Belconnen shopkeepers – and at least one consortium of developers – are celebrating the Immigration Department's decision to scrap its request for tenders to build a new ACT headquarters. That approach to the market, made a year ago, was delayed many times before it was withdrawn in the face of strong local political opposition, from Liberal and Labor parliamentarians.
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It is now highly likely that most Immigration staff will remain in Belconnen, rather than move to a joint headquarters elsewhere in Canberra with their Border Force (and erstwhile Customs) colleagues. Yet their staying in Belconnen is not entirely certain. The department said only that, because of the government's new policy of applying a "local impact assessment" to proposed leases, it could not proceed with its existing request for tender. Instead, the department would "now factor into its consideration of future property options in Canberra the local impacts of potential options on the Belconnen community", and it looked forward "to continuing its relationship with the Belconnen community, as it works through a revised tender process".
In other words, the department can still contemplate moving its workforce to another part of the city. Indeed, it should weigh up the costs and benefits of all options. The department's secretary, Michael Pezzullo, had wanted – not without good reason – employees from the merged organisations to work in the same precinct. That remains, for the moment, one of the department's objectives. Yet there has been little debate so far about the "local impact" that would arise as a result of moving up to 2000 former Customs staff from Civic to Belconnen.
Whichever developers or town centre "wins" as a result of the department's headquarters decision, others will lose. Nor does the public know which outcome will best suit the staff themselves. When this newspaper asked the department recently for a breakdown of where its ACT-based employees actually lived (so as to determine the most commuter-friendly location of a future headquarters), the department said it didn't know. If that's the case, it means any forthcoming "local impact assessments" of development proposals will be only marginally helpful. It's one thing to measure the impact of a workforce on nearby shops and cafes, but that doesn't reflect the overall impact of such decisions on a community.
Operating free and fair markets is difficult in a government town like Canberra, where the public service's spending decisions can shape the local economy so dramatically. That's why this newspaper argued five months ago that the ACT government, as Canberra's main planning authority, should have an advisory role in the federal bureaucracy's property decisions. The Finance Department's new policy of overseeing office leases at least allows it to consider the "big picture" before approving decisions that could have significant repercussions for Canberrans; it's better than the previous approach, which was largely to leave such decisions to individual government agency heads. But we will only know how effective this policy is in practice when the Immigration headquarters decision is finally taken and explained.
