The sea change phenomenon is symptomatic of a larger malaise. We have a particularly dysfunctional system of government in Australia – the ‘federal-state-local’ system with its complex and chaotic mix of institutional arrangements and related roles and responsibilities. As Gurran et al (2006, p.6) point out:
Due to the environmental and strategic significance of the coast, sea change localities are subject to complex, cross jurisdictional planning and management processes relating to coastal management and protection, heritage conservation, natural resource management and utilisation, defence, and land use planning and development. Like other amenity areas endowed by highly significant natural and cultural heritage values, coastal communities are often subject to additional planning or policy requirements at state, national, and even international levels.
The blockage to better planning and the sustainable use of coastal resources is primarily an institutional one – a multitude of State/Territory and Commonwealth Government agencies, advisory bodies, statutory bodies, NGOs, regional Natural Resource Management bodies, Catchment Management Authorities, Coastal Councils and so on, all supported by reports, plans, strategies, and scattered discordant policies and legislation. As Smith and Doherty (2006, pp.6-7) identify:
… it is possible for a range of statutory and non-statutory instruments relating to land use and environmental planning to be administered independently by any of the three tiers of government. Adding to this complexity is the nature of many planning instruments that are specific to an issue or sector, thus creating conflicting goals within and between institutions.
Similarly, with the emergence of regional governance in Australia, there has been the creation of more institutional complexity and disconnects in some coastal areas.
With the emergence of ‘new’ regional governance in the last couple of decades in Australia (see Brown this volume; Bellamy this volume), there has been increasing institutional complexity that lacks any semblance of coherence. For example, the new national regional governance arrangements for natural resource management are commonly developed independently of coastal planning, regional growth management frameworks, and local government regional collective arrangements such as Regional Organisations of Councils (e.g. Smith and Doherty 2006). In this complex system of coastal governance, roles and responsibilities vertically across levels of government and horizontally across actors at each level are not clearly defined and frequently conflicting. Significantly,
There is no clear demarcation of responsibility on major issues – health, education, environment, transport, and so on. For example, aged care is supposedly a Commonwealth responsibility, but in the Douglas Shire it is being shed to the State through the development of a Multi Purpose Health Centre. Now that the Council has bought land for this initiative, an expenditure well outside its core business, it is being blamed for the initiative not happening;
There is waste and duplication. Notably, with the exception of defence and foreign policy, for every state function there is a corresponding federal function, with no clear boundaries;
There is a duplication of bureaucracies (e.g. between spheres of government and amongst individual states and territories);
The co-ordination of policy is poor, and integration is minimal;
Blame shifting and cost shifting is rife; and
We do not have national policy on key issues instead there are seven state/territory policies on each one.
Notwithstanding, there are some good regional initiatives like the SEQ Regional Plan linking infrastructure to long term land use planning in south-east Queensland (OUM 2005), and the Victorian Government’s Coastal Spaces Plan fixing the urban footprint (DSE 2005). However, these initiatives are the exception rather than the rule, and highlight the lack of any national approach. Much of the migration is across state boundaries and therefore it cannot be dealt with in isolation by different states.
In 2006, the NSCT released the findings of a second research report it commissioned on the pressures facing Australian coastal regions, which highlights the need for a collaborative national response to the challenge of coastal growth. This report, Meeting The Sea Change Challenge: Best Practice Models of Local and Regional Planning for Sea Change Communities (Gurran et al 2005; 2006) documents the range of governance, environmental, community, economic, and infrastructure challenges affecting ‘sea change’ councils in Australia. The report identifies best practice planning models. These are reasonably obvious, and the sorts of thing with which everyone would agree, but which cannot be implemented by local governments in isolation under current legislative and institutional arrangements. There is a community will across Australia to sustainably manage the coastline. There is sufficient knowledge about how to deal with these issues. But there is no pathway to the adoption or delivery of national policy. The problem is often the failure to adopt and apply existing knowledge rather than the lack of it. Of course, disjointed planning and governance is not unique to coastal settings.
The Sea Change Best Practice report refers to calls for more integrated approaches to environmental management across ecologically, rather than administratively defined territories. These approaches include forms of ‘catchment’ and ‘ecosystem’ management, or bioregional planning, all of which have emerged in Australia over the past two decades. It is happening to some extent with regional natural resource management bodies (e.g. see Bellamy this volume; Head this volume), which is a very interesting experiment in regional governance emerging across Australia – although perhaps a little threatening to the States and Territories in some instances. Notwithstanding, as Gurran et al (2006, p.7) identify:
At the national level in Australia, a ‘Framework for a National Cooperative Approach to Integrated Coastal Zone Management’ has been developed by the Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council. An important initiative, the framework identifies five issues for national collaboration: land and marine based sources of pollution, managing climate change, introduced pest plants and animals, allocation and use of coastal resources and capacity building. However, the framework does not extend to co-operative policy across agencies or jurisdictions making or strategic planning for the coast, despite the fact that this is frequently an area in which different state and Commonwealth jurisdictions collide.
So, if there is a lack coherence and consistency about jurisdictional arrangements for the coast, what is the answer? Gurran et al (2006) recommend a national level strategic framework, articulating overall objectives in line with the national and international values associated with the coastal zone. They also recommend that such a strategic framework should provide a basis for coordinating policy-making and land use planning on coastal areas with the other national interests and responsibilities that impact on coastal development (such as environmental protection and heritage, management of territorial waters, infrastructure provision and regional economic development).