Regional plan fails to address a single vital issue

The Central Coast Regional Plan is a piece of largely meaningless flackery and, if it "clearly sets out the future of the Central Coast in detail", this detail was not evident in my reading of the document.

The Plan does not mention motherhood, world peace and the elimination of global poverty, but these are about the only platitudes that have escaped the attention of the author in cutting and pasting up his collection of generic planning elements, together with the mandatory photographs (in case we've forgotten where we live) and obscurantist coloured maps.

There is not a single vital issue that is directly addressed, and the establishment of a co-ordinating committee (of course) seems to be the only concrete decision that flows from the Plan.

In his interview, Mr Jennion says that "there are hints" in the Plan of intentions towards the housing sector, but they are faint hints indeed and nothing that couldn't have been written after a day's visit to the region and a casual chat with a few real estate agents.

Where is the strategy for bringing housing need and supply into sync, when it is going in the opposite direction and won't be turned around by pious hopes which are the limit of the Plan's contribution?

Where is the analysis of the discrepancy between infrastructure and residential/commercial/industrial development and the mapping out of a pathway towards sustainable communities?

Where are the figures on transportation movements, the definition of a future transport mix and the establishment of a network of hierarchical corridors to provide optimal access to all the region's attraction points?

Where is the financial analysis, the capital budgeting, the action projects through which the Plan will be implemented?

This is a pitiable effort at a Plan, not even worthy of a planning student, but it would have been foolish to expect anything else, given the flimsiness of the original draft over which the Planning Department had apparently laboured for years.

In case the planners have forgotten their elementary lessons, they should be reminded that Principles/Policies/Plans/Programmes/Projects make up the "toolkit" so glaringly lacking from the present feeble exercise.

Email, 23 Oct 2016

Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy