This podcast is supported by VPLA. Victorian Planning Environmental Law Association. Welcome to the Planning Exchange where we interview built environment professionals who are doing interesting work beyond the ordinary. I'm Jess Noonan and I'm joined by my colleague Peter Jewell. Welcome to another episode of Planning Exchange. I'm your host, Peter Jewel, and today we're diving deep into the world of urban development. I. What drives it, why it's misunderstood, and how we can do it better.
We are joined today by our special guest, max Schiffman, the Chief Executive Officer at Intra Pack Property, one of Australia's most established private developers. Max has a deep understanding of the development process, having worked across a wide range of master plan communities and housing projects. He also brings insight into the regulatory and planning environment, which shapes every decision a developer makes and co-hosting. With me today is Cam Sison stepping in for Jess.
Jess will be back. She's just busy moving house. Cam is a VO for me, a voice to many in the property industry, and also joins us as a new sponsor of planning Exchange. So warm, welcome to you, cam. Thanks, Pete. Appreciate the opportunity to be here today. We'll, we're looking forward to unpack the world of development from motivations to misconceptions and to reimagining what a city can be. So Max, welcome to Planning Exchange. You have been on the program before.
Can you start by telling us about Intra Pack and your role with the company? What kind of projects excite you most? Yeah, thanks for having me, Peter and Cam as well. Look, intra pack's been around for just over 40 years and we've developed a reputation over that time of developing some of Australia's best residential communities. Primarily.
We're heavily focused on the eastern seaboard of Australia, but we also have projects in the Northern Territory and have previously worked in wa so a fairly wide geographic footprint. We've worked on greenfields, large scale infill sites, regional development, and predominantly or historically did a lot of land, but increasingly pushing more into the midden space. Your terraces and townhouses are a real sweet spot for affordability. Thanks, max.
Of those projects, which are the ones that excite you the most? The stuff that I really love is where you've got an element of complexity. So we're renowned for taking on some pretty tricky projects. And if I go back in time probably one of the most successful it was a project called Summerfield, which was in a suburb called Keysborough, which is about 25 minutes out of the CBD of Melbourne.
There it was originally market, garden land plus a series of other things that really constrained the land before we developed it. So you had chicken farms, you had dog kennels you had all sorts of things that created all these concentric buffers that meant even though the land might have been zoned for development, you actually couldn't develop it. And so we went out and actually bought all those issues, if you like and removed them from being bark barriers.
And we turned that into a near 2000 lot estate. Incredibly successful. It went from, originally around 2007, the first acquisition. And we completed that project in the middle of 2018. And over that time won numerous industry awards for landscaping, for environmental excellence, for marketing, and won the residential development of the year in 2016, Victoria as well. Super successful. One of the things that was really satisfying was just how well we were able to build the community.
The community aspect was something that, it was always there, but became an increasing focus for us through the Summerfield development. So we really worked hard to foster a community group. We helped sponsor them, we helped to run events, and we made sure that even after we'd finished the project, they were equipped to continue doing those things in perpetuity. And whilst the development itself was fantastic. Beautiful. The urban design quality was immense.
An enormous open space network as well, beautifully connected, but it was that community, those residents that bring, bringing them together was probably the most satisfying aspect. Max I'd like to ask you later on about placemaking and establishing an identity for new communities. But I want more on the more personal level. What drew you into the development industry? What were some of the defining moment or influences that led you to become a developer?
I played Sim City a lot when I was a kid, so that's probably part of it. Played all the different versions. I was probably enamored by the idea of, building roads and, seeing how all that turned into places. But I actually grew up in a developer family but at a very small scale. My father was a builder. He used to do small developments, so a pair of townhouses, three or four on a block.
Did some apartments on occasion, but really small scale through the sort of Bayside area of Melbourne predominantly. So I grew up in the industry. I used to get my hands dirty and help him out on site when I was younger in my school holidays. So it was always there and. Being migrants. I said, I'd love to be in the business. And they said, no, go and study. So I studied engineering and law worked as a forensic engineer for a while before I got back into the industry.
So I think it was always there. But, maybe a circuitous route to getting into it. But, 15 years later it was the right call. And Max, this episode focuses on what makes developers tick, both big and small. So you, you've seen both, you're in a big outfit, but you've watched your father and probably seen many smaller developers. What do you think motivates someone to stay in this game through the cycles, through the criticism, through the complexity.
I think it's probably an element of mad madness these days, Kim. The way things are going at the moment you, you've gotta have this sort of intrinsic motivation 'cause it's a really difficult business. And it's difficult at both ends. On the small scale you're talking about often very marginal projects. And so you've gotta be able to get through them and get it funded, get them sold, get them delivered, and you haven't got much room for error. I saw my parents.
Thankfully do pretty well over 20 plus a year career doing that. But not every project was amazing. And that's the cycle that you have to run. Sometimes the market's with you, sometimes it's not. So it's being able to be geared up well enough to be able to work through those periods. And so then you apply that at a larger scale with the sort of stuff that we do. And we're talking about generational projects.
Projects that can take at the lowest end, five plus years, but really extending over well over a decade now. And it's about setting things up, right? Financially. It's about having that long-term vision. It's about staying the course on what you wanna achieve, but also being flexible to be able to respond to the market as it changes.
So that's something that you have an opportunity to do much more in a larger scale project where you want to try and create that broad framework early on, but also be able to roll with the punches, which might be market punches might be financial punches but also just product changes and demographic changes as well, and being able to respond to that too. Max, that's an interesting point.
We did interview a developer in Georgia in the States, and in their master plan, they had a degree of inbuilt flexibility, so they could change components as things the broader comm requirements changed. What do you think about having that sort of inbuilt flexibility into master plans for bigger states, for example? It's essential that you get there to make better places. The, one of the real challenges we face in Australia is that your planners want to have everything resolved.
To a perfect degree upfront. And when you are talking about these decade plus long generational projects, you actually don't want to define everything perfectly. Yes, you wanna have a framework around where the core infrastructure is gonna go, where your access is going to be predominantly where the open space is going to be, but within that, you then want to be able to. Have that ability to respond as things change. And I'd have to go and reinvent the wheel.
And we have this real tension now in the system where you just constantly ask for everything upfront. And it's for all sorts of reasons. It's to avoid mistakes. Yes. But it's usually just the fear of the unknown. And I think a misapprehension and a misunderstanding from particularly decision makers and authorities around the fact that you'd need to be able to respond to changes over time. Because that's scary, right? They want to know everything upfront.
Every, they want to, they don't want to get in trouble for approving something that didn't go well. But ultimately, the developers are ones who take the risk and our reputation is linked to how good the place is and how happy the people are in it, and how the place thrives. So I think we have a, an identity of interest in one sense, but the system's not geared up enough to let us do that. In a way that makes sense. Speak sp Speaking of identity Max, developers are, they get a bad rap.
They yet, everything from parks to shopping centers to housing estates, they're built by developers. Why do you think the industry struggles with its image so much? Oh, there's all sorts of reasons. There's no question. There was a period probably in the. I'd say the eighties to early two thousands where some of the development that took place wasn't the best. I think that's probably fair. And so I, I think the industry suffered reputationally through there.
The, they called it the white Super Brigade in some parts of the country where developers would come in and, do a really basic job and not necessarily deliver what they promised. But I think we've become much more sophisticated as an industry. But the sort of reputational aspect in the public hasn't really kept up. I also think that there's been this very political component to it too, where politicians love to kick developers. They love to blame others for all their mistakes.
And so we're a pretty easy fodder because at the end of the day, they've on industry does big things, but it's actually a relatively small number of people. So you don't upset many people by, talking about greedy developers or dodgy builders. But what that does over the longer term is not only tarnish the name of the people in industry, even the best players, but also really has a consumer confidence impact as well.
And so I think politicians particularly have done everyone a disservice by trying to tar all developers with the same brush and bring everything down to the lowest common denominator. 'cause it means you can't distinguish yourself as a developer. You're all treated the same. But it also means that, we are, we're just easy fodder. It's just easy to say, I think the alliteration helps as well with dodgy developer. They love using that term.
But very, it's very much around that sort of political thing of kick someone who they think is making money. They're always evil. Whereas in truth if you look at the number of developers that survive more than about a handful of years, it's a tiny minority. So it's a really risky, difficult business, but that's not appreciated in the way that the politicians talk about us.
I think Max, it's a very corrosive commentary that we get about it's very anti-business and developers create most of the things around us. All the things that we most of us were living in, were developed by developers. Most of the buildings, the shopping centers the shopping strips, everything was built by essentially private sector.
But I, I did wanna ask you, you take a lot of pride in what your company does when you pass by development, large, mid-size that you think has gone poorly with a built formal or community outcomes, what do you feel and what do you think, you don't know the circumstances, but how do you feel when you see something not so good? I think firstly the question is there a universal definition of what is good or what isn't good?
If it is in the eye of the beholder I think idealists have a view of what is good in a particular way and others might say, you know what? This is good enough for me or suits my particular purposes. So it's difficult, have a blanket view that something is particularly bad and something is fantastic. Obviously there's elements that are, call them semi universal, which is around beautiful architecture and, great places.
But often the disconnect is between having beautiful places and how much they cost people. And prices are really. Big challenge at the moment. It's a national problem. It's an international problem now in Western countries where the cost of delivering new housing is so disconnected from people's capacity to buy. And so judging something purely on aesthetics or look and feel, I think is the wrong measure.
Sometimes you've just gotta deliver some housing for people, something that's relatively affordable and the more affordable you wanna make something. I'm not saying you should do absolute rubbish, but there are trade offs that might mean it's a much more basic outcome than what you otherwise would love to see in an ideal world. But economics matter.
And sometimes I think people are just scrambling to try and survive and make a buck, which might mean they take some shortcuts aesthetically, or, which I guess, sometimes you luck out the market's fantastic. You've got a great community, you hit a real niche and you're able to keep reinvesting and doing more.
I, one of the things I like about doing projects of scale is typically because you've got that time with you you're able to make that early investment and you see the dividend for it in the longer term. And you can think generationally. I think it's much harder doing a very small project where you've just got one chance to get it right, to put absolutely everything into it early because it's not really there as a legacy for the long term.
We, as land developers, particularly these larger scale projects, we only do as well through the mid and later life cycle by what we've delivered in the early phase. So it's actually smart business to put more in early. You put in the parks, you put in the infrastructure, you put in the great housing, and then the thing becomes self perpetuating.
And maxie it, it's question in my mind is the planning profession and the policy makers do you feel that those that are regulating the industry or setting up policy or making decisions about what's happening, do they understand a developer or is there a disconnect that it's it's never gonna change? Or what are your views on that? The bureaucracy versus the doers? You know what, you need them, you need all parties to be involved. But yeah, I'm just interested in your view of that.
You talked to politicians, but Yeah. Yeah. Yes it's not just the politicians. I don't think the bureaucrats really understand what is involved at all. They're very they the way these systems are designed is you end up with very silo based mentalities. You have someone whose job is just to look after environmental issues. Just water, just traffic, just maintenance, just rubbish. You name it, everything becomes a little niche.
You don't have someone that's there to look at the overarching vision and outcome you're trying to achieve and navigate a path through it. 'cause in truth, someone whose role is only to protect the environment is gonna fight tooth and nail to protect the environment. No matter what. No matter what the cost, no matter what.
You stop no matter how much you perverse, let's say the final outcome, because their goal, their job, they're literally hired by definition to just look after that particular thing. And the same applies to the people who look after, turning circles for rubbish trucks. If you can't make a rubbish truck, go forwards the whole time a new estate, guess what? You can't build it. It's that sort of very narrow thinking. That means you don't have this overarching perspective on what it takes.
And so I think the planning profession needs to take a good look at itself. The bureaucratic, the strategic and statutory side of it, they need to be able to look more broadly. And yes, you need to get feedback from various experts at given times, but ultimately you gotta decide what is the outcome we're trying to achieve and accept there are trade-offs and satisfying everyone to the nth degree is actually impossible. That's one of the reasons we now have a planning system.
And it's, again, it's very Australian and I suspect it's the same around the world, which doesn't lend itself to any trade-offs. And I'll use a quote from Thomas Sal. He says, there's no solutions, only trade-offs. So if we're actually serious about building more houses, it's going to have to come at the cost of something. You can't protect the environment, protect the amenity, protect everything, and also build houses. Something's gotta give. And the question is what?
So yeah, you do need that sort of more holistic view. One of the thing I'd say is there's just no capacity systemically to actually just let the right people get on with the job. Because again, everything is brought down to the lowest common denominator. If someone does something incorrect, they don't. Put in the trees at the right time or something, everyone gets told, okay, now we're doing things in a particular way.
And you're often having to do things earlier than you'd want to because you just wanna tick a box. We're all very commercial, so we go we'll just give in because it's cheaper to, put in 40 extra trees or, maintain something for a while, then actually fight it. And so you end up with just this death by a thousand cuts outcome. And again, it's one of the reasons systemically, we're now at a point where the machine is working very poorly.
And it would take a lot of little interventions around the place to actually try and unlock it. Max, I'm reminder of that saying, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Yes. It's, I, we're all shaped by our experiences.
And as you say, the motivation, and this isn't we're, we wanna make things better with bureaucrats because ultimately it's for the community's benefit that these things work better and they don't have this high cost impost on whatever type of development we're talking about. But how do we get that change, do you think? What's the approach? It doesn't have to be, you don't have to have the solution right now, but how do we get people speaking the same understanding, the same language?
How do we do that? Look it's difficult. I think the starting point has to be what is the outcome we're trying to achieve? Because the bureaucratic systems, by definition, are about the process, not the outcome. We think very differently as private sector, we go we wanna, turn this piece of land into housing of some kind. We work out what the highest and best use for it, what suburban design principles we wanna apply, what our objectives are from an affordability and price perspective.
And then we have to go off and convince parties that have no vested interest in saying yes to anything, that somehow what we've got in front of them is worthy of consideration. And they don't have the same focus on the outcome. They have the focus on their particular little, piece of the pie. And so I would like to see, I think the biggest bang for Buck would be I've talked on online about the notion of a housing, a, someone whose job, they're the decision maker, right?
They go, we, housing is the number one thing we need to get done. Yes, we have to get input from all these other. Areas, but ultimately we can't let one thing be the barrier to getting housing completed. There's always gonna be those trade offs. So fast decision making, being clear on what the goal is and having the authority to actually say, look, in this particular case I've heard you X, Y, and Z, but we need to get this done and we have to, give on this particular matter.
At the moment, all you really have the choice of doing is having a court battle with someone if you disagree with them. And that's not a particularly fruitful way of getting good outcomes. And invariably what is all negotiations fly out the window and it's just battle stations for everyone. And what's worse is I think authorities, the moment you go down the line of, using a legal right to say We disagree with you, they. Put pens down, they don't even want to try and negotiate anymore.
Ostensibly what you should be doing is saying, look, we need to protect our rights. We're gonna argue this particular point. It's open to everyone to come up with an agreement prior, but that's not how they operate. The moment you take them on, the answer is it's battle stations. We're gonna throw the kitchen sink at you and see what happens, and everyone ends up worse off. You spend a lot of money, waste a lot of time.
You end up with worse outcomes because there's not this there's just no notion of collaboration. So that's why I think if you had someone there that was tasked with approving or getting an approval, getting to yes, on all projects of a certain minimum scale, just to get that speed into the system, I think you could get a lot more done and a lot more, much more attainable housing on the ground sooner. We thank Victorian Planning Reports, our very first supporter.
If you want the A to Z of planning decisions in Victoria and excellent editorials, please get yourself a subscription to the VPRs. Details on our website. We would like to thank Elison Properties, a terrific sponsor of the podcast, great people, great properties. Details on our website. How does the media fit into all this, do you think, max? Because the politicians. Who ultimately control the planning systems, whatever. They're very, a lot of their actions are geared around the media cycle.
So what role, what responsibility does the media have in reporting these issues ? How can it be better done for everyone, not just the developers, but the bureaucrats so they can have more flexibility and, more, give more openness? What do you think? The media has a role and at the moment it's just two geared up towards controversy.
So you can have the best proposal ever or one that ticks court, 90% of the boxes, and they will immediately go and seek an account of you because they have to be perceived as being fair. Which will be the NIMBYs or the environmental protector or, someone is just dissatisfied. And they make it seem like there's much more opposition to something than what there really is, but perception's reality. So then all of a sudden the squeaky wheels get the media.
The local politician, gets a couple of emails. They suddenly have to scramble and try and show that they're doing something. And invariably, those political decisions get in the way of good decision making. I would love to see a media that is far more supportive, if you like, of good projects and good ideas, especially at a time like this when you're talking about a national and international housing crisis. So good solutions which can be delivered at. I use the word attainable.
I don't even use affordable anymore because affordable is a misnomer. Nothing's affordable, but you can deliver the housing that people can purchase and get into at a much better rate of not, I think the goal should be for the me to say, this is actually the target. We want to get more of this stuff and we should be more supportive. I think that's highly unlikely.
I think the reality is controversy is always gonna get clicks and views and reads, but it would be nice in a housing crisis if the media was on board with the good developers saying, we're actually trying to solve this thing. It's interesting. I'm wondering whether we're seeing a permanent. Shift in who the media are. We, everything from TikTok to fragmenting our little bites, but then to long form podcasts like this and other forms all over the world.
I wonder if the narrative of negative news cells has a chance of shifting over the course of the time ahead of us, because the change in the media landscape and you engage a lot with it. I'm wondering Max, whether you, maybe there's some hope in that shift. I think there's a generational hope. The social media generation has a lot to answer for and the negative as well. But I think one positive is that certainly the millennials and below are much more open to the idea of just.
Getting housing built, they understand that supplies a thing they need to get sorted. They understand that you need to densify and change existing suburbs. They're far less conservative by nature, full stop. And I think, yeah, the way social media's influenced that cannot be understated. I also think there's a little bit of naivety in how easily you can solve those issues because social media, generally speaking, is very bite-sized and doesn't get into the depth.
The only exception being those, some sort of longer form podcasts. But it's a, it's such a complex business. Building houses, building homes building new communities, and. I don't yet think enough people understand what's involved and the core role that the development industry plays in doing that.
They I suppose the one, one real negative I've perceived, and, we have a federal campaign in Australia at the moment, but just, it is all the media that I'm seeing, all the social media is so Target that sort of, TikTok audience, 30 seconds, we are building this, we're building that, and it's really attractive sounding, but it has absolutely no depth or no base in reality as to how they're gonna achieve said thing. I don't know what it's like in other countries, but we've had this.
National housing target now for the best part of two and a half years, the housing accord. But we're gonna, we're planning, sorry. The the accurate phase is to say the federal government would like to build 1.2 million homes across Australia over five years, which they won't do, but the narrative is we are building 1.2 million homes. That is the disconnect, right?
That it's attractive for a younger person on social media going, Hey, look, this government's gonna build all these homes for us when the best they can do is enable the private sector, which delivers 96% of new housing to try and get to that target. Now, current forecast suggesting we, we only get to about 900,000 homes as opposed to 1.2 million. But in this election campaign, every bit of media I see is we are building 1.2 million homes.
And so I think it's it, you don't get that depth and understanding of what it would take to get there. And nor do I think decision makers are ma doing the things you would need to do to get to that target. Maybe the industry needs its Netflix moment like Formula One got, and there's some sort of series that goes into the inner sanctum and watches some of the absurdities that you observe firsthand. And maybe that will be an audience, who knows?
Yeah. But it seems to be, as you say, the complexity and depth of complexity. If it could be interesting, maybe that could happen one day. Who knows? Maybe I'm trying to lift the veil on a couple of those stories on LinkedIn at the moment. I'm only scratching the surface.
If, Max, we'll get Ryan Gosling to play you in the no, I thought I could play Ryan Gosling You talk about the immaturity of the public discourse about housing and it's not just, we weren't stray into other fields, but it's about that in a lot of public topics now. The, it's like sugar hits that have no. Bearing in reality and that's yeah, that I dunno what we do about that. Hopefully we get some adults in the room. But Max we've talked about trying to achieve high quality, livable communities.
What's your personal message to the planning profession? Not just here in dear Old Oz, but right around the planet? What's your message to our planners listening out there? I think you've gotta take away that veil of skepticism around all developers. That's probably the starting point, because that to me, sets the scene for the whole interaction, the whole outcome. If you can look at developers as.
As people who generally a, just wanna have a reasonable business that can survive, but b wants to create great places. I think it changes the perception of who we are, what we're trying to do, and therefore the way we're treated through the process. And if you look at it through that lens, it might encourage some different behavior around trying to get to a sensible mutually acceptable outcome rather than making it so adversarial.
So Max, on the flip side, have you a message for the development industry out there that they can work better with the planning regime to get better outcomes? Any suggestions? Yeah. Look I think we have to recognize that we have a seriously critical role as developers, as placemakers, as housing deliverers to deliver a level of quality that people expect, anticipate, and to uphold that. So I. Very much of the view that don't try and be too cute with what you're delivering.
'cause it'll always be found out and think about the longer term as well. So if I bring it back to us, we've always got that longer term view and that means that sometimes it make decisions short term that might not necessarily be the absolute optimal from an economic perspective, but knowing that you're gonna create that value longer term. So if I maybe recharacterize it, I'd say try and create value rather than extract it.
Max, you previously mentioned the burden of red tape, but there's also growing talk or reality of green tape. Some people label it. How do you see these layers of regulation affecting the industry and more importantly, the people we're or you are trying to serve? Yeah the interaction between different levels and different colors of tape. There's a whole bunch of other colors these days that you could talk to, but it's related to what I was saying before.
It is you've got so many competing requirements now across the planning and housing system that it is actually impossible to satisfy them all when you look at a planning scheme these days. And it will have objectives around creating more affordable housing and greater variety of housing. And the same planning scheme, we'll talk about protecting vegetation, protecting environment, protecting, doing minimal earth works.
There's all sorts of things that come into it, which you're at odds with the goal of trying to create more affordable housing. And so the more you layer these things on without that overarching objective of, sorry it's not objective it's overriding priority. We need to ask those. What is the priority right now? And is it true to say that you must protect every tree that might exist on an existing suburban block, which then prevents you from getting an optimal outcome?
Or is it reasonable to say, you know what, it's actually okay to remove some, as long as you deal with the four and fauna, that might be, living on it in an appropriate way, but that you replant something or that you replant a multiple of it. But you create a much more efficient use of the scarce resource of land that you have. I think we've gotta ask ourselves those questions quite seriously. What we end up finding is usually it goes back the other way.
We've had cases recently in planning schemes where, because we were in a particular zone, we had exemptions around tree removals on very large projects. And then you have the council say, no, we still wanna have every single tree approved by the council. And so it just adds this extra layer of regulation, red tape, et cetera, when you've already got a very intense urban framework that you're working to. And I ask, why do you bother doing that?
Why do you have this overarching framework and zone, which expects a level of density and diversity and maturity in the development, but then add this additional bit, which just adds time, money, and unnecessary headache for everyone. Yeah. I find it crazy sometimes makes that trees in the middle of nowhere that there's so much effort to protect them, whereas for this, the money it would cost to protect that tree, you could literally plant 10,000 other trees.
Yeah. And you could green and you could green. So the, in terms of the bang for buck and anyway, but I, we won't, this is meant to be a positive program Max, as cam. So let's get on the positive. Creating new communities, creating new identity in what were once paddocks or just fields? How do you create an identity where there's very little there? Yeah, look it's difficult. Some of it comes down to branding. Some of it comes down to your urban design.
A lot of it comes down to your open space network because it's one of the sort of core things that people see as part of your development and often use. These new development fronts typically have a large proportion of young families moving in. So all those sorts of aspects are really critical to. We tend to look for a point of difference. It's an authentic aspect of the site. Summerfield, that sort of market gardening history that was a real point of difference.
We were able to then utilize in our design, our marketing and our sales, and it created that authenticity for the place with something like we've got a project in Lilydale in the east of Melbourne called Kinley. It's a former quarry. And so that former quarry has this rich industrial history. It's got some heritage building on it that we are retaining and will be repurposing, and you can create a real sense of being around that sort of historical aspect as well.
Now you don't get that everywhere. Sometimes you have to work harder than others, other places. But if you can utilize and maximize the existing history or immunity on the site, which might for example include maintaining some of those trees, pair that you were talking about removing. But sometimes it makes sense because it gives you that sense of of longevity and. It is something more than just an empty paddock. Sometimes you don't have that.
That's when you have to work much harder in, what the place is. Urban design and creating that sort of sense of community within the new residents. And max the challenge of housing affordability that you've talked about and the conflicting rules that sort of make it very hard to achieve. How do you, what role do you see private developers, big and small playing in meeting this challenge and what support do they need to actually, make a difference? We're constantly thinking about affordability.
Again it's smart business. If you can give people a product that meets their needs today and into the future at a price that they can actually afford to pay. So obvious, but apparently it's not for the people that decide around how, the regulatory system works. A lot of the time it's about being highly regimented and also very prescriptive around what the outcome should be.
And when you do that, it limits your ability to innovate with more compact product or different products configurations that might differ from the norm because there is this sort of historical conception of how something might look. And so it comes a little bit back to that notion that you're trying to re planners by definition want to resolve everything upfront to the nth degree. We say, let us over time work out what we're gonna do, which might mean we screw some things up, let's face it.
That's the point of experimentation and innovation. But there are councils around the country where. And this is very prevalent in New South Wales. You have minimum lot sizes of 450 square meters to this day in many parts of New South Wales. So that's a very limiting factor when it comes to delivering affordability. So in other parts of the country, Queensland wa Victoria, you don't have those same limits on lot size.
So you can deliver a much more innovative and more compact product that can be delivered independently but also gets people into the sort of living space they want at a price that reflects the fact they're getting a small land footprint. And so there are some really big moves like that where you could just get rid of minimum lot sizes and you would automatically unlock a whole series of of new innovative products.
But then the smaller you get, the more complex it gets to because then you've got interaction with other parts of. The regulatory systems that don't necessarily apply. So you get into site coverages, you get into tree canopy cover, you get into orientation and overshadowing all these other bits and pieces, which if you're trying to, tick the box on all of 'em again, makes it really difficult. And so it limits the sort of capacity to try and innovate.
And then decision makers never wanna be the ones that say, yeah, we'll give something a go, because they can get tr in trouble for, trying, trialing something they don't get in trouble for just keeping the status quo. So a more flexible system. One, it's more open to innovating around stuff, not based on historical perceptions of, what might have been small or affordable at the time would make a big difference.
It's quite ironic that they're worried about the impact of this when they don't lose any money. And you potentially could yet you are prepared to. Innovate and take risk to achieve affordability, but then they're getting in the way. It's sort of weird. It is. Again we have an incentive to take risks and try and succeed ultimately. And sometimes you get it wrong, but you as a business, you live and die by the decisions you make and the outcomes you create.
And if there's a market for something you do well, and if there isn't, you go broke. In sort of government land I'm using, the, that as a, as an overarching description. There is absolutely no incentive for saying yes to things or for letting people go outside the box. So in fact, it by, it's actually often the opposite. And so you bring it back to the incentives, right?
If you create incentives that said, for to town planners or for directors of planning and councils or state government planners, that the thing we measure you by is how much the average new dwelling costs and how quickly it's built and, those sorts of things. I think it would change the conversation. At the moment, it's very much geared towards no being the default. You have to convince me that I'm not gonna get in trouble by saying yes to something Max.
I think my thought on this has always been that in any planning scheme or any planning code, there should be some written section saying cities evolve cities. Change over time , mistakes happen or there's, there is a degree of grit. Not everything is gonna be beautiful and perfect but and I think if that was written into the planning codes, so planners could reach to that to give them more confidence in allowing something different. I agree with you there.
And also I think one of the ironies is that if you look at. Pretty much every major city of the world, particularly the ones that have been around for, hundreds of years now, some of the most revered parts of those cities are bits are things that you couldn't build today based on regulation.
I think of something like middle or upper park in Melbourne, a very sort of premium beach side, suburbs very old, fairly close to the city, full of tiny lots with tiny workers, clothes on that are some of the most expensive housing in, in, in the city. You could never get those things built. Today, the street setbacks are too short. You don't have side setbacks. There's too much overshadowing orientation's probably wrong on a lot of it. You don't have tree canopy. I agree with you, max.
Yeah. Some of the most beautiful places that everyone wants to live in would never get approval under the current or even the planning controls of the last 30 years. Yeah, that's right. And so it is funny how, we talk about the livability of Melbourne, the livability of Melbourne is based around a lot of old suburbs that were built with basically no rules. You look at Pran, south Fi, Abbotsford, these are old semi-industrial areas. They've got redeveloped over time.
They've got tiny streets that you can barely drive. A car passed if you've got one parked on the side, got nowhere to put rubbish bins. It's a mess. It would never comply with all your your modern planning regulations. And yet there's some of the most desirable parts of the city. And the same happens in all across the world. Imagine trying to build Manhattan today. May maybe we need to be a bit more Victorian and less utopian. I would love to see that.
Yeah. A lot of those areas were established. Before the car had really dominated our urban settings and also benefit from, intense public transport that takes the pressure off the need for the car. So the car's got the car. I've had examples where, from an affordability point of view, we said we'd just like to park two cars down the side of the property and have a side setback and they can add the carport later when they can afford it. Unacceptable. Must have an enclosed single car garage. Why?
That's just what we do. And a classic examiner, you go through Glen Iris, which was probably built in the 1940s, 1950s, and it's all the cars are parked down the side of the house and eventually they've added a, an annex and then enclosed that into a garage. But I initially, it wasn't the whole house, the end game, it was the start of the house that you could build on. None of these principles seem to have a home anymore.
That, and again, the car seems to be so high on, I think the power of the traffic engineers in council is all consuming. That's, I don't know, I'd be interested in your whole, whole take on cars and. Yeah. Look, there's no question that we are a country that's grown off the back of the private vehicle. And so we've had a. Since post World War ii, a much more called Americanized suburban development pattern.
And that's, in some ways it's brought people closer to places they would otherwise have never been able to access, so we can't, we shouldn't throw the baby outta the bath water. The car's been in an amazing invention and done a lot of good. But it does mean over time that we become. More disconnected from other modes of transport that would let us deliver more interesting places. And I think to your point, so much is driven by accommodating the cars these days.
There's a default, you don't have the choice anymore to say to have people that say, we're, we are willing to not have a vehicle, so give us a small lot or a smaller dwelling that doesn't have to accommodate the vehicle. I think that's really the point, right? It's planners don't give people the ability to make choice. State planners are really bad at giving people choice.
We have, on the flip side, an obsession with densification now, which sounds again really good from a utopian textbook ideal, but is actually a very unaffordable way of growing the city at the moment with a whole bunch of sort of regulatory settings. And again, it's something you're experiencing in other parts of the world too. So that sort of pattern of having a. An intense CBD with suburbs around it is virtually universal.
Even some of the denser cities in the world, people say, oh, again, I talk about Manhattan. I love Manhattan. Been there a lot. Families don't live in Manhattan unless they're uber rich. They live in the suburbs or they live in New Jersey. People talk about Paris. Yeah, you've got the old city, which is beautiful, and it's very sexy. Living in a 30 square meter bed, sit if you're a young couple. But. They've got massive suburbs around the city. And that's just how it is.
So if we were better with setting up a public transport network that was reliable and fast and affordable, you would keep a lot of those vehicles off the road, but you could still build that more affordable style of development.
The, one of the real tragedies I think we're seeing around Australia, and I'm not sure what it's like around the world, but there's an increasing over investment in established areas with infrastructure at the expense of newer si newer suburbs and growth areas in the regions. And it's. I think very political. It's very much about, Hey, look at what we're building. Everyone can see it.
And that seems to be the box that's ticked rather than is this delivering the greatest value for the most people within this particular city or town. And so over time, I think over probably the last two decades, we've seen that over investment, in, in mega projects at the expense of a lot more smaller things sprinkled around our cities and towns that would make a much bigger difference, livability, accessibility than what we're seeing at the moment.
And so as long as we keep doing that, it's then easy to say those new suburbs are up. They're terrible, they're congested, they don't have the infrastructure, but governments have made a very liberal choice not to invest in them. If they flipped some of that script and invested there, they'd be much better placed as well. So that's the public discourse and the examination of political decisions by not just the media, but the universities and also think tanks and industry.
Associations, max, where do you go for new ideas? So what sort of sources, or if there is any particular places, but new ideas, where do you go for inspiration? Where's the wealth for you? Or is there many wealths. Yeah, look, great question. So firstly I'm obviously the former president of the EDIA, the Urban Develop Initiative of Australia, which is the peak body for Australian developers. That's one of my core go-tos as you'd expect.
We have a National Congress every year, which brings together developers from around the country, they share experience, but also bring in speakers from around the world. So you get that global perspective too. Often it's around precincts or around great open spaces. You can tie in with some of those with site tours to see what some of the most innovative projects are in the particular city that you're in.
And that's a great way of just broadening horizon and seeing what, some of the best practices and is evolving. I have a particular interest in the sort of modular and prefab housing space. We're not doing a lot of it yet, and I think Australia's still got a long way to go before it becomes de. It is going to be one of the things we have to figure out at some point to make housing more attainable. We can't afford to keep building the way we do, particularly for density.
We have a real challenge though. It's challenge in, in, in the negative sense. At the moment, modular and prefab housing is still. A lot more expensive than what a volume builder can deliver something for in a greenfield area. And as long as that's the case, it's just gonna remain relatively niche. It's probably less expensive than a super high-end builder building something architectural. But for the sort of entry level, I don't think it's there and it's a long way away.
But there's an increasing interest in it. And so I'm looking at international experience in some of the startups that are looking at that space. A member of YPO. So there's a lot of exchanges of information there as well with businesses from overseas. So that sort of helps me keep abreast of things and tech. There's a whole series of different things and plus nothing beats traveling and seeing the things that you like around the world. Ca cam any thoughts on what Max just said?
Look, it'd just be wonderful to have. The concept of a model project, I'm not sure that we really have that opportunity given all of the, to a model project in terms of just being able to experiment with things that are different. You need, oh, it's almost like just ring fence an area and just say, show us what you could do. Let's just see something different.
Just something that we can prove that there is a bit another way if we just approach things differently and in a ringfence itself, it's not gonna destroy the whole world. But, that's some sort of concept of a model project. If we don't have one now, I wonder what it could be, max, and what if you did have this imaginary ring-fenced opportunity somewhere, what would you try, what would you do? Look. One of the things Australia hasn't done for a long time is actually build a new city.
Which is quite extraordinary when you think about the population growth that we've had. We are the most urbanized country on the planet at the moment. And so the fact that we haven't built a new city in Australia for over 30 years tells you that we're not really taking growth seriously. To bring it back to Sim City, one of the things I'd love to do is actually have exactly that, have a, have somewhere which has some of the core connections that you need around, particularly transport.
So it could be a, region which has a train station nearby or at its heart is otherwise not particularly highly developed. And you would experiment. You try to create a modern city which doesn't rely on. Having a private vehicle to take you everywhere.
Now, yes, you might need some somewhere, but if you made it a people centric and active transport centric place to begin with, then it opens up so many opportunities around the urban design, around the form of building, around being able to reduce the price point. And if you have that sort of significant connection into a major urban center as well, then it can be a real affordable dormitory that eventually becomes its own place. So I think that would be an exciting opportunity.
It's just so hard to break through the status quo. And even on projects that are less revolutionary, Z cam, like often we, we come in and we want to try and experiment more and do more interesting stuff, but the process just wears you down. So it becomes about just trying to get past the finish line and get something going. You'd need a real cultural shift to try and get people. Behind you and give you that latitude to do some things that are very different.
And I don't think Australia's mature enough as a country to do it, unfortunately. When's the last point in time? You think that window has ha has been in this country? That's a tough question. I'm, I love history, but I don't know how far back my knowledge goes. I guess the closest thing you have today, something like Springfield in southeast Queensland, you could never get that done today because there'd be too many trees on the site and there'd be koalas that are possibly impacted in habitat.
But that was the closest to saying, here's a very large tract of land, let's plan for the future. For 30 plus years they've built a CBD, and there's now a train station that takes you into Brisbane. So it's probably the closest I've seen to that. And I wonder what the. What were the conditions at the time that allowed that to occur? Why could that happen then and not now?
I guess it just, we didn't have the same intensity of of naysay, this I think, if I'm not mistaken, that sort of kicked off in the early nineties, so it was before the sort of massive ster of climate and protecting everything came in and. Explore those things and, protect important stuff. But I think it's gone too far the other way along the lines we talked about where now if something existed sacrosanct and it should never be changed.
And so you needed that setting, needed a government at the time, I said, yeah, we're bet to make a long term investment into extending a highway and putting in the rail corridors and other bits and pieces. I guess it just had a political and an ec economic and a environmental environment that let you think about delivering something like that.
It's interesting, sorry to Pete to just stay on this one, but the, you mentioned that was seeded in the early nineties, which is, for all intents and purposes, probably the last true Australia wide deep recession where maybe those conditions help. People be a bit freer in, in how much they're prepared to risk, they're prepared to take in the decision making process.
When you really are at a point what we've gotta do something we haven't really, yes, there's been, JFC, but Australia didn't cop it too badly then. Back in the early nineties, all of Australia really felt that, especially in Victoria maybe that win maybe that time will come again. Maybe. It's an interesting observation. If you zoom out into the broad economic environment now, we seem to be at a place where you can't have those sorts of scenarios anymore.
All the monetary theories, change interest rates, are now used as tool to try and keep everything afloat. And we do have a much higher underlying population growth as well. It underpins the popula, sorry, the economic growth of Australia now. So I. Do you wish it for a recession? No. Absolutely not. But it's maybe that things have to get so bad. It's to that everyone goes, all right, we actually do need to change what we're doing. And I don't know what it would take to do that.
I think certainly some of the broader economic stuff we're experiencing at the moment around, record ballooning, debt state and federally low productivity in Australia, all these things are pointing to us heading in the direction where someone's at some point gonna say, actually, we do need a pretty wholesale review of how we do things. I don't think we're quite there yet, but when it happens I think you're right. It could spur on a whole new generation of innovation and quick decision making.
Never wasted crisis. Max, we've come to culture corner. Podcast Extra, something that you've seen, read, listened to, or experienced recently. It could be a film, it could be a book, it could be an event that left an impression and might interest our listeners actually touched on it before, but I just watched the seven series of drive to Survive on Netflix. I'm a Formula One guy.
And people have a mixed view of drive to survive 'cause they sometimes do manufacture controversy when it's not there. But last year was probably one of the most exciting seasons in Formula One that we've seen in quite a while. So it was quite enjoyable seeing the twists and turns, particularly, how the driver's championship was disconnected from the manufacturer's championship for the first time in a while. So I did thoroughly enjoy that in my in the background in my morning gym workout.
But yeah big drive, survive. And Formula One lover. Cam, have you got something for our listeners? I am on holidays and I literally joined this podcast having put my 10-year-old daughter into a pocket that actually gave her a little small barrel. So I'm inspired by the ocean and the environment. And as much as it, it needs to be embraced. It also needs to be accepted. There's plenty of it in this country. We're not short of it. We're not running out of it. It's everywhere. If you go and get it.
Okay. Mine is a little bit different. I've I recently came across this play called Victory Over the Sun , it was first produced in 1913 in what was St. Petersburg. And it was the first abstract theater. And the thing is completely crazy. And what made me laugh at just be silent watching parts of this, is that we think we are the radical ones.
We think we are the innovators, but some of the crazy stuff that was happening in Czarist Russia, and then slightly after the revolution, which was of course a terrible thing. But some of the artwork from Russian constructivism, some of the first graphic art is absolutely marvelous. But this victory over the sun, it's a complete nonsense. Play. The music doesn't make sense.
It, people left the theater, they threw thing at the stage, but it was the, just some of the craziness that people are capable of. So I'll put links on it, links onto it, something you can watch Max when things get you down, you can just put victory over the sun and have a good laugh. Love it, Pete. Very good. Alright, max, you've been a wonderful guest. Thank you so much. Cam, you've filled in for Jess. Jess will be back listeners.
She's just got a lot going on with house moves, but thanks again fellas. It's been tremendous. Thanks Peter. Thanks Max. Thanks having me. Thanks for listening. If you would like to hear more of our podcasts, hit the follow button on Spotify or the like button on SoundCloud or the subscribe button in Apple podcasts. Please also visit our Instagram page, LinkedIn or website for behind the scenes footage of our podcasts and to get the latest on upcoming or recently released episodes.
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