Brisbane Future Blueprint: How exactly did Council plan the city?
It cost $3 million to make and is set to guide Brisbane’s future. But a veteran real estate agent says the city’s Future Blueprint is mostly just based on input from an online game and social media comments.
North
Don't miss out on the headlines from North. Followed categories will be added to My News.
MUCH of the long-term planning for Brisbane’s future will be based on data gleaned from social media and an interactive online game, sparking claims that only 0.5 per cent of the city’s population has played a “meaningful role” in the process.
Brisbane City Council has claimed “more than 100,000 residents had their say” and 270,000 interactions were held with community in formulating the city’s $3 million* Brisbane’s Future Blueprint.
LOOPHOLE ALLOWING UNITS IN LOW DENSITY AREAS CLOSED
QUIRK’S BACKYARD POLICY ‘ALL SPIN’
But analysis of the data shows the majority of the blueprint was developed based on data from Robo calls, social media and the online game Plan Your Brisbane.
Veteran real estate agent Paul Liddy said he was horrified to discover, when he started to look into the blueprint data used by council, that most came from an online game many people didn’t complete as well as likes and shares on social media.
“When I first saw this document — it’s so vague and peculiar,” Mr Liddy said.
“Then I started to ask does anyone know anyone who did one of these 270,000 interactions with community and everyone I spoke to was like ‘not really’.
“It’s frightening to think this is the guiding force for our city.”
The Brisbane City Council report shows 78,127 interactions were from social media and 96,591 were from the Plan Your Brisbane game.
50% OFF FOR THE FIRST 12 WEEKS WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE
Lord Mayor Graham Quirk released “Brisbane’s Future Blueprint Eight Principles and 40 actions to guide our city’s next exciting chapter” in June 2018 and last week announced council had already begun to implement the 40 actions.
The validity of the research and engagement has also raised the ire of councillors Jonathan Sri (Gabba) and Jared Cassidy (Deagon) who said the consultation could not be considered meaningful and the process was concerning.
The Plan Your Brisbane game, according to council, asked players to “house 1000 residents, adding high, medium, and low density dwellings to a reactive map”.
LORD MAYOR LAUNCHES PLAN YOUR BRISBANE
COUNCIL’S BLUEPRINT TOO LITTLE TOO LATE
Cr Sri said the game might have been a good way to generate interest in broader urban planning questions but it was not “in and of itself a meaningful form of consultation”.
He said if residents excluded the “superficial forms of outreach like the online game,
the children’s postcard activity and the primary school library workshops, the consultation report showed that Plan Your Brisbane only meaningfully engaged with less than 0.5% of the population of Brisbane, the overwhelming majority of Brissie residents did not get to have any meaningful input”.
“Even those residents who did engage meaningfully with the process were only doing so within very limited parameters of debate — residents were asked to choose between Option A and Option B without even understanding what other options had been left off the table.
“This whole consultation process seems to me like little more than sophisticated propaganda which seeks to shape values and harvest data for the LNP prior to the next council election.
“It contrasts starkly with true collaborative consultation where you empower residents to actually make the decisions that shape their city. Surveying people and then ignoring the results is not consultation.”
Cr Cassidy and Cr Sri both backed calls for scrutiny over the cost to Brisbane ratepayers for the blueprint.
“While Graham Quirk hasn’t revealed the full cost of the blueprint exercise, we do know that well over $2 million has been spent so far,” Cr Cassidy said.
“The initial advertising campaign cost $2.173m, there were $20,000 in robo calls and several other city wide brochure distributions since these figures were given.
“This, including staff time and cost, would push the campaign close to $3 million.
“I don’t have specific costs for the game. This was the concerning bit about the process.
“The LNP regularly say that 100,000 people engaged in the Plan Your Brisbane exercise, however we know that the vast majority of those were just people who played the online game, even if it was just for a few seconds.
“We know only a few hundred ended up making detailed submissions. This is very concerning that the process was designed in a way to make the engagement seem more broad than it really was.
“And most of the comments on council’s official social media were consistent with what people had been screaming from the rooftops for years (and were falling on deaf ears) — that people were fed up with the way the LNP council had let developers run free while ignoring the wishes of the community.”
When asked, earlier in the year about costs Cr Quirk said he “was unable to confirm that but the cost of having a conversation with the people of Brisbane about something as important as planning is worth it”.
Cr Sri delivered a speech to council at the time of the blueprint release seeking answers about the process.
“It’s important we don’t rewrite history and pretend that Plan Your Brisbane reached a large number of residents in a meaningful way,” Cr Sri said.
“Most of the so-called ‘engagements’ were brief interactions with a very simplistic online game, and the council can’t even confirm definitively how many of those game users were unique hits compared to repeat players.”
“The consultation report shows that actually only 4575 residents participated in the online survey, which only asked three very simple questions and did not go into any detail about specific urban planning questions.”
City North News asked council a range of questions about the blueprint, its costs, why Brisbane needed the blueprint when it had already conducted extensive community consultation for City Plan 2014 and Neighbourhood plans.
Council did not answer any of the questions, claiming the answers were all in the blueprint document.
City North News asked council to provide direct links within the documents to the questions but council did not respond to this request.
Council’s website claims: “Plan Your Brisbane is one of the largest and most innovative community engagement projects of any local government in Australia. It involved more than 277,000 interactions and more than 100,000 genuine engagements, where specific contributions were provided.
“Plan Your Brisbane engaged Brisbane residents from every Brisbane postcode (Appendix 6.23 — list of all Brisbane postcodes from the game survey), ranging in age from primary school children to those in their 80s.
“The engagement involved more than 20 unique types of engagement activities. The diverse range of engagement methods were designed to make it easy for every Brisbane resident to get involved and encourage people who might not otherwise participate.”
Questions City North News asked council but did not receive responses to:
1. What were the key engagement activities that drove the Brisbane’s Future Blueprint policies?
2. How did the social media shares and website hits inform council’s development of policy?
3. Of the one-in-five households engaged in the Plan Your Brisbane game, how old were the individuals playing?
4. How many individual households were called for the telephone surveys?
5. How did the telephone survey inform the blueprint?
6. Is there a report available to the public identifying the 15,000 ideas generated?
7. How did the plasticine sculptures inform the Brisbane’s Future Blueprint and why was that considered an engagement activity for it?
8. How will the blueprint be implemented?
9. Why did the city need the blueprint when it already has neighbourhood plans and a city plan?
10. What was the cost of the community engagement including the specific cost to build the Plan Your Brisbane game survey?
11. What exactly has the blueprint informed in the past three months that was not already part of a neighbourhood or city plan?
12. Where can community read the “40 actions to guide our city’s next exciting chapter”?
* Exact figures for the costs were not provided by council.
Southside study reveals real cost of ignoring mental health
Taxpayers could save $482 million over the next decade if governments tackle root causes of mental distress in Brisbane’s southern suburbs and Logan, a groundbreaking study has found.
‘Do something now’: Fire ants blamed for river banks collapse
Logan River residents want the state to investigate possible links between deadly fire ants and accelerating river bank erosion as property owners live in fear of landslips.