[talk-au] Three rules for OSM planning in Canberra

[Herbert.Remi]

Three rules for OSM planning in Canberra
**Rule 1: In Australian Communist Territory everything is owned by the government,
Rule 2: everything is controlled by the government and
Rule 3: nothing happens without the government know about it.**
If you want to know why read on.
(note: **text** is markdown and this would be in bold if the forum was on GitHub.)

I live in Canberra, the Australian Communist Territory, where we all work for the Federal Government and don’t do anything useful. At least that is what the Australian press and politicians would lead you to believe. Canberrans disagree, “if you worked for these politicians you wouldn’t vote for them.” It is a bit like you sending us your inlaws, they are not welcome. As for the press, well, what do they know about Canberra. There is a great deal of misinformation about the ACT and this is obvious when Canberrans talk with visitors, “It’s part of NSW, isn’t it? It is certainly in NSW?” Well, we are not ruled by Sydney but certainly, we are ruled by the Federal Government.
If you find me a bit sceptical about outsiders ability to understand the ACT, then that’s because you have never spoken about Canberra with my family.  So first I will clear up a few basic facts about Canberra, then I will tell you where all the money comes from, and finally, I will explain why nothing happens in Canberra with the ACT Government knowing about it. In the Australian Communist Territory, you better pay attention to the Five-Year Plan.
**Some basic facts**
Firstly, until this year most of the population worked for the government (ACT or Federal). Now just over 50% are employed outside the government. It is not true that all the Federal public servants work in Canberra, about 50% do but over 30% work in Sydney and Melbourne, and about 16% work in rural Australia. Canberra is the bush capital. I read somewhere that 30% of the Federal government employees work for defence: biggest budget, most employees, $50 billion for subs, the biggest everything. It is not true that the Australian Public Service is particularly big either. The Australian Public Service is only a third the size of the NSW public service. Most Canberrans were not born in Canberra, they either immigrated to the country or Canberra from Melbourne, Sydney or rural NSW (or Queanbeyan for that matter).
**How does the ACT work?**
We are not a state but a territory, which means that we don’t have the autonomy of the state. Canberra is like Rome with another autonomous territory with the city. Our Vatican City is called the Capital Planning Authority. The Capital Planning Authority still controls everything in the Parliamentary Triangle but also has regulatory oversight of any developments in the ACT within 200m from major thoroughfares around it. The ACT government is responsible for planning in the rest of the ACT, except military areas, of which there are many. For reasons of prudence the ACT planning is done in such a way that it does not conflict with the Capital Planning Authority. A difference is that the Capital Planning Authority is prescribed to build in a “premium quality” so that it looks special.
**How is development in the ACT funded?**
With the federation of Australia, the Commonwealth purchased three large farms and then a bit (Hall), but unfortunately, not Queanbeyan. All land then belonged to the Commonwealth Government and that is how it is until this day. If you “buy” a house in Canberra, you have a 99-year lease on the land on which it stands. After that, it would in principle go back to the ACT government. (Rule1: In Australian Communist Territory everything is owned by the government.) This is unlikely to happen to a house, but investors have been caught out purchasing a site for retail development and then have done nothing with it to discover they were threatened by the ACT government with lose of the lease unless they finished the job. The most important sources for ACT revenue are land tax, payroll tax, Federal Government (CHOGM) funding and most importantly LAND SALES. Yes, the ACT Government is the real estate developer in the ACT. (Rule 3: nothing happens without the government know about it.) All suburbs and Canberra are planned and developed by the ACT Government and I know only one exception – Ginninderry. (Rule 2: everything is controlled by the government). When the ACT Government is short of money it develops another suburb with a few thousand houses and sells them off in an auction, where each block can get up to almost $850,000 and the whole suburb is sold off in hours. (I think in Molonglo Valley the whole suburb was sold off in just 6 hours.) To top that all off, demand outstrips supply. Luckily with our benevolent dictatorships, this Mafia structure works well.
**Building a city**
If you were an engineer or urban planner, you would love Canberra. The Australian Communist Territory is a planned economy and the ACT Government has plans for everything. The ACT Government has standards how everything is to be built, designs all sections of the city to those standards often using templates, contracts the construction of the plans to industry, before then resuming all the assets back to government control and selling the land in lots to individuals and builders. The ACT government provides all this information for what it is planning on government portals and provides mapping tools that allow you to visualise all routes, roads, paths, infrastructure, and zoning.
I will describe specifically where you find this information and mapping tools in the next post, before venturing to a concrete task that we need to undertake on OSM.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-au/attachments/20190921/ce10a10d/attachment.html>