Gaye. How are you?

Gaye Francis (00:34):

Good, thank you. Today we thought we'd talk about, and we had a bit of an argument about what we were actually going to call this podcast, but we wanted to talk about town planning disasters, and it really leads on from the conference paper that I gave at the International Public Works Conference a couple of weeks ago (May 2024). And I think we've talked about that. That was really about the VCAT decision around the major hazard facility and the planning law associated with that. But we are sort of reflecting on that there's a number of natural hazards out there, floods, earthquake, fire.

Richard Robinson (01:08):

Bushfires. Dam break, that's not quite natural, but go on.

Gaye Francis (01:13):

And we are looking at how town planning can address these sort of things before they happen.

Richard Robinson (01:20):

 Or fail to (address). I think the point you're trying to make.

Gaye Francis (01:23):

And one of the key takeaways from the conference that I got was everybody was talking about "building back better", but there was also an interesting way that they were saying; we are focusing a lot on recovery from these incidents, but why aren't we building resilience into our infrastructure or seeing how we can as a community build to be able to withstand some of these disasters? And we sort of reflected on it because we've worked with bushfires over the years and we've worked with dam breaks and a number of other natural hazards, and it's always a very interesting discussion.

Richard Robinson (02:04):

That's correct. I mean, if you just take bushfires for example. I mean, one of the things that kind of frustrates us, I mean we've been working in that space for the last, well, for me since 1983 because I used to write papers on the Ash Wednesday fires. And one of the things, if you read Luke's "Bushfires in Australia", the guy from CSIRO, one of the weird things he sort of points out is that the bushfire and the party at risk changes as the city grows. So in the 1930s, the bushfire risk was Sandringham in Melbourne; in the 1970s, it was in the Dandenongs and Eltham and places like that; and then as the city kept growing, which is what happened in 2009/2010, it was King's Lake and Marysville where a whole lot further people had moved further out. And the point was people wanted to move into the bush, they want to enjoy it, they want the kangaroos and the birds and everything else. The dark side of all that though, of course, is that if the bushfire comes through, you're peculiarly at risk. And so it's all those peri-urban areas that are always at risk, and that was the case. And you can just see it as the different bushfires come through. The other frustration we had, and just to give you an for instance, I mean I remember writing papers in the, would've been 1985, I think, so before your time.

Gaye Francis (03:10):

Well before my time, Richard.

Richard Robinson (03:12):

Thank you, Gaye! Where we were sort of pointing out that... You see the way that Bushfires in Australia happen, you've got a hot northly coming down, so you've got skinny fires progressing south, however they started. And then the change comes through and you get the wind coming from the west and you get these huge bushfires. So whether it was just a skinny front coming south, if you haven't put it out by the time the change comes through, all of a sudden you've got a broad fire front coming from the west to the east. And if you're obviously fighting a fire on the downwind side, when the high winds come through on a very hot day, you're in serious trouble.

(03:43):

But from the point of view of town planning, the logical conclusion was you should put fire breaks to the north and west of the town. And a logically and simple way to do that from land use planning point of view is golf courses and potato patches and other things like that, which tend to be bare or don't have a huge growth on them during the bushfire season. Now that was done in 1985 - we were busy writing those sort of papers with my former business partner, Kevin Anderson. In fact, it was writing those papers, which got us together in the first place.

Gaye Francis (04:09):

So there's ideas and controls that you can put in place to mitigate or to almost prevent some of these natural disasters, well not prevent the natural disasters, but the consequences on urban areas.

Richard Robinson (04:22):

But it's consequence planning, not risk planning. You see, that's where they all went muddled. I mean, you might recall, and we're not going to go too much detail, but there's a number of councils who've let the houses be built up to the bottom of the toe of a dam. Either the water's higher than the roof of the house. Now if anything happens to the dam, those people are not well. Now how on earth the flood overlay from the dam wasn't somehow properly laid out so the town planners understood what the key hazards were? I simply do not understand. And that seems to pop up all over the place. I mean, the ones we're talking about were major hazards, which we talked about at length: dams, bushfires, airports. All these sorts of people create these overlays and for reasons that are obscure to us, well, maybe it's not, it's because they keep using the term risk rather than consequence. If you start looking at consequence modeling, it becomes pretty obvious just how bad this could be.

Gaye Francis (05:12):

But I also think there's been a huge mismatch and we're noticing that even more and more between the requirements of town planning, that seems to be a really insular solo siloed activity. And it's not taking into account all of the things. It's really just taking into account the town planning matters, and it's not taking in the Work Health and Safety (WHS) legislation or OHS legislation. It's not taking in some of those overlays that you would expect a community or town planning to have over it.

Richard Robinson (05:45):

Well, I think that's what got us stumped. I mean, we've mentioned this before. Victoria adopted the SFAIRP approach in 2004 with the OHS Act. So we've got our 20 years now because it's 2024, and that's sort of the time it takes to change. Most other jurisdictions only started this in 2011. They've got another 10 years before they get there. And we just sort of observed from discussion with a lawyer in another place, which we perhaps won't talk too much about, but that they were using the HIPAP guidelines for New South Wales still. Well, the HIPAP guidelines died when the WHS legislation became the legislation of major hazards and dangerous goods, which isn't the case in all jurisdictions. That's where it gets a bit messy, but in most jurisdictions, that's the case. And so using target levels of risk and safety and saying the risk consequence by likelihood is the way to do it, rather than just using consequence modeling, they're still doing it. And weirdly, because of the planning appeals process, if you're just planning according to planning legislation, you apparently can't invoke the WHS legislation, which seems to be overarching, I would have thought.

(06:47):

But engineers aren't allowed to address legal matters. You may recall.

Gaye Francis (06:51):

We were told to keep in our own box, yes, or own lane. But I think one of the frustrating things, and even talking to some of our associates about it is when you are dealing with earthquakes and bush fires, we know that there's controls that you can put in place.

Richard Robinson (07:09):

High consequences low likelihood events.

Gaye Francis (07:11):

And it's becoming more and more important for, let's say climate change. We know what the consequences of that are, and there are controls that we can put in place. So why aren't we just doing it rather than arguing about what the hazard's going to be?

Richard Robinson (07:25):

Because it's the commerciality of it. It's like when you go and sell your power network to private equity, private equity says we want maximum dollars. That means you optimise your network for the greatest efficiency. You don't optimise it for credible worst case scenarios. For example, the N -1. N -1 means if you lose a major power conductor somewhere, the grid should just be able to hold up with that single failure. Okay? N -2, you start expecting blackouts of some sort, but an N -1 failure, everything should keep going. But that costs more. If you're just going for cost effectiveness for a rare event, and it's outside the investment horizon. This is where the energy regulator, the Australian economic regulator, it's unfortunately they call themselves the energy regulator, because basically anything outside the five year investment horizon pretty much gets sort of kiboshed, anything that's going to go wrong after that, you just buy insurance. Well, that doesn't stop the consequence. Buying insurance tries to repair the damage, which is your point. It doesn't actually prevent the problem from occurring in the first place. And it does seem to me that... Well, we had that conversation. I think it's the difference between stakeholder equity and private equity. Private equity just wants profit, doesn't care how it's made, and it would use a risk-based approach. Whereas stakeholder equity says, we want you to plan for disasters and make the place resilient.

Gaye Francis (08:46):

And I think that would give councils a lot more tools and you would see a different type of build-set and the location of things in town planning matters.

Richard Robinson (08:56):

Well, even the developers, if they were sort of forced. And in a sense, the WHS legislation forces that because you have to consider your neighbours. That's the intention of it.

Gaye Francis (09:05):

That is the intention. I haven't seen it in practice very often though.

Richard Robinson (09:08):

Not from a developer. No.

Gaye Francis (09:11):

No. And that makes it really tricky. I mean, even I can use the example of my sister lives in a bushfire zone and they're in a newer estate...

Richard Robinson (09:21):

Bushfire overlay zone.

Gaye Francis (09:22):

.. overlay zone, and one of the optional extras when they were building a house was to put tanks and fire resistant materials on and things like that. And some of them were compulsory, but others were optional extras. And when you're in those zone, maybe these things don't have to be optional extras. Maybe they are just a minimum level of protection that's required in those areas.

Richard Robinson (09:46):

Well, that's what, that's in theory what they do. But the point, as we've went through in one of the previous podcasts, that standards are the minimum, rhey're not recognised good practice. And I think that's part of the problem everybody's got. If you're designed to a standard, it will almost certainly be substandard, in effect, because there'll be twiddling with the rules to try and get some kind of deem to comply outcome, and it just doesn't work. But that's from our point of view, there's a failure to design and town planning should be the high level design process, and it's not. What it's come down to is a series of legislative or case law rules about: if you do this, you'll thread it through the legal eye of the needle, and if you do it this way, you won't. So that's what happens.

Gaye Francis (10:30):

Well, they're almost doing it as a compliance, aren't they? It's a compliance audit that if you meet the requirements of X, Y, Z, then tick, you get your planning approval, doesn't make sure that the building being approved is the best that it could be for the issues that it may have to face.

Richard Robinson (10:48):

It certainly doesn't assure that all reasonable practicable controls are in place, which is the purpose of all the WHS/OHS legislation out there.

Gaye Francis (10:56):

And I think that's really important going forward, because I think we all will all have an understanding that with climate change, some of these natural disasters and events are going to become more likely and more severe and going forward, we can't keep doing it the way that we've been doing it.

Richard Robinson (11:14):

It's not human nature though. We like disasters.

Gaye Francis (11:19):

<laighs> Okay, I might not be in that group.

Richard Robinson (11:22):

You're speaking as a mother.

Gaye Francis (11:25):

So I think the due diligence approach is the way to do it, and we know what the consequences are, and we know that controls can be put in place. So let's just make it basic.

Richard Robinson (11:35):

Not only just controls put in there (that are) reasonable, and if you do it at a planning stage, it's very cost effective. It's not expensive. I think that's what frustrates us the most, and that's what actually what frustrates the courts after the event, it all goes horribly wrong and in hindsight, it turned out, yep, there was a cost effective solution that could have been in place, which had it been in place, would've saved the day. And the question is, why it wasn't, and I've got to say the way it's going, it was because of the way we go about town planning.

Gaye Francis (12:02):

So I think town planning has to come out of its silo and have that broader strategic view on things as a community.

Richard Robinson (12:10):

But they consider themselves strategic already. That's what's weird about it.

Gaye Francis (12:14):

Okay. That hasn't been our experience, but we might leave it at that, Richard! Thanks for joining us today. Hope you found that interesting, and we'll see you next time.

Richard Robinson (12:25):

Thanks.