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TRANSCRIPT
OF PROCEEDINGS	Adelaide
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PRODUCTIVITY COMMISSION

INQUIRY INTO THE CONSERVATION OF AUSTRALIA'S HISTORIC BUILT HERITAGE PLACES

DR N.  BYRON, Presiding Commissioner, 
MR T. HINTON, Commissioner

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

AT MELBOURNE ON MONDAY, 8 AUGUST 2005, AT 9.05 AM

Continued from 3/8/05 in Adelaide	
DR BYRON:   Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Neil Byron and I'm the presiding Commissioner for this inquiry, and my fellow Commissioner is Tony Hinton.  This inquiry stems from terms of reference the Commission has received from the Australian treasurer with the endorsement of all state and territory governments.  It covers the policy framework and the incentives in place to encourage the conservation of heritage places, including built heritage.  We've already talked to a large number of different organisations and individuals with interest in heritage conservation in most states and territories, including some fascinating rural and regional visits in many states.

	Submissions have been coming into the inquiry following the release of our issues paper about two and a half months ago and we now have about 120 submissions compared with about 40 this time last week, all of which are on our web site.  The purpose of these hearings is to provide an opportunity for any interested parties to discuss their submissions with the Commission and to put their views on the public record.  We've already held hearings in Brisbane, Darwin, Perth and Adelaide, and following these hearings today and tomorrow we'll be holding further hearings in Hobart, Canberra and Sydney over the next couple of weeks.

	We're planning to produce a draft report for public comment about the beginning of December and then there will be another round of hearings and opportunities for feedback where we're looking for comments after people have time to read and digest and think about our proposed recommendations.  The Productivity Commission always tries to conduct our public hearings in a fairly informal manner but we do take a full transcript for the record and so we can't really run them just like a public meeting because the transcription service wouldn't know who's talking.  But we do always try and give an opportunity for anyone in the room who wants to come forward and put something onto the public record to do so.  The transcripts will be put on the Commission's web site as soon as they have been checked for accuracy of transcription and then they will be available to anybody through public libraries and directly from the Commission.

	To comply with Australian government occupational health and safety legislation, I have to inform everybody in the room that in the very unlikely event of an incident, alarms will sound and we'll go out through the glass doors, down the fire escape stairs just past the elevator and assemble in Collins Street and Spring Street.  The other little bit of housekeeping is that the toilets are just near the lifts where you came in.  I think that's all I need to explain in housekeeping.  

	So without any further ado, I would like to welcome most sincerely the Australian Heritage Council - Tom Harley and Jane Lennon.  If you could introduce yourself and highlight the main points in your written submission which Tony and I have both read very carefully, we'd like to discuss it with you, and thanks for coming.  
MR HARLEY:   Thank you.  May I start by introducing my colleague Jane Lennon who is known to both of you, I think, but has considerably more experience in these matters than I have, particularly in the built heritage area.  I've been chairman of the Australian Heritage Council since it was established last year, and previously I served as chairman for the Australian Heritage Commission.  Jane can speak for her own credentials but I'll ask her to do that after perhaps I've made some introductory remarks.

	We as the council are delighted that this process has begun and thank the Commissioners for the opportunity to put our position.  We're pleased that you've met with so many members of the community and have taken the trouble to travel as widely as I know you have, having run into you in Perth last week.  We're particularly pleased with this inquiry as it's partly born of a submission I sent in my previous role as chairman of the Commission, following a meeting of the Australian Heritage Chairs and Officials in Adelaide in 2002.  Our motive for an inquiry came from several factors:  firstly, a profound lack of really good data about Australia's heritage and the economics of it; a lack of clarity about the market based cases for public intervention to support heritage, particularly built heritage - and I'm going to use built heritage and cultural heritage pretty well interchangeably in my remarks.  

	Cultural heritage in our view is the poor cousin of natural heritage which has been provided for most substantially through the Natural Heritage Trust.  The imminence of the new heritage legislation born of the COAG meeting of 1997 was another motive for us seeking this kind of inquiry.  We noted similar inquiries had been conducted into other areas of, let's say, the humanities, the performing arts, the contemporary arts and Australian music, not necessarily by the Productivity Commission but substantial work has been done on all of those areas.

	We welcome the Commission's engagement to bring rigour to the discussion and to provide market based arguments and analysis for heritage.  We believe the case for heritage is wholly compelling, utterly compelling.  Heritage is best defined in our view as our legacy from the past, what we live with today and what we will pass on.  At a national level, I think Franklin Roosevelt best described the value of heritage when he argued that:

A nation must believe in three things:  it must believe in the past; it must believe in the future; it must above all believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future -

remarks he made on 30 June 1941.  At the core of the Australian Heritage Council position is the view that the market does not always value the heritage value of a place.  In fact in some examples the very heritage values of a place may detract from its immediate market value.  Governments along with the public have a key role in identifying and defining the heritage values of a place and in communicating those values, best summed up English heritage who see their role as follows - and I think Australian Heritage Council would claim very much the same role:

Our job is to identify what heritage is and why it matters to understand it; to value it; to conserve and protect it; to unlock its value; to promote it and help others value and enjoy it and to share its value.

The case for heritage has been most compellingly advocated and put by the Productivity Commission itself in its paper on Social Capital: 

Heritage is in our view the binding factor in social cohesion.  

	I put it this way:  as an Australian, I share with my fellow countrymen something far greater than just having our feet on the same continent.  I share a relationship to the land and share a common history and in most instances, a set of core values born of those relationships that are distinctively Australian; determining places that mark major events in our common history and telling the stories about the people, the places and events, enriches that understanding of the past by bringing us a closer connection to it.

	Let me illustrate that with some examples.  Australia can proudly boast that it has one of the oldest and most robust democracies in the world.  From the earliest models of colonial government the franchise was expanded by doing away with property qualifications and giving women the vote 30 or so years before they could vote for the Mother of Parliaments or in the United States.  The secret ballot known for some time as the Australian ballot was introduced.  Members of parliament were paid.  Democracy with its particular vigour is at the core of our society.  Celebrating the places connected with those events further entrenches us and reminds us of that legacy.  I believe volunteerism, the formation almost spontaneously of community bodies, has been another feature of the fabric of Australian society.  The first lifesaving club anywhere in the world was supposed to have been formed to patrol some of Sydney's Pacific beaches.  There was a big argument about which one.  The Flying Doctor Service, the County Fire Services, have all played significant roles in our community, and so have the values that run them.  Perhaps given the precarious relationship with our continent we have the need for such institutions.  But for whatever the reason, they are at the heart of our social fabric, or as you call it, social capital.  Shared experiences or connection with similar patterns or events in our past also bind the community.  An exploration of those shared experiences enhances social capital.  

	Of particular relevance to today's society are the patterns of migration and the shared experience of arrival and the relationship with those that had already established themselves.  With each wave of migration Australian society has been altered.  Very few countries of our economic strength have experienced such large-scale migration and growth.  The way in which Australian society has adapted and benefited is part of the national portfolio of social capital.

	While the terms of this inquiry focus on cultural, built heritage, no line of demarcation is clear.  The AHC has responsibility for heritage in three realms:  natural, indigenous and cultural.  In more instances than not they are layered on each other, one enriching the other.  Australia is extraordinarily fortunate in having two vastly different patterns of human settlement, with wildly different cultural values.  Aboriginal culture normally judges its successful relationship with country by how little they affect it.  Artefacts are frequently destroyed after ceremonies and not preserved.  When a leading figure dies, their images are frequently erased, not memorialised.  The nature of connection with country is also so counterintuitive to European society.   

	We believe that layering of the different views of the same place leads to great respect and understanding between the two groups, and there's substantial academic research that supports this view.  While at times this may provide a source for differences, on the whole it is our view that it can be a powerful force for reconciliation, arguably an element of Australia's social capital that is substantially in deficit.  There is ample evidence for this in both the United States and Canada.  

	We see these distinctions between natural, indigenous and cultural as false distinctions.  Indeed, the Burra Charter was an attempt by Australian practitioners in heritage to broaden analysis of places to encompass all heritage values.  It is global practice to do so, as embodied in the work ICOMOS does with world heritage listings, and the work of the AHC in assessing places for the National Heritage List.  We regard it as dysfunctional that at state and local government level such distinctions are maintained, and it's one of the nine recommendations we've put in our paper for your consideration that they are brought together at a state level.  We've listed eight other recommendations that we'd be happy to elaborate on in discussion, but that is one I wanted particularly to highlight in my verbal remarks.  

	We've sought at this stage of submission to make the case for heritage itself.  Further work that has been commissioned with the Australian and New Zealand Heritage Chairs and Officials will provide some very specific analysis of instances of market failure.  The public policy mechanisms to deal with issues vary markedly from state to state.  At a federal level the bulk of direct heritage spending is through the Department of Environment and Heritage, although there are considerable appropriations for celebratory programs, one-off events, and most recently the Centenary of Federation funding.  There's also funding that goes through the preservation of Commonwealth properties and the disposal programs.  

	Ultimately it is our view that the national government has a leadership role akin to the one that it exercised over 30 years ago, when the Hope Royal Commission recommendations led to the establishment of the Australian Heritage Commission and the compilation of the Register of the National Estate, the RNE.  The RNE and the body of practice that was developed to identify and interpret heritage stimulated activity across the country.  The RNE provided no real protection for a place that was included, but the achievement of the RNE was that it made the case for heritage and for a richer notion of heritage, one that embraced all the three realms I described before.  The states and territories, those that had not already legislation in place, responded by developing their own heritage legislation and incorporating it into planning and other law.

	The Commonwealth's own legislation lagged behind until the recent set of amendments to the EPBC Act and the establishment of a new National Heritage List.  Until the advent of this list, the states had more capacity in their mechanisms to identify and protect places of national significance than the Commonwealth had.  This has been rectified.  We believe the compilation of the National Heritage List, when combined with the appropriate interpretive and promotional materials, will be a catalyst for a reawakening of heritage, a powerful tool in binding the social cohesion central to your notions of social capital.  We see this as a way of reawakening heritage practice around the country.  That is the vision of the AHC.  Critical to that vision is your work to guide us with appropriate mechanisms.  That concludes my little introductory homily, and Jane and I would welcome any questions or discussion on our paper.  

DR BYRON:   Jane, was there anything you wanted to add at this stage?  

DR LENNON:   No, I think Tom has very eloquently outlined our philosophy for the council.  I think the issue for us is after 30 years of heritage practice since the Hope inquiry and the Commission was established is that we believe that heritage is valued in the community.  As Tom said, it needs a revaluation because of immigration, the changing dysfunctionality of the three areas being separated - natural, indigenous and built.  We see it as a shared heritage, and that's really the power of place.  I think we're back trying to reassert that as a fundamental plank in the philosophy, and I think some of the things that will follow in other submissions is people are expecting the new council to give some leadership, and indeed our act gives us that role.  So we're also represented on Heritage Chairs and Officials and the National Cultural Heritage Forum.  We can advise the minister in terms of the Environment Protection and Heritage Ministerial Council.  So there are subsequent mechanisms, but I think it's been really important to articulate our philosophy and, as Tom said, to look to work with you, and especially in the second round of papers, with some more practical mechanisms, looking at our own experience and my own 20 years in state government and local government looking at mechanisms that have and haven't worked through the three tiers of government.

	Also I must say, that voluntary sector - I mean, the National Trust, being in this city - is how I started out, protecting Fitzroy, trying to save its historical heritage, and it would ludicrous today that people would want to knock all that down.  But they did in the name of progress and other philosophies of public building in the late 60s and 70s.  So we see these cycles, and I think having that historical framework to the Commission's inquiry is quite important as well.  Thank you.  

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much.  I've got a few comments to make, particularly on the written submission, but, Tony, would you like to go first. 

MR HINTON:   Thanks, Neil.  I'd like to thank Tom and Jane for their participation here this morning and statements already made.  Thank you very much, but also thank you very much for the council's written submission that Neil has also referred to.  That's a very important submission for us, setting a scene, very much so, for how we proceed for the next X months.  So thank you for that.  Not surprisingly, I have a lot of questions I'd like to ask.  I've got half a dozen that I will ask, given the available time and about nine others, at least nine others, appearing today and another 10 or so tomorrow.  So I'll try and focus on matters of more fruitful discussion.

	My first and, not surprisingly, most of my questions relate to specific recommendations in the council's submission, which will not surprise you as well.  The first one relates to probably your second recommendation, that the Australian government build the National Heritage List as a plank of its heritage policy.  Then on page 19 you refer to, "But we need stronger financial mechanisms supporting this listing framework," and for the listing framework you refer to both a credible list as well as the initial Commonwealth list to protect the Australian government's own heritage properties.  I wanted to explore with you those issues, in particular the basic message of your second recommendation, the role of the Australian government, and then, as a subset of that, what you mean by a sort of stronger financial mechanism supporting this listing process.  Can you take me through what you have in mind here?  

MR HARLEY:   Certainly.  Let me deal with the notion of a list.  Why is the list an appropriate mechanism to use to protect heritage?  I think there are two aspects to it.  One is that you have to define what you're protecting, and you can define that by inclusion or exclusion.  The most common mechanism in a global practice is to define by inclusion, by saying, "Here are the very special places, here are the values that we're seeking to protect, and here is the management plan that will achieve that."  The Commonwealth I think has - and Peter Shergold I think has changed it to the Australian government but I still call it the Commonwealth, for heritage reasons.  The Commonwealth list can be as big or as small as the Commonwealth chooses to fund it, and as big or as small as we're satisfied on the council that places actually satisfy our thresholds.  We think as a rule of thumb and based on the US and UK practice, that the Australian list, perhaps in two, three years - and this is a function of resources - will probably on the national list be 300 or so places.  There's some kind of strange science to that estimate.  

MR HINTON:   On the Commonwealth list?  

MR HARLEY:   No, on the national list.  The Commonwealth list is already over 300.  We think listing is an entirely legitimate mechanism for doing this.  I can't think of a better one - that's part of my answer.  Secondly, I think there is something symbolic about putting something on a national list, declaring to be a place of national importance, to inspire the discussion that brings about the connection between the values of the place and the general community, the things I was talking about on the social cohesion point.  I mean, we can put the South Australian Parliament on the national list, which it's been nominated for, because it was the legislature that gave women the vote, the first place in the western world.  It's a way of celebrating that.  The building needs virtually no protection at all.  It's adequately protected under South Australian legislation, but the interpretation requires funding, and getting that story out, which is really the value of putting it on the list.  

	There are other places that may be in danger and require protection, and that's where substantial funding may be required.  I think the most expensive places would be in the natural heritage area rather than the built heritage area, but I think the majority of funding that we seek in the near term is for the interpretation of places and for publicising the values for why we're putting the places on the list.  The first place that was put on the list was Budj Bim or Lake Condah, the Aboriginal fish traps in western Victoria.  To the untrained eye it's a swamp.  It needs substantial funding to interpret it, and there's a lot of mechanisms available.  The Americans and British are superb at providing technology and ways of visualising what the place was like and how it worked.  But there's no point in doing that just in western Victoria.  We'd like to see that publicised as part of the general media.  We believe that once a program is set up and we use the distinctively Australian money to stimulate that, a lot of free to air and other publicity will pick up from that.  

MR HINTON:   You refer to the listing process being supported by stronger financial mechanisms.  

MR HARLEY:   Yes. 

MR HINTON:   I was really trying to extract from you whether that really was behind a push for more funding in general for the listing process or whether in fact you had in mind specific mechanisms to deliver whatever funds might be available.  

MR HARLEY:   I think it's a bit of both. 

MR HINTON:   Is there a nuance there or is it ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HARLEY:   No, it's not a nuance.  It's both.  I mean, we want funding so we can progress a greater number of assessments.  Most of our funding at the moment goes on the assessment of places, and we're somewhat limited at the moment by how many we can assess.  The rigour of the assessment process is absolutely critical for the integrity of the listing process and to protect the rights of people whose properties are involved in the thing.  We want to re-engineer the assessment process to outsource a lot more of it and involve a lot more people around the country in doing it, rather than just having it in Canberra.  That may in fact make it slightly more expensive, so we seek funding for that.  The largest lump of funding is more around the interpretation and publication of what goes on the list.  As I said the most expensive fundings are probably around natural heritage rather than built heritage.  That's relative, and it's probably outside the scope of what you're inquiring into.  We believe though that there is a requirement to provide much larger support for built heritage at a Commonwealth level of places that are not necessarily on the list that may be in state care or local government care.  That particular recommendation too is not addressing that point.

MR HINTON:   Well, I was going to get on to that.  I'm happy to ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HARLEY:   Do you want to add ‑ ‑ ‑

DR LENNON:   No, I think you're right.  I mean, we're looking both at our own operational capacity to build these stories with the states and local government, and as Tom says, possibly with some of the management.  The traditional pattern of bagging the Commonwealth for more funds and dropping it off the state budget or indeed in local government not having a budget, is a real problem.  We don't want people to see the national list as yet another bucket, and that's been some of our experience already, because they don't understand the COAG three tiers of government and support.  So we're trying to enhance with the interpretation and stories and some good planning exemplars.  I mean, 300 out of 13,000 on the existing list, that's the top level.  The bulk of our heritage is managed by private owners.

MR HARLEY:   Our bid for more funding for built heritage is really in recommendation 8.  That's a separate issue from the listing.

MR HINTON:   We've discussed the national listing - sorry, the Natural Heritage List.  But before going to the sort of buildings that might be of local and state significance, can we come a bit to the Commonwealth owned properties itself, the Commonwealth list I think you'd call it.  

MR HARLEY:   Yes.  

MR HINTON:   Are there particular problems there that you've identified that needs a sort of policy reaction to address how we are not handling well - if that's the situation - the conservation of those particular places.

MR HARLEY:   I think there are two points I'd make - and I'd welcome Jane's advice.  There are Commonwealth departments and there are Commonwealth departments.  Each department is required to develop a heritage strategy and we are required to review that strategy.  So far we've only reviewed one which is the Defence Department which has taken enormous strides, partly driven I think because of its disposal program over the last 10 years in getting an understanding of heritage.  It has a heritage officer, or a number of officers who we work with.  The disposal program of the Commonwealth has raised a whole lot of heritage issues where some departments are better than others in planning the heritage issues that need to be addressed.

	There is also this functional work between the state and federal governments, where a federal property may fall under - which is currently governed by a Commonwealth legislation, will be privatised and fall into the hands of state planning legislation, and politics rather than sense frequently intervenes, and discussions there about what might happen to those properties.  There needs to be a policy mechanism to bring about a smoother transition from Commonwealth owned properties to where they fit into state jurisdictions.  I think the biggest risk to Commonwealth heritage is in the hands of some of the privatisation programs, and earlier planning and earlier allocation of resources to those programs would benefit both heritage and the Commonwealth's ease in the disposal of those properties.

DR LENNON:   Yes, I think the new legislation requires that the Commonwealth departments have to find, in their own budget, funding for identification and maintenance of key heritage places.  Now, some departments might consider that core business and try and speed up the disposal program, but as Tom said, we've already recognised this problem of having appropriate mechanisms for when it is disposed - thinking of post offices that might have been sold 10 years ago or whatever and have lost their landmark value to a community, something like that.  But I think the new legislation - we've only had one department so far.  They have two years under the act to come to us with their strategies.  

	So a little like your submissions, we're expecting a great rush of them soon and we'll be very busy looking at this, but it's a whole new mechanism and it is the first time the Commonwealth has been responsible to manage its own heritage properties - to identify its estate and manage them in accordance with the principles that are set out in the regulations to the act.  I mean, it's something that groups have been lobbying for for a long time, so we're about to see that.  I think other than in those two areas it's a bit hard at this stage to say what will be the extra reasons ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   So it's more work in progress at this stage, Jane, rather than being able to reach a judgment as to whether it's working well or not working well.

DR LENNON:   Yes.  

MR HARLEY:   There are some areas that are clearly not working well.

DR LENNON:   Yes.  

MR HARLEY:   I'd just make one general remark.  The places that are directly controlled by a government department there tends to be a greater sense of responsibility for the heritage of those places, than places that are put in the hands of government-related agencies or corporatised bodies that are managed outside departments.

MR HINTON:   Is there an issue here of a risk of divergence of approach when you have different portfolios taking responsibility, yet there's a common objective here?  Is there some sort of lack of integrity to the whole because different portfolios are involved?

MR HARLEY:   I think it's too early to tell.  I mean, it has the potential for that but we're supposed to be, as it were, the kind of standardiser and moderator of that.  Theoretically it should work.  I think the issue will be how important each of the government departments makes it and what resources they put into working up their heritage plans.

MR HINTON:   I was going to move on to another recommendation.  Recommendation 5 talks about the need to close the legislative gaps in protection of the historic environment.  Can you sort of elaborate for me what is driving that concern because there's been action at the Australian government level.  There's certainly been action in most states and territories to sort of bring up to date the sort of legislative framework with a view to try and bring an integrated approach to this across two levels of government.  Can you sort of explore for me what's behind that concern?

MR HARLEY:   We're talking about historic heritage particularly where if we recommend to the minister a place go on the national heritage list, a building that is in private ownership, and the person who owns it wishes to demolish it themselves with their own pickaxe, the Commonwealth does not have the power to prevent that.  It doesn't fall as a controlled action within the EPBC Act.  It may fall as a controlled action but the Commonwealth doesn't, on a fairly sensible reading of the Constitution, have the power to prevent that.  Virtually anything in the natural heritage area gets swept up by the Commonwealth treaties' powers and ‑ ‑ ‑

DR LENNON:   And the indigenous.

MR HARLEY:   Indigenous is clearly within the Commonwealth's reach.  The Commonwealth in the legislation is claiming more power than it has.

DR LENNON:   Other than for an historic place on the national list.

MR HARLEY:   For an historic place on the national list it does not have the power to prevent a private owner doing to a private property something that is against the management plan that might attach to that national ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   You think the Commonwealth - the Australian government should have that power?

MR HARLEY:   I'm saying that as part of a cooperative scheme which works and should work in all directions, the Commonwealth takes responsibility for the places of national listing, it works with the states and territories in establishing that national listing.  The states in an ideal world would refer to the Commonwealth the power to protect places that are on the national list in private ownership.  That would be the mechanism to solve that.  That's the legislative gap that that refers to.

DR LENNON:   If I may add, I think that comes back to our policy platform and our work with especially Chairs and Officials.

MR HARLEY:   We work as a cooperative scheme.  Despite the colour of the various governments we were at one in the passage of the legislation and the support for cooperatives.

MR HINTON:   So when you use the expression "legislative gap", you mean it's a power that resides in another level of government rather than a ‑ ‑ ‑

DR LENNON:   Yes.  

MR HARLEY:   Sorry, the ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   - - - non‑existent legislation that's yet to be passed.

MR HARLEY:   The legislation exists and is arguably beyond the powers of the body that has got it.

MR HINTON:   Thank you for that clarification.  But closing it suggests that the solution is not by legislative action but by cooperative action.

MR HARLEY:   By cooperative action and I'm not sure whether that requires the states to legislate - to refer that power to the Commonwealth or whether they can do it in some other mechanism.  It was certainly envisaged in the 1997 COAG agreement but it hasn't happened.

MR HINTON:   That takes us to recommendation 9 in some sense in that you recommend that there be the development of new mechanisms for coordination and cooperation between governments, especially Commonwealth, state and territory cooperation in building a National Heritage List.  Now, that's a very narrow recommendation in a sense that it's only on the National Heritage List.  But presumably you would see that cooperation being much beyond that which relates to just the National Heritage List.

MR HARLEY:   I agree.  We'd like to see that.  We thought the National Heritage List may be a good start.

MR HINTON:   Given that you've got 300 or so in mind.

MR HARLEY:   And that it may have profound impacts on states and territories.  We'd like it to be developed cooperatively.  Interestingly, the one that we were in Perth announcing last Friday, Fremantle Gaol was nominated by the premier of Western Australia.  We would like to see more nominations from the state and local government area.  We've sought in the nomination process to have it as open as possible, and the council has not used its power to make nominations, hoping to flush some out from the various levels, again with the spirit of a cooperative agreement.

DR LENNON:   Tom, may I just add to that?

MR HARLEY:   Yes.  

DR LENNON:   One of the issues in there is that some of the places that we might think as a council are of National Heritage significance aren't yet on a state list.  So this is again the importance of this three-tiered approach.  We have the power to go and make our own list but it won't work unless we bring everybody with us.

MR HINTON:   I'm glad you mentioned that.  I just presumed that the Australian government and the council - AHC - are pursuing items for the National Heritage List, that more than likely those potential cases would already have been at least state listed and therefore not under some sort of threat.  But Jane's comments suggest to me that you see it slightly differently, if not fundamentally differently.

MR HARLEY:   The quality of heritage legislation varies markedly across the country.  There are some states with powerful legislation that is under‑used, others with very rudimentary legislation and wildly different levels of funding.

DR LENNON:   And places where owners - owners who might be a corporation or an institutional body - have resisted state listing.

MR HINTON:   But are they in danger?  I had in mind that if you go from how many you've got at the moment on the National Heritage List out to 300, given the constraints - resource constraints in particular - and other constraints, moving from whatever it is.  It's nine, is it?

DR LENNON:   14.

MR HINTON:   14,  thank you, you brought me up to date.  It's a bit like our submissions.  14.  The 300 is going to take a while.  If I read your body language correctly, that suggests that some of those could be under some pressure, if not endangered, simply by the time it will take to do something about that.  Given your circumstances where some of those would not already be on a list.

MR HARLEY:   I'd hope that early on in our listing we would find a place where listing provides it with protection and that it requires it in the near term.  I think it would be a good demonstration of the value of the legislation if it in fact did that.

MR HINTON:   So you're not only putting weight on significance, you're putting weight on those that are under some pressure.  

MR HARLEY:   It has to satisfy the significance test first.

MR HINTON:   In any case, yes.

MR HARLEY:    The developments of new mechanisms I also have in mind the fusing of the realms.  At the moment the ministerial council that our minister attends consists of other ministers who largely only have responsibility for historic heritage, not indigenous or natural heritage, and so the new mechanism for coordination, I would like to see the ministerial council ideally widen to include people with responsibility for heritage as it is defined at Commonwealth and world level.

MR HINTON:   That's an interesting point you raise in terms of a COAG process because it does raise an issue that has occurred in some other hearings and that is what would be the process or mechanism by which the Productivity Commission's recommendations might be progressed, that is if it's going to involve action by the Australian government and state governments with implications for local government. Prima facie that suggests that there needs to be some sort of COAG action that might react to the Productivity Commission's report.  Is that the AHC's position?

MR HARLEY:   Yes.

DR LENNON:   Yes. 

MR HARLEY:   The whole current scheme is born of COAG.  In a way it would be appropriate for any recommendations the Commission chose to make to go back to COAG on that issue.

MR HINTON:   So it would be a refinement of existing agreements rather than breaking new ground, which helps.

MR HARLEY:   It would be a mechanism that gives effect to the existing agreement.

DR LENNON:   I think that's the issue exactly, that the previous agreements haven't been put into effect if you look at the 1997 agreement, the 1998 Heritage Convention where it talked about a policy framework's standards.  I mean, you can't go and argue the detail of financial incentives if you haven't got the big framework in place.  I think that's what we see with our very specific little task, yet our national overview to inspire everyone to some action.  

MR HARLEY:   I think the focus on the list - why are we so obsessed with that, if you like - I used the example of the RNE before in my remarks.  It had a profound impact because it galvanised thought around what should be part of the Register of the National Estate.  It went far beyond the Commonwealth.  It's always been my vision for the national list that it excites a discussion about what is really important to us as a country, for all the reasons I went through before, and that that has a flow-on effect to local and state heritage in the same way the RNE managed it 30 years ago.  So the end is not the national list; the end is heritage.  

MR HINTON:   Some could suggest that a national list that has 300-plus on it could in fact be depreciating the currency, so to speak; that is, do we really have that many - I'm being the devil's advocate here - items or building sites of national heritage significance that warrant action at the Australian government level that implies not only responsibility but funding beyond that which would be done say at state significance level.  Is that ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HARLEY:   I don't want to get hung up on the 300 number.  If you look at the US and the number of places managed by its parks service - you may have been taken through this argument - that's how that number falls out.  

MR HINTON:   Those are the origins of that number, you said at the start. 

MR HARLEY:   It may not be that 300 places would satisfy our thresholds, and I would not compromise the thresholds to get that kind of bulk.  I think in a way the integrity of the list is almost determined by what we leave off it rather than what we put on it, and we have rejected I think many more than we've put on at this stage.  

MR HINTON:   But that suggests your point about different levels of government responsibility - that something that doesn't make the national list but just misses out, one would hope, then gets picked up at that next level and not just fallen between desks, so to speak.  

MR HARLEY:   Yes, and hence the weight we put on cooperation, because again the national listing process may identify a place that is not on a state list but would merit that.  

DR LENNON:   But I think the other part of your story as well is that 20 decades of European settlement, 89 bioregions in Australia - there's an immense amount of diversity that people are unaware of as they now all live in cities on the coast.  There is a rich heritage of building the nation that has been forgotten.  So I think one of our ideas is ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HARLEY:   Reawakening particularly ‑ ‑ ‑

DR LENNON:   Yes, reawakening.  

MR HARLEY:   Regional Australia has kind of slipped out of capital city newspapers.  

MR HINTON:   I've got another question that takes us down a slightly different track, and it's in response to your recommendation 7:

The development, especially for regionally disadvantaged places, of an appropriate shared formula between governments for funding conservation works where the private sector cannot provide resources.  

There's a couple of issues there.  One is the regional aspect, the disadvantage aspect, the private sector lack of resources aspect, as well as the fact you've got a shared formula.  

MR HARLEY:   We just wanted to add to the ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   Degree of difficulty.  It's a bit like you've taken a dive with a pike, isn't it, and done a backwards somersault.  Can you help me better understand what you have in mind behind this recommendation 7?  

MR HARLEY:   It comes from the observation that there are certainly places of great heritage significance - whether they're national or state or local let's put to one side for the moment - that are outside the capital cities, that don't receive the attention that something in downtown Melbourne or Sydney gets, and there are not the resources in the local community to support the preservation of some of those places.  They might be the cottages we were talking about on the goldfields last night that date from the 1850s that are in disrepair or under threat because of being yuppified or whatever, and are derelict - and there are quite a few of them around the country.  They're not within the view of a lot of people.  

	They're not going to necessarily make the National Heritage List, and there's no kind of adequate mechanism of funding the protection of those places, because the shire council or whatever it is where they're locally significant does not have sufficient funds.  Whether there's a formula, what the mechanism is for doing it, we believe that they are a critical part of Australia's heritage fabric and should be protected.  

MR HINTON:   But implicit in that - in fact explicit - was that it wasn't nationally significant.  It is at least locally significant but ‑ ‑ ‑

DR LENNON:   And not on a local register.  

MR HINTON:   But maybe of sufficient interest and significance to be state significant.  

MR HARLEY:   Yes. 

MR HINTON:   Yet that suggests prima facie that maybe that doesn't warrant a formula base.  Maybe then it falls to the state government, in association with the local government region, rather than involving the Australian government.  What's particular about that category that we're talking about that warrants a formula involving the Australian government?  

MR HARLEY:   The issue is that there are some states that have other priorities, and yet this is part of the national fabric but not part of the national list.  Australia's heritage is diminished if some of the sawmillers' cottages in remote parts of Tasmania or old churches or old graveyards in remote parts of Tasmania or Western Australia disappear.  They're critical elements of the national story.  The local government is not going to protect it and the state government may not be minded to protect it without funding.  

MR HINTON:   You seem to be bringing in a slightly different variation on what is nationally significant, Tom.  Am I reading you correctly?  

MR HARLEY:   There's national significance with a capital N, which are the things that go on the national list.  Heritage, for all the reasons that were in my homily at the beginning, is a nationally, with a small N, significant thing.  If there are not the funds provided at a certain level in Australia, then there is, I believe, scope for the Commonwealth to provide funding in the way it does with the Natural Heritage Trust, which doesn't make the national significance test that the National Heritage List does for the application of Commonwealth funding through the national list mechanism.  The Commonwealth for years has had grant schemes and programs for protection of historic heritage.  You don't have to be on the RNE even to have got some of those funds.  There is a case for providing programs to support places that are part of the national heritage fabric but not the list.  

DR LENNON:   Could I just add to that, Tony.  Tom's example of cemeteries, sawmill cottages, the tiny little cottages derelict, some gentrified beyond recognition, in the goldfields - there's that mix of built characteristics that give the landscape its very distinctive characteristics that we all celebrate, and yet for the national list we might only have the Mount Alexander diggings part on the list.  But if you drive from Castlemaine to Ballarat you're going through all these landscapes.  

MR HINTON:   We've done that, yes.  

DR LENNON:   Equally, say, if you look at rural properties where you might have had a property with 60 buildings and that property merges with another one in the outback, some shires - in the Shire of Hughenden in the last 10 years half the properties have merged, so there's a lot of abandonment:  significant buildings, good assets, but too far away.  Some might be picked up in a regional tourism grant and some adaptive reuse for tourism; a lot of them just become derelict and literally blow away in the drought storms.  So these problems have been identified, but we need some share funding response between the different levels of government.  

MR HINTON:   Thank you very much for that elaboration.  I found that very useful for what was behind your proposals in terms of significance and value of heritage, but I need to also take it that step further, which you then started to get onto, Jane.  That implies to me some sort of funding mechanism, whether it be a program at the Australian government level that then has criteria by which funds are allocated to project-specific cases.  Is that too rigid, is that too precise with what you had in mind, or should it be done through the state governments like general transfers?  

MR HARLEY:   I think that's a question we're asking you, because we're concerned over the years there's been a plethora of these things - the CHPP, Cultural Heritage ‑ ‑ ‑

DR LENNON:   Cultural Heritage Protection Program, Sharing Australian Stories, the RNE grants.  

MR HARLEY:   There have been seasonal givings by governments over the years.  A lot of that money, I daresay, has been less effectively spent than it might have.  That's probably the best way ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   Insufficient rigour, is that it?  

MR HARLEY:   Insufficient rigour ‑ ‑ ‑

DR LENNON:   Lack of continuity.  

MR HARLEY:   Lack of continuity, lack of science.  Simon Molesworth and I ruminated on this a year or so ago at Broken Hill:  in one of these programs a massive thing was built on the Line of Lode, a kind of museum, tourism centre and so on.  There's very little science that goes into the establishment of these things, and some of them - I don't want to be specific about Line of Lode - become real burdens, and within two or three years it seems that the tourism numbers or the throughput of people is insufficient to support the thing that's been built.  

MR HINTON:   Isn't there a risk here, Tom?  If the Australian government sets up a program with the characteristics you've described, doesn't that have the potential for a displacement effect as to what the state governments have or have not been doing or might be doing.  We were talking earlier that you were giving a lot of weight to the integrity of the overall system across different levels of government.  

MR HARLEY:   I think ideally it has to be shared, and that's why we're talking about a formula - that it isn't just the Commonwealth going off and saying, "We'll fix that," and the states and local government bowing out of it.  It has to be money that draws other money.  

MR HINTON:   Thank you.  

DR LENNON:   That's a leveraging of the three levels. 

MR HARLEY:   The need for cooperation in virtually every aspect of what we're talking about is paramount.  

DR BYRON:   I sort of categorised the content of your submission under I guess four general headings.  The first one, which I think you've argued very convincingly this morning and in writing, is about why and how heritage conservation is important, and I really don't have very much that I want to say about that at the moment.  But the second one that partly stems from that is about the role of government, given the importance of heritage conservation, and how and how often, in what ways, et cetera, governments become involved:  should they be catalytic and supplemental, or should they be far more active and hands-on in doing it or driving it?  

	The third set of issues is around the identification and the listing process, and the fourth is a group of issues relating to how to raise funds and how to disperse funds, and they sort of follow in a fairly logical sequence, I'd expect from you.  Not surprisingly, given that you are the Australian Heritage Council, you've concentrated on what governments can do, particularly what the Australian government should do, and we've talked about the articulation between what the Australian government does, what the state governments do, and local government.  How does that government apparatus relate with the non-government?  I guess my big question is whether you see government's role as being catalytic or intervening only in cases where markets clearly fail, or whether they're much more central in doing most of the hard work.  

MR HARLEY:   I think there's no black and white answer to that.  My first preference for it is to be catalytic, to lead by example by articulating what heritage values are, by articulating best practice and developing materials that inform people on best heritage practice.  The old Commission was very good at that, and its papers -  I don't know whether you're received any of these - dealing with indigenous heritage and migrant heritage are really significant in awakening knowledge of the value of heritage where a whole lot of people didn't know it was.  So that was catalytic, and I think that added a layer of value to various properties and places around the country.  

	If it is effective in being catalytic and there is general acceptance of preserving places through the legislative mechanisms of putting them on lists, which I think is always going to be essential, then it can be less hands-on, less reactive.  The earlier incarnation of heritage 30 years ago was stepping in front of the bulldozers.  If you've actually established the community acceptance and understanding of the value of heritage, that is less important.  That becomes less necessary because it's embedded in the community, but there will always be the need for that.  There will always be a threat of something falling down or of demolition where government will have a role.

	I think the more significant thing is when you come to the private sector versus the public sector.  If government is effective through its catalytic advocacy role in lifting the understanding of the value of heritage - I think the power of place material of English heritage is very articulate about this - then there's less need for government to intervene.  You've established a market value for heritage that gets put crudely into the value of the property, and the neighbourhood recognises that.  Local government in its own planning mechanisms recognises that and the values of the community.  

DR BYRON:   So the more that can be done through the shaping and moulding of public attitudes and therefore the market in a sense, the less that needs to be done by specific hands-on type of activity?  

MR HARLEY:   Correct.  That's my philosophical view and I think my observation.  It will not remove, though, the need for government to fund things, particularly the advocacy and the protection and having a process that acts as a deterrent for people who might want to circumvent that.  It also requires I think some leadership in terms of funding for grants to redevelop some places, to assist where there is market failure, but we'll get into that more when the work from Allens comes in.  But I think there are quite clearly cases where government intervention very specifically has added to the value of a place, which wasn't seen at the time the property was for sale or was under threat of demolition.  

DR LENNON:   I think that goes for all the tiers of government.  You can see state governments, where they've intervened in looking after their own properties which had been run down.  They've had a major restoration program say in Victoria of public buildings, and that's led to a lot of pride in place and then private investment in the street.  So there are those sorts of multipliers that happen.

DR BYRON:   There's a lot of signalling that goes on that inspires rather than necessarily pays for or demands through compulsive measures.  

DR LENNON:   Exactly.  It's reinforcing that historical character.  

DR BYRON:   Just on the listing process, you mentioned that 30 years ago success was stopping the bulldozers and that a lot of the list may have been through reaction to crisis.  Has there been up till now, or is there a need for, a much more systematic and rigorous ex ante survey, an inventory of what's out there, rather than waiting till something hits the front page and then, in a sudden reaction, it gets listed?  

MR HARLEY:   Absolutely.  That was one of one of my - going back to this Chairs and Officials meeting, I said, "How many properties do we think are under threat?"  There have been little surveys done - I think the National Trust has done some and State of the Environment tries to do some - but I believe that needs to be much more rigorous, hence our desire for an inquiry to actually get some rigour around what it is we're talking about.  

DR BYRON:   But presumably it costs to actually send out people with the expertise to do the nationwide survey or inventory that would be necessary for that sort of proactive planning.  That raises a question, I guess, in terms in allocation of funds.  If there was suddenly X million dollars more in the pot, how much more of that would be spent on the exploration and discovery and the documentation of new places that we haven't identified yet or that haven't been properly protected, as opposed to putting more resources into the better management and conservation of the ones that are already identified?  

MR HARLEY:   I'd like to do the survey first and then answer you.  I suspect that we'd put much more into the preservation than the exploration.  

DR BYRON:   The better management of what we've already identified?  

MR HARLEY:   Yes, but I'll bow to Jane, who's much more expert in this than I am. 

DR LENNON:   I think there's a real problem in that local government has not been adequately surveyed in many parts of Australia, and in some states local government control is voluntary, because they don't have an idea of that.  Again we come back to this formula for creating the national list and telling our national stories in cooperation with the three tiers of government.  A lot of those places are known, but the full extent of the stories aren't, so we need more research, which is what we've been talking about jointly there.  The survey of buildings is more, I suspect, for protection at the lower levels.  There's local government and local government-state interaction as well.  I mean, you will have realised this looking at the compilation of State of the Environment reports around Australia and the very inadequate coverage in some jurisdictions.  

DR BYRON:   But it seems to me the very difficult choice is:  we've got strong reasons to suspect that there are very significant places that haven't been documented at all; there are places which have some documentation, are on a list and have some statutory protection but in spite of that they may still be falling apart because there's a need for stonemasons, et cetera; and then there's another demand for better presentation to the public of the places that are already ‑ ‑ ‑

DR LENNON:   Yes.  

DR BYRON:   So I see lots of competing claims on any additional resources that become available.  

DR LENNON:   I think this is our shared formula, our need for a policy framework.  

MR HARLEY:   In a way you have it led by the participants.  First of all on the identification, that is a shared responsibility by all levels of government, but hopefully most of the places of national significance are relatively identifiable or self-identifiable.  The places under threat that are falling apart may have been identified, or their significance may not have been fully explored.  There needs to be funding that has a shared responsibility, I think, between local and state governments and the NGO community to do that.  Very little actually gets put into that.  There are heritage offices in many local governments, but a lot of them are an adjunct to the planning process rather than proactive.  

DR LENNON:   Identification and survey.  

MR HARLEY:   Can I just go to your fourth point, the raising and disbursement of funding.  That's the thing that troubles me the most.  I'm not expert enough to know whether granting tax deductions to encourage more private investment is the most efficient way of doing it, or providing grants or formulaic grants.  That's really where we need ‑ ‑ ‑

DR BYRON:   We have some practice in that.  

MR HARLEY:   Yes.  I have an initial view that it is a mixture of all of them.  I've been opposing the concept of tax deductibility because I think that's a formula to allow rich people to do up their houses at the taxpayers' expense.  However, I think where it's appropriately used you can actually have some leadership events where you end up, through doing that, funding a whole lot of expertise that gets re‑established or preserved - the stonemasons you mentioned.  I think that was English Heritage's experience, from some of the work ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   Tax deductibility can also cover another category, which is passing on to third parties for work more broadly, rather than the owner-occupier or owner of buildings.  

MR HARLEY:   Yes. 

DR BYRON:   With a view to the time and the number of other people that are coming today, I'm reluctantly going to have to draw this to a close, but there are a lot of other issues, I know, that both Tony and I would like to take up, so we may get back to you on some of the things that we haven't had an opportunity to raise this morning, if that's okay. 

MR HARLEY:   We look forward to it. 

DR BYRON:   But thank you very much for coming, and I'm sorry that we have to cut off the discussion.  

MR HARLEY:   Thank you very much indeed. 

DR LENNON:   Thank you.  

DR BYRON:   Moving straight on, we have the Australian Council of National Trusts.  Thank you very much for coming, and thank you very much for the quite substantial written submission.  If you'd like after introducing yourselves to take us through the main points, the highlights, of what's raised in here, we might discuss it. 
MR MOLESWORTH:   Thank you, Mr Chairman.  If I can introduce myself, my name is Simon Molesworth and I'm the chairman of the Australian Council of National Trusts, and appearing with me today is Marie Wood, who's the national conservation manager and the acting executive officer of the Australian Council.  We do welcome the opportunity to speak to our submission.  Obviously when we've put a submission of some 240 pages before you, I have no intention spending the rest of the day reading it to you, but what I do want to do is address some of the critical points, if I may, and in so doing I will focus on the Roman numeral pages that begin at (vii) through to (ix).  I think if I focus on those issues that are highlighted - in fact I'll start at (viii), the summary of the submission  It will do justice to the balance of the report.  There will be a couple of matters that I want to add, if I may, but as is the way of many a barrister I don't actually have a prepared address or speech, so I do apologise if it comes across in a somewhat ad lib fashion.

	Commissioners, the key starting point that we as the National Trust movement, if I can immodestly put it that way - because really the ACNT submission is on behalf of the eight National Trusts which is variously placed somewhere between 80 and 100 thousand members of the Australian community, depending whether one is talking to a politician today.  It's on the upper level but the reality of the paid‑up numbers it's probably about 80,000 people.  The key proposition that we want to put to you is that historic heritage conservation is a fundamentally important element of Australia's social capital, and to recognise that and to place it in the hierarchy of values within the Australian community is one of the key challenges of the National Trust over its 60 years.
		
	In its early days it was deemed to be an eccentric body concerned about things that were better removed from the streets and suburbs of our cities.  But as time passed it then became recognised as being the body that was essential to protecting those key parts of our Australian cultural heritage which in essence told the Australian story, which gave us our identity and told us where we came from.  This inquiry provides us with an opportunity to find a way of valuing that capital, that social capital, and identifying, amongst other propositions, government programs that could expand and certainly not erode that value.

	The aspect of supporting what we call our heritage social capital is one that emerges very much from this submission that we put before you.  You'll see in our second paragraph we say that:

The historic heritage market is characterised by significant externalities and the market is unable to operate at its economically efficient level without public funding to address areas of market failure, and to provide greater clarity to owners of historic heritage places about their rights and responsibilities -

and if I can just explain an aspect of that.  It could be fair to observe that in the course of the trust's involvement in heritage, there were times when there weren't the market failures to the extent that there are today.  There would be examples if we could look back into the trust's history to indicate that there were very profitable centres of heritage activity which were popular in the community, popular places to visit and were self-sustaining economic generators for those that were responsible for them.  I'll give you a couple of examples later.

	The reality is that times have changed and that if one analyses the activities of the National Trust being but one, but essentially a major player in the Australian community, there are clear evident indicators that without external funding and support the maintenance of the heritage that we the trust look after and other entities look after would not be able to be sustained.  To operate efficiently we require a nationally consistent heritage conservation regime that has transparent processes and procedures for identifying places of heritage value and clear definitions of threshold criteria.

	If I could explain that.  Part of the problem with heritage conservation are misconceptions, misunderstandings of the way the heritage policies and laws operate throughout this country.  Much of my own time as being a person for over a quarter of a century who has been involved at the coalface of heritage issues, has been basically explaining to people that their perception of what it is to conserve a heritage place and what their rights might be having conserved that place is quite wrong, and that in actual fact, apart from something to celebrate in saving their heritage place, in fact there are restraints to the perception that they hold.

	If we look at the next paragraph where we touch on the inclusion of a place on the heritage list being a declaration of public interest in a property, and that the degree of reduction in the private property rights are in proportion to the relative importance of the place to the community.  I want to explain that.  That sounds like a fairly negative comment.  Understanding what the impact of a heritage listing and an imposed heritage management regime is on an owner of a heritage place, calls one to really look into the nature of property law in Australia.  This is one of the greatest misconceptions in our legal system.  There is a belief on the part of the lay community that property is a bundle of rights which are fettered when government seeks to impose the laws which say, "Look, you may or may not deal with your property as you would wish."

	In reality, property has never been other than a bag of controls from which one has some entitlements to deal with property.  Let me explain.  Over the centuries, being cognisant of the rights of one's neighbours, being cognisant of the impacts of one's activities on a neighbouring property, has led to a succession of changes in the way by which we deal with property.  The first controls, one could look right back in the medieval days which were restraints in the way we use water, that we didn't pour sewage from the top layers of a building into the public street as passers went by.  That was a health safety issue.

	Subsequent to that we realised that if we just used our properties for the burning of rubbish in the backyard or for the disposal of our waste that then created pollution, so we then saw the introduction of pollution laws.  As time went by we then saw the introduction of controls on noise and then most latterly we've seen, through the planning process, introduction of controls which actually deals with the physical fabric of the properties we have.  That evolutionary process which we can trace back over centuries is nothing other than a recognition that when one actually holds property, one is doing it as part of a community and cognisant of the rights of others within that community.  The fact that one is putting a restraint - if that is indeed the consequence of a heritage listing - on ownership of property to protect the heritage values in it, ought not be seen as anything different than the evolutionary process of ensuring that we have clean air or we don't pollute the streets or cause an issue of health and safety.  Philosophically it is the same and is entirely consistent with the evolution of property laws over the centuries.

	If one supports the concept that in effect the conservation of heritage is the recognition that we all have a shared responsibility to take forward what we value today into the future, what we're really espousing and adopting is a principle, the inter‑generational equity.  One of the propositions that we wish to leave with you today is the concept that when one is focusing on the values or the disadvantages of a heritage regime being placed over the heritage that we have today, we are in a sense making a decision not just for our own generation but for future generations.  That is entirely consistent with the succession of international conventions which have been gradually appearing in the international arena since about 1982 in relation to the environment.

	If one just focuses on the primary inter‑generational equity principle that one finds in the natural environment conventions - and I'll quote from one:

The present generation should ensure that the health, diversity and productivity of the environment is maintained or enhanced for the benefit of future generations.

It is a valuable context within which to place a focus of your inquiry, that when one is focusing on the economic consequence of preservation today, the dividends might come not just for the present generation but for future generations.  That is a very important concept.  It's the spread of the benefit beyond just today that has to be taken into account as part of the equation.

	There is strong justification in fact to looking at the full set of sustainability principles which are now being adopted of great currency throughout the world with environmental legislation and to ask the question whether in fact those principles have equal application in heritage conservation, and it is our submission that in fact they do.  Consider, for instance, the principle of shared responsibility.  The protection of the environment is a responsibility shared by all levels of government, industry, business, communities and the people of - and the focus I'm looking at in one piece of legislation here is the people of Victoria.  But that can have equal application throughout the Australian community.  That brings me to the next paragraph where I say:

Governments as owners of many significant heritage places should commit for the provision of adequate funding to conserve and interpret those places for the community through their own management or by arrangement with other parties.  

	If I may just interpose a comment perhaps in answer to a question you put to Tom Harley, Commissioner Byron, about the role of government, is it catalytic, supplemental or involved, we would say it is all and it must be all.  I'll add another phrase which Marie Wood has suggested and that is capacity building.  Clearly government has a role - and it's an unquestioned role with the wider economic management of the Australian community - to perform a catalytic role, to stimulate the economy, to support a principle by adopting a process which encourages others to go about, in this instance, safeguarding heritage for future generations.

	Consider this as a somewhat unmeasured aspect of the economic ramifications of a catalytic approach to government involving itself in heritage conservation.  One of the ramifications of a proactive approach to heritage conservation in an economy like Australia is to stimulate a level of economic activity associated with, for instance, the restoration industry.  That is a totally unmeasured sector of our industry.  I happened last night just to focus on the Victorian Trust News and my Victorian colleagues didn't realise I had thrown it in the bag when I was reflecting on this particular point.  This Trust News, every issue, as with all the Trust News's around the country, is effectively funded by advertisements by the suppliers of services and materials in an industry associated with restoration.  If government was proactively pursuing a catalytic approach to support greater heritage conservation, one of the ramifications must necessarily be a stimulus to that sector of conservation economy in the building sector.

	If I may just simply hand this page across - and I'll leave this magazine with you.  You'll see I have opened up there a page about the Home Show.  In the early years of the Victorian Trust, the Home Show was a great success.  It then went through a period of wane and now it's come back with a real vengeance, independently organised outside the trust.  You'll see from the description there that there are some hundreds - I think about 240 exhibitors - that are participating in that particular show, and I ask this question:  is that not but one indicator that out there there is an economy, part of our economy, that can be stimulated by the conservation activity that we are encouraging today?  

	Going back to your question, Commissioner Byron, about government, the supplemental role of government, supplementing the functions of an organisation like the National Trust, we have pointed out the market failures.  We have pointed out that in the current climate it is necessary for organisations like the National Trust to be assisted, for their economic generation from their heritage places to be supplemented from external inputs, and external inputs from government is one source.  We also say, to use your word, Commissioner Byron, involve:  in the ideal world it would be superb if government could be an exemplary holder of heritage properties, and there have been examples around this country where in fact government has been an exemplary custodian of heritage properties.

	Let me give you one illustration of a role that government could play.  In Victoria there is a magnificent heritage property called Werribee Park.  About 15 years ago - it might be a bit more than that - when I was chairman of the trust in Victoria, the then government in Victoria offered the National Trust that property, and they offered it to us with a $1 million cheque to accompany it in return for us taking that property in perpetuity.  We did our analysis and we decided that in fact one would need in excess of 2 to 3 million dollars each year to get that property to a state where one could be proud that it would be an exemplar of a magnificent heritage property that the public could visit.  On my casting vote, my trust council rejected the offer, I have to say as an aside, too late for the government press release which had already gone out announcing that we were going to take it.

	Putting aside that somewhat of an embarrassment, for the government more than for us, what happened thereafter?  Government had to find an answer, so they found Parks Victoria.  They created Melbourne Parks and Waterways and then that converted into Parks Victoria.  Parks Victoria has been responsible for Werribee Park, and with very significant inputs of government funding Australia has one of the best heritage places which can be visited.  I don't know today what the visitation figures are, and let me say if we did analyse them, a very hard-nosed approach to economic analysis might say that it might not have justified on a pure economic return the investment that the government must have put in, which by now would probably be tens of millions.  But if one takes into account those other inherent values which one has tied up in a heritage place, one cannot deny that that government investment of being involved has now established, and left for future generations, an exemplary heritage property.

	Another example would be the Treasury Building at the top of Collins Street.  Again, that is an instance of a building which was almost given to the National Trust.  I was involved in many months of negotiations with government where government was keen for us to take it.  As it happened, we did not in the end, and government maintained the responsibility.  In fact, Mr Harley and I then joined the board, as independent members of a government board, to oversee that building's restoration and then its presentation to the public.  It has been a government project throughout, and it is now one of the jewels in the crown of this city, and if one were to analyse what the benefit, the dividend, to Melbourne would be, at the very least one would say it figures very largely in the promotion of the premier street of Melbourne, and in all those images as one comes through the airport and sees the photographs and Melbourne scenes, there you see the old treasury building.  

	My predecessor, Rodney Davidson, who was chairman of the trust, oversaw a heritage campaign which caused the reversal of a decision to demolish the old treasury building.  That building was to be demolished by an earlier Victorian government.  The trust saved it, subsequently it was open to the trust.  We said no; government should have a partnership role with the community and organisations like the trust and do its best to preserve heritage.  The dividend, we say, is one that will now be returned to Australians for generations to come, and I doubt if there's a person that can question the wisdom of that investment.  

	If I can return to the heritage conservation regime that we've touched on in the second-last paragraph on page (viii), it is essential that there be a coordinated planning and development process in this country which involves heritage conservation.  Our submission largely focuses on the pure heritage proposals and systems that one finds throughout the country, but it is an integrated system that we're addressing.  Where misapprehensions and concerns arise is when there is confusion, when there is a misunderstanding, when there is an exasperation of overlay upon an overlay of system.  With the new heritage regime which was introduced by the federal government in January 2004 there was an opportunity to achieve a coordinated approach across this nation, and we entirely support the propositions that were put by Mr Harley and Dr Lennon on behalf of the Australian Heritage Council, but it has fallen short of the original COAG vision.

	There is no doubt that if one goes to the intergovernmental agreement, which put down in writing what the concepts were which were to be taken forward into the reforms within the federal government, there was a partnership required with the state and territory governments to also take forward the reforms, and that has not happened.  None of the intergovernmental agreements or the direct memorandums of understanding which were supposed to have been put in place following the new federal legislation, the amendments to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, have been put in place, and as a consequence of that we have half the reforms that COAG envisaged.  

	There are ample numbers of examples whereby national cooperation across governments has achieved outstanding success.  A simple and early example was the national cooperation in companies law, the Corporations Law - a clear example of where all governments saw that it was absolutely essential.  But let's bring a focus to a closer area of environmental control.  COAG created the National Environment Protection Council, which is an instrument of all governments of Australia. It is administered by the National Environment Protection Corporation out of Adelaide, and it is charged with the responsibility of bringing into force national environment protection measures.  We have a whole series of NEPMs, as we call them, which have brought about excellent examples of national cooperation in essential areas of environmental management - the air policy NEPM, the transportation of dangerous goods NEPM, the contaminated lands.  These are all instances where the governments of Australia decided that these were fertile areas of cooperation, in fact essential areas of cooperation.  

	If COAG were serious when they entered into their intergovernmental agreement which brought about the federal reforms for the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, then they ought complete the job and so encourage the state governments to dovetail with those amendments and bring in a consistent system of heritage control and policy which all Australians can understand.  As long as we as an Australian community are confused and have misconceptions of what the heritage policies and laws are in this country, the longer the battles will continue as explaining what in fact is the benefit of heritage protection.  We touch in the last paragraph on (viii) that:

The historic heritage market has a number of unique aspects associated with its public good and intangible (cultural and intellectual) capital characteristics, and provides significant non-market community benefits.  

	It is essential, we say, that the values which are inherent in heritage are understood.  That sense of place, that sense of community, that sense of nationhood, that sense of knowing where we've come from and where we're going, that unity that comes from understanding those philosophical concepts, that sense of belonging, is an inherent part of heritage conservation.  They are values which one can't put a dollar figure to, but they are inherent in the reason why people choose to live in one suburb which appeals to them as distinct from another, or one city as distinct from another, or why people will come to these shores to visit the place, to understand what is the essence of our Australian heritage.  Those are inherent values, impossible to value in many respects, but nevertheless part of the all-important, critical equation.  

	The not-for-profit sector within the heritage field is an extraordinarily cost‑effective provider of services to the Australian community.  Much of the Australian Council of National Trusts' submission focuses on the history of the national trusts in this country and what those eight national trusts are doing by way of contributing in a positive way to the Australian community.  Over 60 years we have been at the vanguard of heritage conservation, and we remain the single largest provider of experiential opportunities for people to come and understand, appreciate and in fact cherish our heritage places, but we do it cost-effectively.  

	We may at times be on the breadline, and we may at times have had to reduce our staff, but the reality is if one looks at the analysis of the trust which you will see in this submission, there's great value for relatively little investment, and we say that because of that extraordinary value, that cost-effective aspect of the national trust's operations, there is a case that is made for us to have what you earlier referred to, Commissioner Byron, as the supplemental approach of government - to supplement the already existing activity of organisations such as the national trust and, as Marie Wood has indicated, right across the Australian community the building of capacity, the building of local communities to do their job better in preserving their heritage.  It can touch on the local historical society or the regional council - the magnificent example of the central goldfields councils in Victoria or a great city like Broken Hill that with a bit of investment, a bit of external impetus, the dividends are enormous.

	Funding provided to the not-for-profit sector is set out in the middle of (ix), and we suggest that it should be directed to education, advice and support for the community and historical property owners, conservation and interpretation of community-owned historical heritage places, ongoing management of collections and their interpretation to the community, heritage research and publication programs, identification of significant heritage places, and development of skills - professional, management and trades - to support the conservation of historic heritage places.  

	We need to be clever and we need to find a clever way to convey a heritage message to the community which is different to the way it used to be done in the past.  There is absolutely no doubt that our society has changed in the mode by which if fills its recreational time.  In the early days of the trust, the visiting of a trust property and throwing a rug on the lawns of, say, a great property like Ripponlea with a picnic with one's teenage children was the way it happened in the 60s and the 70s.  That has gone.  In fact I was actually reflecting on the fact that to compare one property in 1984 through to 1986, I was responsible for obtaining the planning permit for the heritage property Como in South Yarra and the city.  At the time that the submissions were put to our planning tribunal over those years - it extended over an unfortunately long time - the National Trust was receiving between 30 and 38 buses a day to Como which generated an annual visitation figure of between 130 and 140 thousand people a year.  In the intervening period since 84 to 86 to now 2005, the visitation figure - and Mr Hare and Ms Weidner will most probably correct me, but something in the order of 30 to 40 thousand is the figure.

	Why has it changed?  It's not for the want of effort, because Como would now be better presented with more interesting displays, more beautifully interpreted, more intelligently interpreted education programs than ever at any stage in the past.  In those years something in the order of 3 to 3 and a half million dollars have been invested in that property.  I was reflecting last night on what one of the differentials might be.  If you turn your mind back to 1984, I was one of the first people at the Victorian Bar to get my first PC computer in 1984.  There was no videos.  1985 was when I got my first video.  Nintendos and all the paraphernalia of youthful entertainment didn't exist and in fact messaging on a mobile, which seems to now occupy 50 per cent of those who might be sitting beside you on a train or on a tram, certainly didn't exist five years ago.

	So there has been enormous evolution of social entertainment or social ways which now the chances of getting a group of teenagers to accompany their parents to the Ripponlea lawns to have a picnic on a Sunday afternoon is pretty remote in these terms.  But the reality is that there are replacements.  There are new and more exciting ways to do it which accord with the modern way.  Trusts have to be clever to find the ways, and other custodians of heritage properties to find the ways, which will excite.  Theatre in the round is a new concept in many a place.  We didn't have live open-air theatre in the Botanical Gardens 10 years ago, but the last five years has been one of the absolute attractions of Melbourne in summer.  The trust adopted it.  We now have theatre in the round as we have for at least five years at Ripponlea and Como, and at the Ripponlea ones you are lucky to get a place on the lawn with a popular show because it can be booked out weeks and weeks ahead.  That is an example of people wanting to see heritage properties come alive and provide that essential experience which is part and parcel of the Australian way we are convinced is still there.

	Now, that brings us on to that recommendation which we have at the top of page (x).  This might be thought to be a risky exercise, to have carried out a survey; to carry out some way by which we can accumulate the data to prove what we are saying, because I think it's more than feelings in our bones.  We believe that it is part of the Australian way to be proud and to be interested in our heritage, in whatever way that heritage appeals to the individual.  It varies from person to person in enormous ways.  But unless we get that data on the books it will be difficult to convince many in the Australian community and many governments that the inherent values are cherished by very significant numbers of the Australian community.

	I would add, if I may, that touching on the economic flow-on of heritage activities such as demonstrative of that Home Show, but more to the point all those ads that appear in magazines like that and many other magazines on the news stands, would be a very interesting test as well.  Has anyone asked the building and restoration industry what percentage of their activity is associated with the restoration of housing in our urban centres throughout this country which is tied to a belief, a cherishing of the heritage values of our older housing?  That would be a very worthwhile survey as well.  As we say at the top, we need to establish the community's preparedness to fund conservation.  We will not deny that fashion has changed and that survey may reflect a change in fashion, but the inherent values will be there, and if one stands back and accepts that one is asking for that survey in the context of an inter-generational responsibility, then it may well be that the old traditional values of the National Trust experience may return; it may not, but whatever will be in the future with respect to heritage places is an essential part of the Australian way.  As we say in our recommendations on this page:

Governments should commit to completing the National Heritage framework, as was foreshadowed in the COAG agreement.  There should be seamless protection of heritage places nationwide.  The Environment Protection and Heritage Council should implement the agreed integrated National Heritage policy incorporating best practice.

	Our paper, if I may just interpose at this stage, focuses on many of the models around the country.  The interface with planning is absolutely critical.  The example of the Victorian heritage overlay which is in every planning scheme providing a base level of protection for heritage is a model that ought be adopted, in my opinion and in the opinion of the majority in the trust, worldwide.  Have an interface with planning that is seamless with an overlay which is the catch-all - because you will find that you will not have the resources in Dimboola or Sale or Corryong as you might in the city of Melbourne or city of Sydney.  

Funding must be provided to address those areas of market failure and in particular for education, conservation, research and professional development.  Governments should acknowledge that the not-for-profit sector is an effective and an efficient group for delivering heritage conservation services to the community and in future could be used more by government to provide services to the community and owners of historic heritage places.  Funding support should particularly be directed towards the not‑for‑profit sector and private owners of heritage places where the market failure can most be observed.  The allocation of funds should be on a basis of which activities can offer the greatest returns in terms of key criteria established as part of the overall historic heritage policy framework.

	Can I hasten to add when we say "offer the greatest returns", we are not focusing purely on monetary returns, we are focusing on the whole collection of values that ought be recognised and seen as dividends that flow from the investment in this sector.  There should be a variety of approaches to funding heritage conservation activities, including tax, rate rebates, grants, market options and revolving funds.

	Can I say in respect to that short list, there should be a bag of tools and that bag of tools should have many tools in it because as time passes there will be some approaches that will be appropriate today, and other approaches that will not.  It is essential that we never stop looking for the best means by which the objectives which are set out in this paper are sought to be achieved.  I'd like to close these opening comments by reading the National Cultural Heritage Forum's vision.  You will see in the last 20 or so pages of this submission we have set out the National Cultural Heritage Forum Vision for Australia's Cultural Heritage; that vision, the Australian Council of National Trust was a very proactive partner in achieving.  All that one finds in that vision statement we endorse.  But the words that I would like to finish in this opening are these which you will see at the bottom of page (ix):

Australia's heritage, shaped by nature and history, is an inheritance passed from one generation to the next.  It is a living record of places, objects, events, associations and memories which define and sustain our natural and cultural history.  It is for us, the present generation, to nourish and nurture this inheritance for future generations.

Commissioners, those are our opening words.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much for that.  It's a little difficult to know where to begin but I'll start with, I guess, a conceptual model of how the system sort of works at the moment.  If I could get your reaction to this one:  there are a great number of very interesting, important, old, sometimes historic, sometimes beautiful buildings and other places which are in private ownership and their owners are looking after them and using them on a daily basis because they think that that's a useful, worthwhile thing to do and they enjoy it, and it just goes on irrespective of the existence of government - people who are just looking after their home or their business or workplace or whatever - and then, as a sort of a thought experiment, for some reason they find that either the benefits of continuing to retain this place start to decline - it no longer meets OH and S requirements or the technology has moved on or the market has changed.  

MR MOLESWORTH:   They've aged and the children have moved out.  

DR BYRON:   Yes, or the costs of maintaining this place start to rise - the difficulty of getting tradesmen and the right materials and all the rest of it.  So there comes a point where the private owner of this private place decides that it's no longer worthwhile for them, from a strictly private point of view, to continue to maintain it.  So what are their options:  to demolish it and use the land for something else, to just say, "I'm not going to pour any money into this," and let it gradually degrade and deteriorate, or they can offer to sell it to someone who would either demolish it or retain it, continue to use it?   I suspect decisions like that are happening all around us most days of the week ‑ ‑ ‑

MR MOLESWORTH:   They are.

DR BYRON:   - - - and we don't normally notice, except you get a special case now and again where we, the broader community, say, "Hang on, we don't want that place demolished, or we don't want to allow it to just fall apart because the individual owner thinks it's not worth keeping."  So the community, the public at large and governments on their behalf might step in to do something, either through legislation or through changing that financial equation, which makes it worthwhile for the owner to keep doing it.  Some of the places that we've come across are where there might be only a small number, 100 or 200 individuals, who feel passionately that a certain place shouldn't be demolished, but in some cases they've formed a club or a society or even a company and said, "Okay, we'll put our money where our heart is and we will acquire that property and look after it."  

MR MOLESWORTH:   Yes.  

DR BYRON:   Somebody suggested to me that the National Trust may have started off as such a society of people who felt passionately and put their money where their heart was.  Another possibility is that that group of concerned citizens would persuade the government to buy it or to give the money to a not-for-profit.  So there's a whole number of options that arise in those cases where the broader public feel that the private decision of the individual owner is not in the public interest, and that's the rationale for governments to become involved.  But that suggests - and it's coming back to my comment earlier, "Is the role of government catalytic?" - should the government be involved in decisions that every owner of property makes on a daily basis, or only when it becomes clear that the owner is going to do something that is vastly out of step with the public interest?  I'm trying to set up a sort of an abstract conceptual model of what triggers governments to become involved in what otherwise is just normal everyday life?  

MR MOLESWORTH:   Yes, I understand.  I think necessarily government can only become involved when there is a trigger, and that will be when there is to be an action which is contrary to the public interest.  More often than not, the vast majority of people out there in the community will be accepting, either indirectly or directly in their mind, the custodian responsibility, and those people ought be allowed to go their way, because their custodianship of their property is consistent with the public interest.

	It's where the conflict arises on change and necessarily you need a process that catches that change - and it might be a proposal to demolish a building which the rest of the community loved on the street corner because they walked past it every day to get to the train and they would miss it when it was not there.  Necessarily that involves government, be it at a local or higher level, involving itself.  Philosophically that level of government involvement is no different from those other examples I gave before, where, for instance, when I grew up everyone used to on Saturday afternoons rake their leaves together on their front lawn and light a little bonfire.  All our childhoods have those sorts of memories, yet we decided as a community that government ought to say, "No, that's enough.  The asthmatic next door doesn't want to cough the rest of his life.  He wants clean air."  That intervention by government is an intervention in property rights.

	The question is:  what does government do to make it easier?  There are different approaches.  It was pretty simple with the banning of incinerators.  We all now have wheelie bins with green lids on where we can put our green vegetative material and the council takes it away.  With heritage there's an equivalent, and that is for government to look at a bag of assisting tools.  In America there are taxation benefits available for those who want to spend money on restoration.  Here we adopted that for a little while.  It failed as a program for various reasons.  It was administratively complex and not promoted, but it was seen as inequitable because it was a benefit to those who wanted a tax deduction or who could obtain a tax deduction.  

	But the answer, when it was abolished, from the trust was, "We've thrown out a tool that is useful in some circumstances, not equitable in all circumstances.  Therefore one needs to supplement it with another tool, and that might be of some sort of assistance."  But we're not dealing with the whole suburb.  We're dealing with those gems in a community of buildings which ought be protected.  It might be, as we have in the majority of Australian jurisdictions, a rebate on land tax or a lower rating system where the valuation takes into account the heritage overlay, or it might be the giving of a grant of money.  I chaired for 15 years a body here in Melbourne called the Melbourne Heritage Restoration Fund.  We administered about $5 million which was for the private sector.  That some of money was a rotating fund, and during those years that I chaired it I saw hundreds of private properties benefit the public facade aspect - not the back lane, not the back garden, not the new family room at the back of the house, but the balcony that projected into the public domain, the street, or the roof that could be seen from the local park.  Those were the aspects it benefited.

	There are lots of programs, the leading paint program in Broken Hill, for instance, where every citizen in that town that has a building of a certain age, which is basically 99 per cent of the town, can get a $500 gift to buy paint in a selected colour scheme or an additional $500 loan at, I think it was, zero per cent or 1 per cent if they wanted to do more.  That was then extended to a balconies program, where all the commercial properties in town were assisted to the level of $10,000 if they reinstated their heritage balconies.  Those are clever examples of what can be done.  The list is not a short list, and if one looks around the world one can see that there are many, many examples of assisting.  

DR BYRON:   I guess what I was thinking of is that we've been told by many people as we've gone around that one of the best ways of insuring that an historical building is well maintained is to have it continued in use. 

MR MOLESWORTH:   Correct.  

DR BYRON:   So it seems to me that offering relatively small amounts to change that equation of private benefits and costs so that it's worthwhile for someone to stay there and keep using it might actually be much more cost effective than trying to use taxpayers' money to maintain an empty building if the first owner moves out.  

MR MOLESWORTH:   Clearly if the outcome is an empty building, then that's the least desirable.  I suppose the marketplace does have an act in play here, and that is that, despite what one does sometimes see - in fact, all too regularly one sees - people saying, "I have to sell this house.  I'm going to abandon this house because of the restraints upon me."  The actual analysis isn't that, and the reality is that there is a niche market which buys these places, and buys these places at a premium.  Now, it might be sad if an occupant, an owner, has lived there for the better part of their life and they've now reached the closing years and they would like to stay on but they can't, for whatever reason, but if they move on, I don't think the market shows that those places will necessarily depend on government support, because there is enough interest in the heritage sector, among the buildings in that sector, for them to be picked up and bought, and bought at premium. 

DR BYRON:   Would you agree that there's a significant difference between say Melbourne, where there are people who are interested in acquiring and maintaining a heritage property, and many rural areas, where there are now assets which, if you like, are surplus to requirements?  I think Tom or Jane was talking about when properties have amalgamated you don't need three woolsheds, and so two of them just slowly deteriorate.  The even more concerning case, I guess, is where somebody has an old and important structure on a rural property and out of misgivings about what might happen if it was identified by government, they'd then go and bulldoze it or burnt it before anybody finds out it's there.  

MR MOLESWORTH:   Yes.  

DR BYRON:   That sort of thing, where heritage is not lost through neglect but ‑ ‑ ‑

MR MOLESWORTH:   But deliberate action. 

DR BYRON:   Deliberate action - I think is even more to be concerned about.  

MR MOLESWORTH:   There will not be an answer to all those cases, but there is an answer to those in the community that have a misconception of what the draconian hand, the dead hand, of the government might be.  There is evidence in what I might call the anti-heritage campaigning literature across this country a building up of a belief on the part of many property owners that they will be dealt with in a draconian way if they retain a heritage property and don't look after it as they feel able.  There are countless examples of that.  In fact, I front in the front row here as observers two representatives of a group in the suburb of Brighton.  Mr and Mrs Sheppard lead a community group in that area, and the literature that they have received as the owners of one of Brighton's wonderful properties they have shown me, and I have been appalled at the blatant lies that have sought to terrify the Sheppards of the word.  In fact, that's perhaps how they became as active as they have - because they were angered by the lies that were put about.  

	But it is sad.  The example you've given is one that's right with me at this very moment.  One of our friends up in the western division of New South Wales only a fortnight ago told me that he had just demolished the original homestead and woolshed on one of the four adjoining stations that he now owns.  I had looked at the homestead.  It was a wonderful old wooden homestead of the turn of the 19th century.  It was in a state of great disrepair.  The reason he removed it was that his insurer had advised him that he had an occupational health and safety issue and, despite the fact that the driveway to his homestead was all of 15 kilometres long, the insurance company said, "Someone is going to get hurt and you will be sued for millions."  What did this, as he thought, hapless grazier do for fear of being sued, because people were coming in to get firewood every now and again?  He demolished it.  I said, "Why in hell didn't you talk to me first?" 

	The sad thing is that that story highlights one of the problems within the management of our heritage in this country.  It is the misconceptions of the insurance industry, and that is a very big topic that I hope will be focused on at times in your Commission.  

DR BYRON:   We've received a number of submissions dealing with the insurance premium issue.  Tony, you wanted to follow up.  

MR HINTON:   I did have a follow-up question, but before I raise it I want to record our appreciation for the ACNT's umbrella, very weighty written submission and your participation today.  I know that you've devoted significant resources to it, but I also know that the different state national trust entities will also be appearing.  But I wanted to record our appreciation for the sort of umbrella approach that the ACNT has done.  Thank you.  

MR MOLESWORTH:   I am very proud to have seen a team effort compile that, but the principal authors were Lou Owen and Marie Wood, and all the trusts contributed to it, but we are very proud of that submission.  So thank you.  

MR HINTON:   My follow-up question was sort of pursuing Neil's theme.  My attention was drawn, when you made those responses, to recommendation 5.  Among other things, its basic point is that the owners identified as having heritage significant properties have a duty of care.  While I understand and fully appreciate the points you're making about the very bad examples, or very good examples of very bad behaviour, that you have alluded to, a general responsibility of duty of care for owners of property seems to be a very broad-brush policy instrument in this area in terms of circumstances where it might not be matched with a delivery of a recommendation that says there should be more funding, for example.  I therefore became a little uncomfortable to read your recommendation 5 as what I saw as a very powerful, broad-brush policy instrument for a general duty of care.  That is a strong recommendation.  

MR MOLESWORTH:   It is, but can I place it in context.  Oddly enough, recently I, for an entirely different purpose, had to produce a paper for somewhere else.  It was called Property Law Within the Context of Emerging Environmental Philosophy, and I focused on that precise issue by reference to the emerged concepts of trespass, negligence and nuisance.  If one focuses on those concepts of tortious law, as it is, in relation to property, one can go back to in fact the Middle Ages, where some poor soul trespassed onto the domain of the owner of a greater state and fell down the pit that was created to catch the next stag that ran across the field - bad luck.  He was spiked and killed, but the owner was dealing with his land as he saw fit.  The law evolved, and it evolved with interesting cases such as the juniper hedge - deadly poisonous - where a horse rode by and ate the juniper hedge, which poisoned the horse, and the horse was killed.  That sped up the process of how one manages land, so juniper hedges became banned on the boundaries of properties.

If one looks at the process, I ask this conceptual question:  today we have a state whereby the law says that, if a burglar breaks into your property and you accost that burglar in your living room and trip him up and he falls over and hits his head on a chair, he will sue you quite legitimately for the damage that you have caused to him as the trespassing burglar.  The law says he has rights.  

MR HINTON:   Reasonable response, is that ‑ ‑ ‑

MR MOLESWORTH:   There are lots of reasonable responses.  But I give that extreme of the Middle Ages where he falls into the stag's pit and get killed on a spike and the owner is exonerated, and the burglar now.  We're still dealing with property law.  

MR HINTON:   Simon, I hasten to add I'm not questioning tort law here.  What I'm really doing is saying there are these sets of behavioural characteristics of the operation of law in our society and community, but this particular recommendation seems to be adding another dimension for those properties that have been designated and identified as of heritage significance.  That is the distinction I'm trying to draw, and in those circumstances you seem to be implying another level of requirement on the owner of the property.  That seems to be a very big step relative to that which already exists, of the kind you're talking about.  

MR MOLESWORTH:   Let me interpret the duty of care.  I think as it appears in this submission, it's a duty of care in a philosophical sense, the inter-generational equity:  we are all but custodians of property today for future generations.  It's only in the instance of the most important heritage properties, where they go on to, for instance, in Victoria the Victorian Heritage Register, if your property is harmed by neglect, if you are at the upper echelons of listing - in other words, the actual listing of the property designates certain aspects of a building to be the critical elements that led to its being registered - and you then deliberately allow it to decline, that is a statutory breach of a duty of care which is actionable.  There has been an instance of a case of a Geelong in relation to that.  But that is at the extreme end of the perspective.  

MR HINTON:   And deliberate as opposed to benign neglect.  

MR MOLESWORTH:   Yes, that is right, but what that says, that we have a duty of care ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   Is it an aspirational obligation on the owner or is it more than that?  It is whether or not there is another legal requirement that is beyond that which currently applies within our community.  That's why I'm exploring recommendation 5.  

MR MOLESWORTH:   If I were to look into my crystal ball, I would say that we are part of an evolution of environmental law philosophy that one can actually see moving through internationally.  Look at the Rio Declaration, for instance.  One can actually look at those sustainable development principles, which were there in very broad and general form, and then look at the next extrapolation of that as the international convention has developed, and then into domestic laws and how they are now interpreted, and you can think, for instance, of the Commission's recent inquiry into the clearance of vegetation.  I don't know if you saw last year's amendments to the Western Lands Act in New South Wales.  The inter‑generational equity principles of sustainable development have now been inserted into the objects clause of that legislation.  

	I highlight that because what we are seeing is a progressive evolution of legislative principle.  So where today we say that we all have a duty of care, we do philosophically all have that duty of care and it picks up nothing other than the high‑sounding statements which have emerged from international conventions, and in five years' time or 10 years' time we might see it in a different form.  

MR HINTON:   Thank you for that elaboration.  I've got a consequential.  To the extent that that is perceived as an obligation that's beyond that which might generally apply, does that not run the risk of having a perverse effect such that the owners of these properties would be concerned about that perceived obligation and therefore would work very hard against being identified as having heritage significance?  Would that not be in fact contrary to your basic objective concerning the heritage objective - a perverse effect of this particular statement?  

MR MOLESWORTH:   Yes, and I will be perfectly frank and say that that is one of the ramifications.  It is all about the next paragraph, how one educates and proactively goes about explaining the misconceptions.  If that duty of care today is a draconian control - the reason I say it's with us today is another conversation I had at a meeting of the Pastoralists Association of Western Darling.  I went to their annual meeting three weeks ago, and at lunch was the whole cluster of graziers, representing about 15 properties.  What they were saying to a newcomer in their midst was, "Whatever you do, if you happen to find an Aboriginal relic, bury it and don't tell anyone."   I reflected on that as I came away from the meeting - that in effect what was happening was a terror on the part of those pastoralists to have their property identified as of significance as far as Aboriginal heritage is concerned.  

	I think that's an instance of what can go wrong.  Again I reflected on the misconception when the pastoralist that was loudest about this said, "You'll never be able to use your land again.  You won't be able to graze."  He said that to the newcomer in the group, and I thought to myself, "What a misinterpretation, in fact a blatant misinterpretation, of what the statute books do not say."  

	So, yes, there is that danger.  I do agree there is that danger, but at the same time, if we are going to start talking broadly about an inter-generational duty of care, we have an equal opportunity which is shared with government to be involved and to  build the capacity of the community to better understand, build the capacity in the National Trust to better educate, and the Heritage Council and the like.  For instance, I see with regret a great reduction in the publication program of bodies such as the federal government agencies.  Now, they have produced superb works.  One of the ones that we cite is the Successful Tourism and Heritage Places.  It's one of our references.  One can just go through them.  

	If Australian ICOMOS didn't produce Illustrated Burra Charter, the understanding of what the Burra Charter is about, with effectively a layperson's approach - the method of conveying the message is so important, and if anyone is talking about controls and restraints and changes of laws and policies without also looking at the way we convey the message and find the best way, none of this happens without government support.  None of it can happen unless there is a particular grant or subsidy or program that supports it.  When I was a heritage commissioner we were producing many publications a year.  I don't know how many are produced now, but my library shelf is not filling up as quickly.  

DR BYRON:   Just one more consequential on that.  Is there a reciprocity in exchange for this duty of care obligation on owners of heritage-listed buildings that society as a whole or governments in particular should not make it overly burdensome for owners of heritage properties?  I'm thinking in particular of some local governments that, for example, waive development application fees for listed properties as a quid pro quo:  "We have put your property on a local environment plan heritage list.  We realise this imposes some burdens but, apart from some rate relief and so on, we're going to do what we can to make this least burdensome on you as possible."  

MR MOLESWORTH:   Yes, absolutely, and it is one of the critical tools.  An immediate example which one finds in at least three, or some, of the planning jurisdictions around this country is that the normal prohibitions or restraints by reason of zoning are lifted with respect to heritage properties.  So whereas a restaurant might not be possible on a heritage property in a particular zone, because it's a heritage property they lift that restriction and you can have your restaurant, to make it easier.  The application of fees:  as a perfect example again I can cite the City of Bayside.  The City of Bayside accepted to adopt heritage controls with respect to trees, tree preservation controls, and they listed significant trees in their scheme.  But foolishly, they retained a process, a money generation process, where anyone applying to have their tree modified - and that might be lopping for safety or whatever - would have to pay a significant fee.  I happen to own a large garden with a large number of trees in that municipality.  I've now paid a fee nine times in the last three years, and I think that's really quite farcical, especially as I was the one that led for the control to be brought in.  

	The reality is that the public relations side of that control has been undermined by the council being blinkered in its understanding.  If you're going to ask someone to do something proactive for the sake of us all, you don't also lumber them with an extra $100 fee every few months.  

DR BYRON:   You should make it easy for them to comply.  

MR MOLESWORTH:   Exactly. 

DR BYRON:   One last question that I have is that you've made the point that the Victorian government, for example, has sunk millions of dollars into Werribee and the old Treasury Building and so on.  The question that I probably would have also asked the AHC is the question of how much resources to put into the icons as opposed to the grass roots, if I can put it that simply.  As a not very good example, the Australian Cricket Board has to decide how much to put into an elite team as to how much to support mass participation of the under-nines, and the netball people are the same.  Do you want millions of people out there on Saturday morning at a grass roots level or do you put your resources into just 10 who play in test matches?  You said nobody would challenge the question of the resources that went into Werribee.  I guess I am doing that, and saying that if there's $10 million a year for the state government to spend on heritage in Victoria, how do we know that putting it into Werribee or the old Treasury building is going to give us a better heritage bang for the buck than spending that $10 million across lots of rural areas or throughout municipalities in Melbourne more broadly?

MR MOLESWORTH:   I think it's a very good question.  What it does is it highlights the necessity not to have a single top-down approach of a state registry.  But you do need to have very proactive interaction at the local government level.  My perfect example is Broken Hill.  If every citizen gets the $500 to repaint their town in heritage colours and lift the whole corpus of the heritage buildings of that city, everyone benefits.  There will always be icons and they should be exemplary projects because they should be the inspirational projects.  But there is no doubt that any process that is restricted to just the icons will fail because it will not capture the allies that you need across the whole community.  

	The reality is we're talking about the community being inspired to have a sense of ownership with their heritage.  The wider you can spread it, the better it is.  But that duty that we say rests on government shoulders - government at every level - will always be that in each municipality there will be an iconic project, but in each municipality there will also be the need for a program that filters down and gives a sense of pride and community and a sense of place to the ordinary citizen.

DR BYRON:   So it's not an either/or, it's a question of getting the balance.

MR MOLESWORTH:   It cannot be an either/or, and if it's an either/or it will fail.

DR BYRON:   Okay.  Tony.

MR HINTON:   I had several more questions that I don't think I've got the luxury to ask so I'll choose one.

DR BYRON:   No, you don't.

MR HINTON:   Presiding Commissioner, will you give me one question?

DR BYRON:   Just one.

MR HINTON:   I think in your introductory remarks, Simon, you referred to the progress falling short in delivering this sort of integrated national heritage policy, that is previous commitments by governments have fallen short in terms of actual delivery.  This is probably too hard a question to answer in the time available, but if the process of inter-government cooperation and coordination has failed in the past, what should we do differently this time around to try and ensure we can deliver progress that doesn't fall short?  Got some bright ideas? 

MR MOLESWORTH:   I suppose at the end of the day I'd probably almost say that there is a marketing aspect that the trust has and that is to basically say at the end of the day it's in the interests of governments - state government and local government - to be part of that partnership because there are proven dividends that will flow to a community that is responsible across the board.  I have to say I did witness the response.  When the COAG agreement was signed I happened to be on a state government committee in this state that oversaw the then amendments to the heritage legislation.  I brought to that committee this report - and the then minister was present who was quite a character - and I said, "This is the federal government proposal with respect to the amendments to the federal legislation and this has got great opportunity for the state in working in partnership.  This is my opinion of what can be made of this offering."

	Halfway through he stopped me and he leant across the table and he said, "Simon, as long as that back pocket is bulging with a fat wallet from the federal minister, I'll listen, but if it's thin he's not getting through the door."  Now, that was a pretty colourful and characteristic response, and you'll probably get that response around the country from other governments off and on, depending.  But what I would suggest that indicates is that there was a lack of a shared vision.  As long as it looks as though one is imposing a message and imposing a reform, it will fail.  It's unfortunate, when I actually looked at the - I have a photocopy of the inter‑governmental agreement because it was actually published with the signatures of all the premiers that signed it that led to these heritage reforms.  I looked at everyone who had signed.  

	I think there was only one premier that signed that original agreement.  They have all moved on.  So there's probably a change of heart in some areas, but you just have to sell the message.  I'm not quite sure if it would be of interest.  It's not part of the formal submission, but my paper on Property Law Evolution, if that would be ‑ ‑ ‑

DR BYRON:   Certainly of interest.  We are going to have to move on.  Did either of you want to make some concluding remarks? 

MS WOOD:   Actually, I would just add to what Simon has just said and make a suggestion to Tony that the new national heritage system is strongly community based.  There are strong community mechanisms encouraging people to nominate and for people to vet and assess what's happening in that system.  But there aren't mechanisms yet in my view to really fully explain that system, as Simon says, to have people share the vision of it, to have people understand it.  There's no developed education program at community or schools level.  My understanding is the minister for environment and heritage is about to issue a major national environment education statement.  Certainly the latest drafts I'm aware of don't showcase the national heritage system.  So there's real gaps there.  

I would think governments of all levels working with communities at all levels could really make something work and that really would be exciting.  That was the promise of the national heritage system as the amendments were passing through the parliament.  I think listening to Tom and Jane this morning was really exciting because you could see they are clear about that.  So we all need to be clear about it.

MR HINTON:   Thanks, Marie.

DR BYRON:   I'll just come back on that.  One of the things that struck me as we travelled around talking to people in this inquiry is the extraordinary amount of very detailed knowledge in the hands of citizens, people out there who either through family connections or interest or whatever, basically know a great deal.  I think it was in the Adelaide hearings, people were pointing out that in many of the citations on the register of the National Estate, there are blanks, no details recorded.  Yet there were people in that room who, given the opportunity, could have filled in a lot of those blanks.  Getting that documentation is likely to be very, very expensive if it all has to be done by salaried professionals.  But if there are people out there, subject to quality controls - if there was a mechanism to tap into that body of enthusiasm and expertise - and I guess the trust exists because of that - then it may not be such a huge task if we allow people who want to participate, to participate more fully than they can at the moment.  I guess I'm just reinforcing your comment about the community as an asset.

MS WOOD:   I fully endorse that.  I just draw one example which is the National Estate Grants Program which finished I think about eight years ago, was a mechanism for encouraging research and documentation about the National Estate.  There is no equivalent now.  There is no equivalent at all, and we're all suffering because of it.  All those people who have that information are struggling to put it somewhere.

DR BYRON:   I'm afraid we are going to have to move on but we will be continuing the dialogue in the future.  Thank you very much for coming today.

MS WOOD:   Thank you.

MR MOLESWORTH:   Thank you very much for hearing us.  We will have a five‑minute break.

____________________

DR BYRON:   Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, if we can continue with National Trust of Australia, Victoria.  Thank you very much for coming, thank you for the written submission.  

MS WEIDNER:   Thank you very much.  My name is Dianne Weidner and I am the chair of the National Trust in Victoria.  Our chief role is to endorse the ACNT submission and in so doing provide some highlights and substantive issues which are pertinent to the National Trust of Victoria.  I'm not going to try and be as eloquent as my national chair.  I will present a brief history and statistics of the membership of the National Trust in Victoria.  The CEO of the National Trust, Stephen Hare, will focus on how the Victorian trust is providing the bridge between government and community and harnessing community energy to achieve sustainable social outcomes.  Our conservation manager, Jim Gard'ner, will present the Victorian trust's perspective on some of the key recommendations of the national submission; as well, he will present two case studies which provide some statistics on the value adding ability of the National Trust honorary expert committees and the use of volunteers in its work.  I think it will follow on very nicely from the previous presentation.

	The National Trust in Victoria was formed in 1956 so we're celebrating 50 years next year.  It was set up by a group of people within the community, indeed Robin Boyd - a popular writer and one of Victoria's most noted architects - did much to pave the way for the National Trust in Victoria.  In 1952, the publication of his Australia's Home informed a wide audience of the existence and significance of Australian architecture.  Australia's Home was a major stimulus to research in architectural history, at the University of Melbourne, particularly, and for all people concerned in heritage matters.

	But it was in 1955 that the first meeting took place between a group of prominent citizens, including Darryl and Joan Lindsay, Robin Boyd, Stuart Calder, John Turner, professor of botany at the University of Melbourne, and Kenneth Myer, chairman of what was then the Town and Country Planning Association of Victoria.  Robin Boyd wrote at the time:

The idea was to channel into useful directions the wealth of aimless public goodwill towards our historic relics which is stirred up every time an old house is demolished or a century old garden is bulldozed or a public beauty spot is subdivided for private villas.

So you can see that the early days of the National Trust in Victoria was substantially community activism, and whilst there are different ways and mechanisms which we use today that was very strongly to the fore in those days and it would be fair to say that the enactment of 1974 legislation in Victoria which was the first in this country was in no small measure due to the efforts of those early members of the National Trust.

	The trust at the moment has a membership of 13,000 which translates to about 30,000 members.  Our supporter base is very much broader as is evidenced when we hold open days at properties which bring in a wide variety of people and a large number of young people these days.  Our actual support is probably - well, it is considerably more than that, although we don't actually have a value for that.  We manage 40 properties in the state of Victoria, we own 32 and sit as a committee of management for eight, and 25 are open to the public on a regular basis.  We have the equivalent of 66 full‑time staff, as well we have substantial collections, including paintings, furniture, a cast iron collection and a substantial and highly valuable costume collection.

	If I could just mention our funding which I know is something which is of interest to the Commission.  Most of the National Trust Victoria funding does come from membership, some comes from bequest, and we receive some small government grants, a federal grant of approximately 66,000, and 233,000 from the state government.  However, we do of course receive considerable in kind and some financial funding from corporations.  We also do receive money from property visitations, although as has already been mentioned most of those properties only allow themselves - well, they don't even really fund their own restoration programs.  I'd like to stop there and let Stephen talk about the bridge between the community and government.

MR HARE:   Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today.  I'll quickly go over some of the comments in the summary submission.  To try and avoid repetition I'll elaborate along the way.  I've actually got five points:  one is that the Managing Our Heritage document that was prepared - well, it was about four years ago now but it was published in 2003.  It was a response to calls from the trust about its funding.  What it actually found or determined from that review - it was done in consultation with the Heritage Council, National Trust, Parks Victoria and others - that there's a poor understanding of what our heritage stocks were which was leading into a deterioration of our heritage stocks.

	There were poor management systems in place and they tended to be personal, not systematic.  So as a consequence, things such as volunteers and succession planning and volunteer systems were non-existent.  The assignment of responsibilities for public heritage places was not done well.  There was poor integration, both government to government, government and community.  There was, in the same area, resources and incentives were poorly integrated.  There was a distinct lack of cooperation so that skills were not keeping pace.  For instance, more recently when I had to recruit a new conservation manager for the National Trust I did have to go overseas.

	The UNESCO conference also we're supporting the concept of which is probably one of our biggest challenges in the trust, some of the statements that are made in there.  The UNESCO conference in 2003 - linking universal and local value, managing a sustainable future for world heritage sites - indicated that an intrinsic relationship exists between people and place, culture and nature.  So it's not just about place, it's about the people, the local community and that heritage places must evolve, they can't just be frozen in time.  I think that is to the core of one of the questions that you asked earlier.

	Not so long ago when I was at the home of one of our women's committees and I was in one of the heritage places in South Melbourne, she said to me, "Well, it's not really kosher to change the bathroom," because she was looking at what had been done in this property on the outside, and I said, "No, it's entirely appropriate to change bathrooms and change kitchens and make the place usable for a current generation," so they do have to evolve.  So there's a perception even amongst our members that these issues are present in the way that we operate today.  So there's a big need for education and changing that perception.

	Thirdly, as I mentioned already, the trust was going through some problems in around about 2000 which led to the Managing Our Heritage project.  Had we not had $3 and a half million of Centenary of Federation funding, had we not had the ability to call on a foundation to help us with one of our properties and had we not engaged in some judicious sales of properties to actually re-energise the trust, the trust financing would have been in a very sorry state.  It actually had to occur.  It was a reflection of the need to actually make choices about what properties were important in keeping in a public institution such as the trust to actually tell the story.  That's the nature of what we're doing now, is that we are linking our program to what the community sees as valuable.  We're linking the program to actually broaden beyond just simply our properties, so we're now linking with other heritage properties to help support a wider base.

	The final point is that the nature of what we do, we cannot provide with our present level of funding for all heritage properties that are important.  The significance of some properties requires - or places requires - that they actually be retained and kept in their original condition.  But the nature of those properties, they can't be commercialised, their usage does not lend itself to other things, with a consequence there is a need for either a body or a body of funding to support those properties that fall into a safety net, if you like.  So the points that I'm making is that the trust, if it's to be actually more effective it does need that sort of support, or alternatively there needs to be another body set up, a la the English heritage on an Australian scale.

	So in terms of what the trust is doing, we manage something in the order of $100 million worth of properties.  We run those properties on the basis of something in the order of $5 and a half million of operating income each year, but we fall short - unless we actually go to other means, either government or philanthropy - to support the restoration and maintenance of those properties.  That's where most of our work is now focused is on supporting that restoration and the maintenance of those properties.  As part of that process we are now putting learning as a key part of everything we do.  Some examples of those might include, for instance - Simon mentioned - the sustainable garden or Ripponlea.  We've now put in place a sustainable garden linking with water providers to make sure that there is a learning opportunity out of that property.  Every one of our properties has a learning opportunity attached to it, so it fills a much broader need than simply what the inherent or original qualities of that property may have been.  I think on that note I might pass it across to Jim Gard'ner, our conservation manager.

MR GARDNER:   Again, thank you for the opportunity.  Before I look at the two case studies we've presented to the Commission, I'd like to draw out some of the National Trust of Australia Victoria's own perspectives on the main points of the ACNT submission.  This will include one or two areas where the Victorian trust's view may diverge slightly from those of the state and territory trusts.  I'd like to start by commending the creation of the new national heritage regime because that relates very closely to the way the trust in Victoria attempts to consider heritage values in an integrated holistic way by looking at natural cultural and indigenous heritage as part of a larger overall spectrum.

	We also strongly support the Heritage Council of Victoria's Victorian Heritage Strategy 2005-2010 which signals the need to integrate historic heritage conservation within state government's sustainability and planning strategy and to increase community engagement and participation in the management of historic heritage places.  The National Trust is a key body to allow that community engagement and participation to take place.

	We also draw the Commission's attention to the draft document Victoria's Heritage 2010 that discusses the economic, social and environmental benefits derived from historic heritage conservation in Victoria, and I'm sure that's been drawn to your attention by Heritage Council and others.

	The trust in Victoria believes that the conservation of historical heritage places is not only a desirable outcome for the community but is essential for the development of shared values within society and to enhance social cohesion.  Heritage places have been shown in numerous studies around the world to contribute to economic regeneration, tourism, educational opportunities and environmentally sustainable outcomes.  The trust in Victoria, like the ACNT, contends that there are evident market failures in the provision of historical heritage conservation through, amongst other things, significant externalities creating a divergence between private costs and public benefit accrued through heritage conservation, and barriers and impediments that arise from imperfect information and cultural and behavioural prejudices regarding their conservation.  I know that Simon Molesworth has drawn out some of those issues, and I'll touch on a couple of examples from my experience.

	We also assert that there is a twofold role for government at Commonwealth, state and local level:  firstly, the identification, assessment, designation and protection of historic heritage places and, secondly, the provision of an adequately funded incentive program, and that can be this very broad tool kit that Simon was talking about, which may include grant and low interest loan provisions, tax based incentives and, importantly, the provision of advice, guidance and other subsidised services to owners and managers of historic heritage places.  The Australian Heritage Commission's idea to explore collaborative funding programs I think has great merit, and the trust in Victoria would endorse Tom Harley's suggestion in this area.  

	One thing that the trust in Victoria does operate which sets it apart from some of the other trusts is a hierarchical assessment methodology; that is, we classify historic heritage places depending on their level of significance based on thorough comparative analysis.  Although not all state and territory trusts operate in this way, we endorse the use of a hierarchical designation regime on the basis that it enables statutory controls to be better matched to appropriate historic heritage conservation outcomes.  This methodology can also better inform the appropriate allocation of scarce resources.  We also believe that a system like that can better match regulatory controls to an appropriate level of incentive.

	One of the areas in which we have identified significant barriers to achieving economically, socially and environmentally desirable outcomes is through existing cultural attitudes, for instance - and the ACNT have already drawn this issue out - the lack of understanding of the Crown's right to impose restrictions on property use, and not just for public health and safety but for amenity and heritage issues as well.  But, importantly, the persistent myth of the adverse impact of heritage listing is still prevalent within society.  This on a macro scale has effectively been discredited by recent studies by Heritage Victoria and Macquarie University which have been drawn to the Commission's attention.  

	Another area which I know the Commission is aware of is the plethora of poorly integrated and inconsistent heritage lists and regimes has a very adverse effect on people's understanding and ability to make sound decisions on historic heritage matters.  The myths of impact of that heritage lists is also important.  A recent example we came across in Wellington Shire is that the local press in the local community - and the local newspaper is a very powerful voice, very powerful body - were publishing a lot of misinformation, not deliberately but because they'd been fed very poor information by advocates who were campaigning against having heritage studies and heritage overlays put in place.  We put a lot of work in trying to turn that around and I think we had some success.  Now many of those councillors who were once voting against putting money into a heritage study are actually competing with each other to see whose ward can get the money for the heritage study.  So a lot of that misinformation - if you put the right out there, attitudes will change.  

	Another issue which I know Simon Molesworth has already touched on but which requires addressing at state and local government level is the interface between heritage legislation and planning provisions.  Conflicts often exist between different development, sustainability and heritage agendas.  While the trust recognises that heritage considerations must be balanced against other land use issues, there is an evident lack of integration between heritage and other development matters.  In Victoria that has been especially prevalent throughout the implementation of the government's Melbourne 2030 strategy.  These issues might well also be resolved through the local government planning and heritage groups of COAG as well as at state and territory planning levels.

	We also contend that the mixed quality of decision-making on Australian heritage conservation contributes to inherent behavioural and cultural barriers within the community.  Improved and consistent decision-making, such as a transparent designation process, will improve decision-making abilities of the individuals and organisations who manage historic heritage places.  Simon again mentioned the reduction in publishing which has been evident in recent years from the Australian Heritage Commission and others.  It's that publishing of guidance, things like the Illustrated Burra Charter, that are necessary to ensure that there is consistency not just in the public's understanding of what is heritage but in the way that the regulations are interpreted and implemented.

	Mechanisms such as user-friendly guidance and training to address skill shortages amongst heritage and planning professions are a way of dealing with these failings.  Research, where it can be effectively disseminated to a target audience, can also do much to dispel the myths and prejudices and build capacity within communities.  

	My final point before I go on to the case studies is that we in the procurement of works to our own properties and in recruitment of staff, as Stephen has noted, have noted that there is a great difficulty in assessing necessary professional and trade services, and that adversely affects individuals' ability to economically and appropriately maintain their historic heritage places.  I personally believe that this situation can be seen as making the ownership of such places an onerous duty, and to address this we contend that consideration should be given to encouraging the training and traditional craft skills and the development of appropriate technical knowledge and heritage practitioners advising owners and managers of historic places.  I think these are borne out by issues we've heard earlier, such as on insurance on the inability to get appropriate and timely advice and inconsistent implementation of heritage regimes.  

	If I may, the two case studies I'd like to draw to your attention aim to illustrate how the National Trust can leverage out both cash and in kind assistance and can effectively procure heritage services on behalf of the community and government.  The first one looks at our expert committee system.  The National Trust in Victoria has made use of volunteer expert committees to aid in the assessment and management of heritage places since its inception in 1956.  These groups of experienced and knowledgeable professionals contribute to the trust's work through the preparation and reviewing of classification reports advising on responses to planning applications and reviewing external appeal requests.  These committees contribute significant knowledge and experience to the work of the trust and can considerably strengthen its status as a reasoned and credible voice.  

	We presently have 10 committees which cover the entire raft of work that the trust undertakes in the area of historic heritage but also natural and other cultural heritage, and in the second case study I'll look at some of the work of the specific project subcommittees that have been established to look at the matter, and typological studies into bridges in Victoria.  

	In order to assess the value that the committees add to the work of the National Trust, we asked members of each of those committees to identify how much time they estimated they contributed to the work of their committee through meeting preparation, research, report writing and other activities in the last 12 months.  This contribution ranged from as little as 40 hours for our collections committee to over 500 hours of pro bono expert advice for buildings.  We valued this time at $60 an hour.  This is based on the minimum cost for the trust to obtain expert research or review of that research in a specialist field.  Through this assessment we've identified that the trust obtains, through the use of volunteer expert committees, approximately $170,000 per annum in pro bono support, which equates to nearly 3000 hours.  

	As well as supporting the classification process of the trust, this work directly contributes to the development of statutory lists at Commonwealth, state and local levels.  Historic heritage places classified by the trust are then nominated to the appropriate level of government, depending on their level of significance, and much of the research and comparative analysis has already been undertaken by the trust and its pro bono expert costs at no cost to the regulatory body.  The trust's role in identifying and researching historic heritage places has, we believe, been greatly enhanced by the pro bono expert advice.  The coordination and resourcing of these committees by the trust leverages out much valuable research and understanding of historic heritage, which is of significant social value to the government sector and to the wider community.  

	The second case study I'd like to draw upon looks both at the National Estate Grants Program, which Marie Wood has just spoken about, but in particular the National Trust timber bridges study, which was seed funded by that program.  It's fair to say that the Australian government's National Estate Grant Program has been responsible or seed funding some valuable heritage initiatives, not only for the original municipal heritage studies but also for conservation works to many significant places and also, very importantly, funding for research and typographical or thematic studies.  There's actually very little money now available for this kind of research.  Through the National Trust of Victoria this grant scheme has allowed the trust to undertake thematic heritage studies on Victoria's cemeteries, historic gardens, engineering workshops, butter factories, inter-war housing and timber bridges.  The case study I'm going to explain now seeks to illustrate how the trust can effectively procure such studies and is able to leverage out significant monetary and in-kind support from the public and private sectors.  

	The National Trust made application to the Australian Heritage Commission for funding in March 1992.  A small proportion of the funding requested, some $35,000, was received over two consecutive financial years.  The study continued with assistance from funds received from other sources, including VicRoads.  The study generated widespread interest among the general public and professionals alike and demand for a  book on the subject, and the committee has continued to work on the publication and dissemination of the research gathered through this study.  

	The successful outcomes of the timber bridges study have led directly to two further major National Trust-led studies of bridges in Victoria - the metal bridges study, which is nearing completion, and the concrete bridges study, which has just commenced.  VicRoads initiated both these studies in order to assist its planning and in particular to avoid unforseen delays and other expenses in capital works projects due to late stage identification of historic heritage places.  In other words, they have identified that it is cost-effective for them to fund a study such as a bridges study to identify up-front historic heritage issues rather than embark on expense capital works projects which may be delayed due to fines.  

	Heritage Victoria has also made modest contributions to these studies, reflecting that they are a very cost-effective means of assessing places for the Victorian Heritage Register.  The budget for each of these projects was $95,000, 80,000 being supplied by VicRoads and 15,000 by Heritage Victoria.  A large amount of staff resources were allocated by the trust to these projects as part of its own mission to educate the community and raise awareness and understanding of the value of cultural and natural heritage places.  A significant amount of pro bono expertise was also contributed through the steering committees, volunteer researchers, administrative support, database development and the preparation of a monograph on the subject.

	The 7500 hours of pro bono assistance identified in this case study we believe are quite conservative estimates.  The apply to this project only and do not include the significant number of hours of work generated as a consequence of the project, most notably through the trust's ongoing involvement in conservation issues, on particular bridges, identified in the study.  I'd just like to briefly summarise some of the outcomes before I talk about the economic impact of the study.  The positive outcomes from the study have been wide-ranging and include increased public awareness of the value of these important industrial artefacts and community engagement with their local heritage places.

	Specific benefits accrued include for the first time a state-wide history and survey of Victoria's timber bridges and the identification of the most important and representative examples.  88 bridges from this study were identified at a state level of significance and now fill a major gap which previously existed in the state's heritage register.  Statutory protection through the local planning scheme through the heritage overlays has also been provided for many hundreds more bridges.  Many of these bridges continue to be subject to further studies, conservation management plans such as have just been commissioned on Hanamunji and Murrundil timber bridges in Gippsland.  These have led to repair works on specific bridges as well.

	Raising the awareness of timber bridges in the professional community and the general public occurred through the production of many papers and reports on the subject.  There's also been the development of a database of over 2000 bridges.  Its success has seen it greatly expand over recent years to include data on masonry, metal and soon concrete bridges.  It is used actively by VicRoads in their decision‑making processes and is recognised by Heritage Victoria and municipal heritage advisers as the key reference document for historic bridges in Victoria.  The study has also led to the production of a manuscript and collection of publishable quality contemporary and historical photographs on Victoria's timber bridges.

	But in conclusion, the timber bridges study through initial seed funding by the Australian government to the National Estates Grant Program has resulted in the completion of a major state-wide study and to an important but previously neglected part of Australia's historic heritage.  It has resulted in many of the bridges identified now enjoying statutory protection and it's resulted into further research and improved management regimes for individual bridges.  The dissemination of the study has raised public awareness through conference papers, academic publications and numerous media articles.  It has facilitated the production of a monograph on the subject and it has generated an appreciation of a type of historic heritage place that was previously unrepresented on all registers and whose value is now widely accepted in the community.

	The study has also made possible the recognition by VicRoads and the local municipalities of the economic value of thematic heritage studies of assets in advance of capital works projects to roads and other important infrastructure.  The value placed on the timber bridges study by the Victorian government, as well as the trust's ability to procure and manage it in a cost-effective manner is evidenced by the commissioning of the metal and concrete bridges studies by VicRoads and Heritage Victoria.  I think the key points to take from this case study are:  from the original $35,000 grant from the Australian government for the study it has so far leveraged out approximately the same amount in cash grants from the state government for the timber bridges study; over six times that amount in cash grants from the state government sources for all three bridges' studies, that is timber, metal and concrete; over three times that original $35,000 amount in paid staff time by the National Trust on the original timber bridges study and associated work, and that equates to a contribution from the trust of in excess of $130,000; over four times the original value in volunteer time and pro bono expertise.  As I say, that is an excess of 3000 hours of work or $146,000 of value for the timber bridges study alone.  That work continues with the metal bridges and concrete bridges studies.

	Overall, these three studies once completed could be considered to have leveraged out additional cash and in kind contributions of in excess of 10 times the original National Estates Grants Program funding.  I acknowledge this is only one case study but the amounts leveraged out compare very well with those identified in English Heritage's document, the Heritage Dividends which reviewed English Heritage's own grant scheme outcomes.  So I think that shows very much how both the National Trust is able to procure efficiently and effectively and that Commonwealth grants can leverage out significant in kind and cash support.  Thank you.

MR HARE:   If I could just take one more moment.  You asked a question earlier on about how we actually get the community on board to align themselves with some of these things that we're talking about.  Those two studies that are outlined there were quite deliberately framed around things that are not often thought about in relation to the National Trust and certainly not part of the broader submission because it's generally focused on properties.  There's a microcosm of the sort of things the trust is doing at the moment.  Within the next month or two we expect to, for instance, sign an MOU with Tourism Victoria, sign a partnership agreement with Mornington Peninsula Shire and link the process of heritage tourism in a tangible way right through the Mornington Peninsula Shire.  This is more of a top-down type approach to the way we get benefit out of heritage.

	As part of that strategic partnership with Mornington Peninsula Shire, we expect that what we'll be able to do is instead of being reactive in the context of how - certain heritage determinations or ending up in VCAT, what we end up is a positive way of creating the environment for better heritage conservation, or heritage sensitive development.  So I think there's two ways to look at this.  It's not only bottom‑up, it aligns with Simon's comment about a kit of tools.  It's important to think that there are many ways which an organisation that bridges that gap can actually pull this together.  I think we're in that situation if we work constructively, so that's a comment.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much.  I guess starting from your remarks, Dianne and Stephen, the submission has pointed out to me very clearly the range of different sort of activities.  Just going through the first page there, you "conspire and communicate with the public".  You're a volunteer research service classifying thousands of places.  You acquired properties, so you're a property owner and manager.  You're an operator of house museums.  You're a contractor to present eight public buildings - government-owned buildings - to the public.  So there's a whole range of different activities identifying recognition and then the restoration maintenance and then the presentation and communication, the outreach, the learning and education and so on.  But times have changed a great deal since the trust was formed.  At the beginning there was no Heritage Victoria or Victorian Heritage Council.

MS WEIDNER:   No legislation at all.

DR BYRON:   Yes.  No statutory protection.  There was no statutory list.  So I guess the first thing I'd like you to explain is how the role and functions of National Trust Victoria have redefined themselves as the other sort of government apparatus has come through and taken over some of those functions that the trust initiated and how you see that evolution going in the future.  I think you were implying the emphasis might be more on the extension, the communication, telling the stories to the public rather than being a property owner.

MR HARE:   Okay.  There's no two ways about it, the role of the trust has evolved and quite considerably over the last few years.  At its formation the trust was, what I call, a strident advocate because there wasn't any legislation, there was no protection.  But as protection has become developed, now what we're doing is saying, "Well, let's accept that that is the way that we should protect heritage properties.  That's the process we should support.  So instead of challenging it, let's see if we can get behind it and lift it," which is thus the reason why we're so heavily mentioned in the current heritage strategy.  That's the background of what the trust is doing.

	The nature of the conservation role that we have in the trust now no longer is out there fighting battles, it's working with the community and working with government to support heritage-sensitive development because we know that development is what we have to live with now.  So we've moved on a long way from that perspective.  What we recognise though - and that's why I alluded to the comments from the UNESCO study - is that the challenge with identified places now is, how do we best manage them?  The traditional uses of those properties is certainly the best way to manage them if we can actually see that occur.  But there are also properties that have a much more meaningful value to the community.  We don't have them all in the trust portfolio.  Some in the trust portfolio don't belong.  Our objective therefore is to link those properties, not only inside the portfolio but also to link them with properties outside the portfolio to tell a story about how Victoria and how Australia was developed.  It's that opportunity that we're actually pushing down the path at the moment, is to link those properties.

	It does another thing too.  The nature of the support that property owners have who might only have one heritage property and it may well be in the situation where it's either hungry or starving for funds, the trust can actually support those properties, so we're coming in with expertise that we've developed over a long period of time.  What we had to do to deal with that is we actually had to go and recruit people with those higher order skills.  That was our first challenge, to get the right people into the organisation so that we could do that support.  So, yes, we have evolved, we are looking for a new role, or developing the role that we see for the trust and developing particularly a vision for a Victoria that really is proud of the stories it has got to tell, and we can actually use our properties as living heritage experiences and use others that want to link into that process to make that a cohesive opportunity.

MR HINTON:   Thanks, Neill.  I had a follow-up question that in fact links your comments here today with the comments earlier today by Australian Council of National Trust.  There may be an example of - which I think one of you alluded to - perhaps inconsistencies or different nuances, so let me try it anyway.  It's to do with the sort of interface between planning and heritage objectives.  On the one hand we had the Australian Council of National Trust putting forward the view that Victoria sets an example of that interface between planning and heritage that is so good that it should be adopted "worldwide".  I subsequently heard this morning from one of you - and I think it was Jim - who suggested that that interface between heritage and planning fell well short of best practice, and that's an understatement, and in fact there were significant deficiencies that needed to be redressed.  Can you enlighten me here?

MR GARDNER:   Yes, certainly.  I was in no way meaning to undermine the position of the ACNT.

MR HINTON:   You have.

MR GARDNER:   But I realise I have.  The thing is, this was something which came out very strongly at the meetings we had in Canberra of the ACNT that Victoria has one of the strongest pieces of heritage legislation in the country.  It has one of the clearest and easiest to use planning provisions with relatively consistent application of a heritage overlay system.  Now, when you're sitting in Victoria it's much easier to see the faults than it is to see it in the wider context of the Australian situation.  So that's just to qualify my comment.  

	There are often inconsistencies between development, sustainability and heritage agendas.  As I say, Melbourne 2030 is a case in point.  It has to balance a huge range of heritage agendas.  It has to allow for increased population while still protecting Melbourne's important hinterlands, such as the Yarra Valley, but it also has to protect the historic inner and middle suburbs, which have become so desirable.  Those are inherently at conflict with each other, allowing increased population while protecting heritage and putting an urban growth boundary in place.  It's all about protecting amenity and quality of life and it's a balancing act, and sometimes we in the trust feel that the balance is pushed too far towards either sustainability issues, with our not recognising the sustainability benefits of historic heritage through things embodying energy and other benefits, and also through the need to respond to development pressure.  So it's about balance.  

MR HARE:   As I look down at the MCG, the analogy might best be that, whilst we have rules that govern our football match, it doesn't stop 100,000 people yelling "Ball" everybody somebody grabs hold of another player.  The rules are there; the rules are pretty clear.  It's the interpretation of those rules that is at issue here, and how that's actually put in place.  

MR GARDNER:   Yes, and I think it's the inconsistency, and I think that's something which has been drawn out in conversations you've had throughout the country, by my understanding.  It's where you need training, guidance and capacity building to address.  

MR HINTON:   I had one other question, which is to do with skill shortages, that I wanted to explore with you.  A number have talked about skill shortages, but I noticed this morning that the Council of National Trusts talked about the role here for NFPs, not-for-profit organisations, and I'm a bit puzzled.  Perhaps I don't fully understand this, but what role do you see for the National Trust of Victoria in pursuing skill enhancement in this area with regard to the heritage objective?  

MR HARE:   I might start, if you don't mind.  It's interesting because you probably realise that Jim leaves us this week to go and join Heritage Victoria.  So he is now ‑ ‑ ‑ 

MR HINTON:   After last set of comments.  

MR GARDNER:   Sorry, that was a flippancy.  

MR HARE:   Jim is actually, as you'll hear in his voice, a New Zealander, and much of his latter experience with heritage came out of English heritage.  He joins another assistant director at Heritage Victoria who also comes out of the British system.  When we were recruiting in this marketplace we quite deliberately recruited into Britain and New Zealand, and the number of Australians who actually have applied for this position  are very limited in number.  That's a typical example of what is out there in the marketplace at the moment.  In other words, here we are trying to change the perception that exists across the state about what is, what is not, heritage, how we should work with what we've got or vice versa.  It's a limitation immediately.  In terms of capacity building more broadly, Jim, you might want to comment on that.  

MR GARDNER:   Yes.  Certainly I think both for enabling there to be consistency and decision-making there needs to be increased capacity building and upskilling of professionals.  Often you talk to local councils.  They have great difficulty in recruiting heritage advisers, and it's often architects or other professionals who just have an interest in the area.  They have no real qualifications or experience in it.  There are also issues such as traditional trade skills.  You just have to look at the work the Institute of Specialised Skills does throughout the country in bringing out skilled professionals from abroad, whether it be on dry stone walling or stonemasonry, the conservation of historic war paintings.  There are a whole raft of things they have to look abroad for.  Just to sort of qualify what Stephen said, for the recruitment within the trust every effort was made to look for Australian applicants, but often the people are just not available.  It's a very small industry, and there aren't the spare people sitting round waiting for jobs, unfortunately.  

MR HINTON:   Thanks very much. 

DR BYRON:   Again, this could probably go on all day, but in fairness to those coming next I'm going to have to draw it to a close, I'm afraid.  But we will keep in touch, and I do thank you all very much for the very valuable contributions both today and in the written document.  

MS WEIDNER:   Thank you very much for allowing us to present it. 

DR BYRON:   Thanks for all the trouble you've gone to.  

DR BYRON:   Next we have Associate Prof Renate Howe.  Thank you very much for coming today.  If you'd like to just take a seat anywhere and, when you're comfortable, if you could just introduce yourself for the transcript.  We have your notes.  Thank you very much for that.  

PROF HOWE:   I am Associate Prof Renate Howe, and I'm a member of the Heritage Council of Victoria, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal planning and environment division as a sessional member, Planning Panels Victoria as a sessional member, and a board member of the Centre for Cultural Heritage for Asia and the Pacific at Deakin University.  I'm here to talk on heritage and planning in Victoria.  It's just a brief submission, but it is trying to pull together my experience on the three probably main planning bodies in Victoria.  I think through an accident, I'm on three of them, and I think I have some overall views that might be interesting because of that.

	So the submission is related to heritage regulation, especially the roles and responsibilities of each level of government.  This has been identified as an important issue for investigation by the Productivity Commission in its issues paper, and I note was a matter for discussion with the National Trust.  This submission is focused on the need for integration of heritage in planning between state and local government in Victoria and the Heritage Council and, as I outlined, my expertise in the membership of these bodies, all of which at the state level are responsible for the administration of built environment heritage and my membership, as I've noted, has given me an opportunity to observe the need to improve coordination in heritage decision-making.  

	The main points that I want to make are the recognition of the importance of local government in heritage planning, especially the provision of adequate resources for the documentation and protection of local heritage; improved coordination between, at the state level, the heritage councils and other state planning bodies involved in heritage decision-making; and, thirdly, the importance of the development of appropriate criteria for local as compared with state and national heritage significance.  While this submission is particularly related to Victoria, I think it probably has significance at the national level for policy-making and, of course, in other states.  

	If I could begin by looking at local government especially, the issues paper notes that, although local government covers the largest number of heritage places in Australia, it is not well integrated into national and state heritage planning.  Increasingly in Victoria heritage issues have been integrated into state and local planning systems, so Simon's comment that it might be of world significance could be noted.  However, I think this does present some challenges to the Heritage Council of Victoria.  Particularly the introduction of heritage overlays into local planning schemes has meant a large expansion in the number and range of places which now have heritage protection, generating a large demand for heritage expertise at the local level.  

	In response to these demands Heritage Victoria has in recent years provided some support to local councils in the preparation of heritage studies as a basis for the preparation of heritage overlays and has supported the importance of part-time heritage advisers to local councils.  Recently a local government working group, in late 2003, was established by the Heritage Council in response to the need for liaison with local government.  There was nowhere really for the Heritage Council to self‑consciously make that liaison before that point.  It was initially envisaged as a temporary committee.  It now seems that the working group has filled a gap in the council structure and will remain in place for the foreseeable future.  It has somehow transformed itself into a standing committee of the Heritage Council.  

	One of the main tasks of the working group has been to respond to the recommendations coming from Planning Panels Victoria by heritage amendment reports.  Especially important has been the Ballarat planning scheme amendment C58, written in January 2004 by then head of Planning Panels, Helen Gibson, which self-consciously set out to have an overall look at the Planning Panels' experience of heritage amendments to various local schemes.  It pulled together a number of other Planning Panel Victoria reports which have recommended improvements in identification of heritage places, improvements in assessment, documentation standards, rigour and preparation of statements of significance.  I think there's been a number of Planning Panel reports, which as I say that Ballarat report tried to bring together.  

	Numerous VCAT decisions have also addressed the uneven quality of heritage criteria and assessments in local schemes and the difficulties for planning decision‑making.  VCAT tribunals have regularly found themselves having to untangle the distinction between neighbourhood character, emphasised in Melbourne 2030, and heritage protection.  Many VCAT tribunals have been critical of the criteria used in heritage assessment by local government and have raised issues of rigour and significance.  I haven't attempted to document those here, but there are many, many VCAT decisions in this area.

	If heritage overlays, then, are to be effective in the planning system, there clearly needs to be a review of procedures.  To this end the Heritage Council of Victoria local government working group has been reviewing the local government heritage guidelines, which were first produced in 1991 but have been updated in draft form over the years, in order to provide greater guidance to local government and the public in relation to the preparation and purpose of heritage overlays.  It is in the interests of the Heritage Council for there to be better procedures and coverage at local government level.  This would allow the Heritage Council to review the places on its register and to focus more on places of state heritage significance.  Because of inadequate heritage protection at the local level in the past, some places - I might even say perhaps many places - of only marginal state significance have been placed on the register to protect them.  At the moment the HCV is addressing a gap in the system, where nominations to the register which are refused by the HCV on the basis that they are of local rather than state significance are insured of heritage protection at the local government level.  That doesn't happen at the moment and is an obvious gap in the system.  So if the Heritage Council refuses something but says, "This is of local significance," there's no certainty, if that place especially is not in the heritage overlay, that it will be protected at the local level.

	Planning Panels Victoria is soon to begin hearings for a review of planning and heritage issues in Victoria.  The draft terms of reference for this heritage panel will include issues of heritage criteria, especially the suitability of adjusting national heritage criteria to identify places of local heritage significance, which was especially criticised in the Ballarat amendment C58 report, that it was very difficult to apply a national criteria to a local level.  Now, there's a difference of opinion on that amongst heritage experts and that's a matter that the planning panel has specifically been asked to addressed, its heritage overview.

	If I could move on now to just briefly having a look at metropolitan planning, particularly Melbourne 2030.  Many were disappointed that Melbourne 2030 did not have a substantial focus in its own right on heritage.  However, the strategic directions recommended by the policy in relation to neighbourhood character and activity centres have had considerable heritage implications in the planning system.  In response to concern at applications for more intense development around activity centres, recent nominations for the heritage register - and this is an example - have included the National Trust nominating inner suburban streets in Melbourne, such as Smith Street, Chapel Street and Brunswick Street which of course poses very great difficulties for the Heritage Council that has been a reaction by both local government and the National Trust to the impact, particularly in inner city areas of Melbourne 2030.

	As well as a concern to protect neighbourhood character as more dense development is encouraged by Melbourne 2030, there has also been the nomination of subdivisions and precincts and they too challenge the Heritage Council's registration system which under the act is based on basically the nomination of individual places.  Clearly there is a need for greater coordination between the various planning authorities in Victoria to improve heritage administration in the implementation at state level.  This has been recognised by the Victorian government in recommending that the Heritage Council's draft Heritage Strategy 2005-2010 be considered in a whole of government context.  This was mentioned by the National Trust's submission and is regarded by the Heritage Council as a very important development that heritage is no longer sidelined but seen to be much more central to government decision‑making.

	Finally, looking at these three bodies - the Heritage Council, VCAT and planning panels - this has also had implications for the Heritage Council that so many matters are now being dealt with in relation to heritage in the two other bodies.  The registration hearings are currently being looked at in the planning of protocols committee of Heritage Victoria.  It's recognised that the greater integration of heritage into the planning system has implications for the current conduct of registration and permit hearings and decision‑making.

	The committee is presently considering recommendations as to how the Heritage Council can adapt better procedures to be in line with planning panels and VCAT for the conduct of its hearings to ensure that Heritage Council decision‑making is well respected and integrated into other related parts of the planning system.  In conclusion, my identification of issues for consideration by the Productivity Commission has been set out at the beginning of this situation.  Clearly heritage is more integrated into planning for the built environment here in Victoria and I would imagine increasingly so in other states as well.  Because of this, the issues of coordination will need to be - and should be, I think - addressed by your report.  The increase in heritage documentation at the local level I think is especially significant and has considerable implications for the Productivity Commission investigation.  Thank you.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much.  I think the immediate answer is, yes, it is.  It's an issue that has come up just about everywhere we've been.  It occurred to me while you were speaking that there may be a reconciliation between the two apparently conflicting comments that the Victorian system may well be the best in Australia but may still have opportunity to further improve.

PROF HOWE:   Yes.

DR BYRON:   One of the things that concerned me, you pointed out the articulation between state and local listing and that a place which is not quite up to standard for state heritage listing may fall through the cracks and that they're not routinely ensured of heritage recognition at the local level.  Do you have a suggestion for how that might be dealt with, because I think that is a problem that is occurring in many other jurisdictions as well.  I think Queensland is considering having a single list where the state Heritage Council would also maintain a list of places of local significance because of the inability or unwillingness of local government to do that.  But I'm not sure that's the right solution.  It seems to me symptomatic of people who are grappling with the same question.

PROF HOWE:   Yes, while I think that suggestion might work well in Queensland it would possibly not work as well in Victoria.  There has been a dramatic change in the attitude at the local level to heritage listings while there's still some opposition.  In fact, many people are rushing to have their properties listed at the local level, hence some of the listings are now very considerable at the local level, and looking at those lists in the future will also be another issue, I would imagine.  I don't think for those reasons that it would be a huge - well, it would be a considerable undertaking for the Heritage Council to have a local listing but it's something that I don't think we've considered that it could be considered.  But I think some changes in the legislation would enable that particular gap to be covered.

	The executive director has the power to recommend that something not be on the Heritage Council list, but be protected at local government level.  To ensure that direction takes place, I think by administration or changing the act that could happen.  It would make a big difference.

DR BYRON:   Or you could just rely on informal coordination mechanisms and hope that it works well.

PROF HOWE:   That is happening.  One of the Heritage Victoria staff did a survey and I think came up with about 75 per cent of places that are recommended for local cover, having been rejected by Heritage Victoria, in fact are included then in heritage overlays.

DR BYRON:   But 25 per cent are not?

PROF HOWE:   25 per cent are not, yes.

DR BYRON:   So what happens to those?

PROF HOWE:   Well, they're on the endangered list, I would imagine.  It could be in the future that local councils do pick them up.  In some cases where a property is under threat you can see how the pressure is on Heritage Victoria to cover it itself.  I can think of several examples of that.  If the local council is not supporting the property being saved, as it were, Heritage Victoria rejects it, it's unlikely the local council will then turn around and give it protection.  

DR BYRON:   I'm just trying to imagine what arguments might be used by local government of not listing, as locally significant, a place that almost made it onto the state list.

PROF HOWE:   Well, local governments can vary enormously in their attitude to heritage.  One example I could think of is a Boyd house in one of the Melbourne suburbs.  The local government felt this house was not suitable for inclusion in the heritage overlay.  There had been a lot of opposition from the owner and therefore it hadn't been included and that would be one example of that situation.

DR BYRON:   Thank you.

MR HINTON:   Professor, thanks for raising this issue of the role of local governments because as you rightly flagged it is a big issue for us and certainly others have also made reference to it.  But I want to go to the next step:  if, as you were just discussing with Neill, you did get the listing right - that is there's no falling between desks and whatever, and decisions are consistent and integrated - there's still an issue of the implications of the listing at local government level.  We're getting a variety of cases where individual officials in local governments can read a listing quite differently to their colleagues, not only in another jurisdiction but even in the same jurisdiction, and therefore there's lack of certainty as to the implications of the listing.  

	That raises a question of what should be done about it, and I welcome your views on this issue as well.  Does that take you down a track of the state government imposing requirements on local governments, how they go about pursuing the heritage objective?  Does it go the more relaxed approach and have guidelines as opposed to prescription.  Thirdly, in any case, if there is action taken here, either guidelines or prescription, is that not an issue for the sovereignty at local government level in terms of decisions being made locally with local expertise and local preferences?  I'd welcome your views on the sort of issues that emerge with regard to those sets of problems.

PROF HOWE:   The way that has been addressed in Victoria at the state level is by having policy guidelines in state planning schemes which are meant to assist local government in terms of drawing up their heritage criteria.  But the difficulty arises in a great range of differences between the extent to which local government put resources into developing their own heritage criteria in line with the state criteria at the local level.  So this can range from the City of Port Phillip which has almost a Bible as it were in terms of heritage.  It has worked out very considerable information on neighbourhood character and so on.  In the case of the City of Yarra they actually tried to introduce an amendment which would have virtually covered the whole of the City of Yarra -, again an inner suburban area of Melbourne with a lot of heritage areas - a more or less blanket heritage overlay over the whole municipality.  

	So I think it is difficult to know how the state government can have more consistency in that situation.  Certainly at present the planning schemes attempt to allow a lot of leeway for local government to determine what the heritage character - and what they want to preserve at the local level - should be, and that's probably very desirable.  On the other hand, you do need this coordination and some powers at the state level.  

MR HINTON:   You recognise the tension but you're not taking me down one particular track, are you?

PROF HOWE:   No, I'm not really.  My answer, I suppose, is to put more resources into local government level so that there is more consistency and a better quality of the planning decision‑making at the local level and I would recommend that very much at the moment.  I think more resources made available through the state level bodies, for instance, for training heritage advisers and for providing much better heritage overlays is, I suppose, the most immediate need at the moment. 

MR HINTON:   So better documentation of the characteristics that make the building or whatever worthy of listing because of its heritage characteristics in itself could help better consistency across jurisdictions ‑ ‑ ‑

PROF HOWE:   Yes, I believe so.

MR HINTON:   - - - as well as your expertise factor.

PROF HOWE:   Yes, I believe so.

DR BYRON:   And greater rigour in those listings.

PROF HOWE:   Sorry, I didn't catch that.

DR BYRON:   You mentioned the need for greater rigour in the listings because it seems that at the moment with that element of discretion some councils may list too few places and some - I'll stick my neck out - may even list a few too many.

PROF HOWE:   Yes.  There certainly needs to be greater rigour at the local level and that was looked at in great detail in the Ballarat amendment report and that will certainly be an issue that's going to be looked at in the planning panel's review.  In many ways perhaps some of the answers to the questions that you're asking at the moment could well come out of the planning panel's review.  Certainly that's in their terms of reference - to have a look at what role the state planning heritage policies could be amended or changed to make them more effective at the local government level.  So in many ways some of the answers to these questions will hopefully emerge from that inquiry.  

DR BYRON:   Some of the rural local government areas rely on a couple of days a month or two weeks a month of part-time heritage adviser.  Is that right, that not all them have full-time specialists to do produce the documentation and rigour that we were just talking about? 

PROF HOWE:   Yes.  I recently had a case at VCAT which involved Portland, which is a very important area in terms of heritage in the state of Victoria, and there a very part-time heritage adviser was available to do a report on a particular building.  The actual heritage overlay had not been prepared thoroughly.  It hadn't been prepared as an amendment to the planing scheme and hadn't been through Planning Panels, as the council felt it wasn't a priority and they couldn't afford it, because they have to pay for the panel hearing.  The original heritage study had been undertaken in 1981 and 1983, so it was very out of date.  So you can see there the problems in a regional council which is short of money, doesn't have a lot of resources to devote to heritage issues.  Perhaps the popularity of heritage is more of a metropolitan phenomenon that a country phenomenon sometimes, particularly at the council level.  You can see there some of the difficulties in a regional setting, for quite an important heritage area in the state.  

DR BYRON:   The only other thing I wanted to pick up on is that the Victorian Heritage Council's registration system is designed for or premised on nomination of individual places.  Is that something else that needs to be amended to better cope with precincts and conservation areas?

PROF HOWE:   I would strongly recommend that that is something the Productivity Commission could consider.  As I've indicated, Melbourne 2030 has created a number of problems for particularly inner city and middle ring councils in Melbourne, where a tremendous amount of Melbourne's really important heritage is located.  The individual listings are really not coping with that issue.  The idea of neighbourhood character was introduced really as a response to the demands from the inner ring suburbs as they saw individual buildings being picked off and redeveloped and whole streets changed in character, and of course the nomination of the inner suburban shopping streets, retail centres and commercial centres that have been so important over Melbourne's history was also a response.  All of them qualify as activity centres, so all can be redeveloped under the criteria of the planning scheme, or it's possible for that to happen.  

	So I think there is a real need to look at that ability for heritage legislation to place on the register precincts, subdivisions and some of these important historical areas in a broader way than presently exists.  At the moment the Heritage Council must advertise to every adjacent owner, so if you're faced with listing Brunswick Street it can be quite a challenge.  I know negotiations are taking place with the National Trust on that matter, but it is very difficult to resolve under the present legislation.  

DR BYRON:   I think that's all I had to ask you about.  Is there anything you want to say in conclusion that you haven't had a chance to say already?  

PROF HOWE:   No, I don't think I need to add anything more, except to say that I think these are important issues for the Productivity Commission to look at.  Victoria is probably better than the other states, so the need is probably even grater in those states.  There is possibly not one solution for every area, which in a federation always makes your task more complex, but I think one thing you could look at is national policies that facilitate this sort of coordination and developments at state level.  

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much for that.  We can now adjourn for lunch and will resume at 2 o'clock with the Municipal Association of Victoria.  Thank you.  

(Luncheon adjournment)

DR BYRON:   Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.  If we can resume the public hearings.  We've now got Mark Marsden, Municipal Association of Victoria.  Mark, if you'd just like to take a seat .  When you're comfortable, if you'd just like to introduce yourself and highlight the main points from your written submission.  Thank you very much for that, and we'd like to talk about it with you.

MR MARSDEN:   Okay.  Thank you very much and good afternoon.  My name is Mark Marsden, and I'm a planning adviser to the Municipal Association of Victoria.  The MAV represents the 79 councils in Victoria; bit of a historic institution itself I guess.  The MAV has been around since 1879.  So it has a long history itself.  Thanks for the opportunity to make the submission this afternoon.  I just wanted to make a few opening comments and am certainly happy to answer any questions that the Commissioners may have.  

	I guess for local government, there has been a very significant journey with respect to conservation over the lat 30 years.  It was in response to concerns at the local level about the loss of historic buildings that led a number of councils particularly in the inner city regions of the capital cities like Melbourne to undertake conservation studies and to look at ways to protect significant heritage.  Over that last 30 years or so, there has been an increasing number of councils that have introduced or undertaken heritage studies and introduced heritage overlay controls, and it's my understanding that out of the 79 councils in Victoria, 73 have undertaken or are undertaking a conservation or heritage study with the view to look at introducing heritage controls.

	I have to say it's been a bit of a bumpy ride for a number of councils and I know that various councils at different times have undertaken heritage studies, tried to introduce heritage controls, but have been opposed at various times by local communities, and in some cases the councils have had to come back and revisit the planning controls at a later stage.  I'll give you one example.  In Ballarat there was a significant conservation study undertaken in the early 1980s, and there was an attempt by the City of Ballarat as it then was to introduce a heritage control over a large part of the urban parts of the municipality.  However, there was strong resistance, and the heritage controls introduced at that time were very limited, only to the two main streets of Ballarat; Sturt Street and Liddiard Street.  However, as time has gone on, there has been greater community acceptance of the value of heritage, and in the case of Ballarat, it introduced wide-ranging controls in 2001 based on that original study undertaken in the 1980s.

	Mr Chairman, there's probably three main points of our submission that we'd like to highlight this afternoon.  The first one is that we believe that there is a strong case for government intervention to protect heritage places.  I think it is important to bear in mind that the nature of planning controls and heritage controls is not to stop development.  It's to ensure that development is sympathetic either in terms of restoration of existing heritage buildings or in the construction of new buildings in heritage precincts.  So I think it's very important to bear that in mind, that heritage controls are not to stop development.

	We think it's also very important that given the technical nature of heritage conservation issues, that it is important that there is access to technical advice and to design skills for private owners in particular of heritage places, and with the assistance of Heritage Victoria, a number of councils do employ, at least part-time, heritage or urban design officers, and I know that in speaking to Heritage Victoria, that those particular officers or consultants are in higher demand.  In fact it's quite difficult to get appointments with them.  We might have to wait three or four weeks quite often.

	The second point we'd like to make is that we believe that there are strong social and economic benefits in protecting heritage places.  Heritage can play a vital role in community connectedness, and it's really given the value that people place on heritage places.  In addition, we believe that there are also strong economic benefits that can accrue; for example, through tourism, and I think the issues paper itself talks about an example of Melbourne as one example, but also in the protection of the economic benefit can be through the protection of areas by ensuring that inappropriate development does not occur.  In other words, heritage precincts can be highly sought-after places in which to live.

	Our third point, Mr Chairman, is that there are costs associated with protecting heritage.  For local government who are the custodians for a number of public buildings and infrastructure assets, whether they're roads or drains and such forth, there are costs perhaps associated with maintaining such buildings or such assets.  I'll give you two examples.  Bluestone gutters can be a valuable heritage asset in areas, but they are difficult to maintain with respect to weeding and so forth.  It's not always possible to have a street-sweeper go down bluestone gutters.  So that's an example of an additional cost.  

	Another example could be with a public building.  Another example, Her Majesty's Theatre in Ballarat is - I understand it to be the longest-running theatre on mainland Australia, and it's not able to attract certain productions because of the constraints to its use.  So they're a couple of examples, and for private owners, there is the potential also of additional costs.  For example, owners may be required to replace like with like, and sometimes that can be also expensive.  

	So we believe that there is a significant need for funding or at least for financial measures in which to look at enhancing the bucket for heritage, and there are a few examples around of different ways to fund heritage; low interest loans is one example.  There are grant programs that both Commonwealth, state and sometimes local government administer.  We believe that a taxation system could offer greater scope in which to provide incentives to protect heritage buildings.  So certainly we believe that there is a greater case to be made for improving the amount of funding to protect heritage.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much, Mark.  There are a number of points I'd like to take up from both your opening comments and the written submission that one of the things that I've found really interesting talking to local governments and representatives of local governments is they're in an interesting situation where they're very well aware of the costs of maintaining historic buildings and assets.  You know, if council owns buildings that are on a state heritage register for example, and I'm also very cognisant of the trade-offs that that imposes; if a council has to spend more money on maintaining an old building, that's less money for creches or rubbish removal or something.

	Then the council is also in a position through local environmental planning and so on of maintaining heritage lists that may impose similar costs on its own repose.  So it's both the subject of it and the source of similar costs or pressures, if I can say that, on private ratepayers.  Is there a contradiction there or is that an intention?

MR MARSDEN:   I'm not too sure if there is.  I'm not too sure what the contradiction is.  I mean, I guess that both public authorities and private citizens have a role to play in which to protect heritage assets, and - yes.  I'm not too sure what the contradiction would be.  If anything I think councils would be sympathetic to concern that private individuals may have because it knows itself that because of potential costs associated with maintaining heritage, that it's not easy.  So I think there might be some sympathy about that, and I think that's one of the reasons why councils are keen to explore financial incentives.  

	As I just mentioned earlier, a number of councils have introduced low interest loan schemes, and that's where a person can apply for funding.  It's basically seed funding in which to undertake restoration works of a heritage building or heritage place.  I know that other councils have actually provided grants at various points in time.  So I think if there is any contradiction, I'm not too sure how you could resolve it because I think council would be sympathetic to the concern of that cost.

DR BYRON:   But I guess in both cases, being aware that historic buildings can be more expensive to maintain than modern ones, I guess there's a concern to make sure that the system is as efficient as possible, and when we're talking about the need for additional funding, I guess we have an obligation to try and make sure that the existing system isn't too leaky before we start suggesting that a larger bucket of funding be applied to it.  We want to make sure that the existing system is reasonably efficient and that the existing level of funding is being used well and effectively before we start calling for additional funding from taxpayers.  Reaction?  So the question:  do you think the existing system works reasonably efficiently?

MR MARSDEN:   I think it does but, look, I think the challenge is becoming greater, and that is that there are more heritage places that are being protected under heritage controls, particularly at the local level with councils undertaking heritage studies and introducing planning controls.  So I think the challenge is becoming greater with the number of places registered at the local level anyway.  Secondly I guess the concept of heritage has also grown to not just physical places or buildings, but to landscapes or gardens and so forth.

	So I think the challenge is becoming greater, and at the end of the day, it's what the community values and what it's prepared to pay for is to me the critical issue, and if indeed going through a community process before deciding to protect heritage.  But if that's what the community does wish to do, then I guess there are costs associated with it and I think it's understanding that there is a cost involved.

MR HINTON:   Mark, thanks very much for your submission and your appearance here today.  I also want to follow up some of Neil's points regarding funding.  You said in your opening remarks that you felt that "a greater case" can be made to use the taxation system for funding, and that was following on a comment about low interest loans and grants, whatever.  Is the greater case relating to increasing the total amount or is it a greater case relative to alternative forms of funding?  I wasn't sure which point you were making.

MR MARSDEN:   Okay.  I think both actually.

MR HINTON:   I understand fully increasing the source of funding.  Can you then help me out to get a better understanding as to why the taxation system would be a better mechanism as opposed to direct intervention like grants.

MR MARSDEN:   Okay.  I think that the advantage of the taxation system is that with a lot of heritage assets in private ownership, that when for example people do propose to make alterations to heritage places, then an efficient way in which to provide the incentive would be through individual applications being made through the taxation system rather than being administered through a loan scheme at a local or state level.

MR HINTON:   Let me try my hand at an alternative view to see if I can get your reaction, and I have in mind the case of a building that's of local significance, not a national icon or a state-significant building, but local significance.  Therefore the benefit of conserving this building could be argued to benefit the local community.  It therefore follows, normally speaking, that there would be logic to the view that the costs of that - accruing that benefit should also be borne locally.  That then follows that perhaps a rate rebate would be a much more equitable, efficient and appropriate mechanism to fund the conservation of that building relative to using the taxation system more generally which is Australian taxpayers more widely.  I would have thought that's quite a persuasive argument when it comes to efficiency and equity.

MR MARSDEN:   Yes.  I think it's the same concept, but applying it at a more local level rather than at the general national level.  I guess one of the difficulties always is defining what is of local significance.

MR HINTON:   That was a given in my example.

MR MARSDEN:   I just think that one individual building in itself may be locally significant, but you put them all together and then they have a wider significance, and in the case of somewhere like Ballarat or Bendigo or some such place, it really is the precincts that contribute to the sense of the heritage, not just one individual building.  So I think in terms of defining local, you need to look a little bit wider.

MR HINTON:   Thank you.

DR BYRON:   One of the things that I liked in your submission is that when you were discussing the private sector, you differentiated between privately owned and in private use or those that are privately owned and in public use, like churches, and I guess we could add banks and universities and so on, and private ownership and commercial use.  One of the issues that was raised by somebody we met with in a provincial town is that he's running a business from a heritage-listed building.  He's competing with other people in the same line of work just down the street, but they're not in a heritage-listed building.  They don't have to spend $75,000 doing the slate on the roof or something and he does.  If he goes broke because he can't compete with the other guys, then who's going to look after this old building?  It seems to me that that's the sort of phenomenon that occurs fairly generally.

	He was particularly asking about what would the council do for him because this was a locally significant building, not state or national, but what you were just saying in your answer to Tony is that maybe he needs a contribution from a wider circle of people than just the ratepayers in that town?

MR MARSDEN:   Basically that's what I was saying.  I don't want to diverge, but councils are under severe financial constraint and it's probably an argument for another forum, but with the cost shifting occurring, councils are founding it more difficult in which to find the necessary funds to do all the things that it's required to do, whether it's to fund the creche or to conserve the heritage building.  In terms of some of the contextual issues of - you know, the broader financial issues, I think this is becoming a more difficult issues for council to find funding, particularly in the context of greater cost shifting.

DR BYRON:   I think today and tomorrow we will hear more about that second category of privately owned heritage buildings that are publicly used, like the churches and the banks, because if those places are of local significance - I'm thinking particularly of country towns where they are sort of part of the main skeleton of the main street.  The issue has been raised that with declining populations and declining incomes in many of the agricultural areas, even though there are heritage buildings and other places there, the ability of the local ratepayers to pay for the ongoing maintenance of those heritage places may be limited.  Is that a situation that arises for your members, rural councils.

MR MARSDEN:   In Victoria there has been a similar scenario of the smaller townships declining further.  My understanding is that the population in regional Victoria as a whole is increasing, but it's varied and that some areas are experiencing growth, like the regional cities of Ballarat and Bendigo and Mildura and such forth, but the outlying villages or towns are declining and losing population.  So, yes, that is a scenario that is also evident in Victoria.

DR BYRON:   So that raises the question of, well, who is left to pay for historically important former public buildings - churches, banks, town halls, post offices, mechanics institute, et cetera - when the local population is shrinking?

MR MARSDEN:   That is an issue, and I guess for those townships and those local communities, there has to be reinvention I guess of what future those sort of townships can have and whether they and diversify into more tourist-related activities is just one example.

DR BYRON:   But they can't all become art galleries and silver handicrafts and coffee shops, can they, or can they?

MR MARSDEN:   I guess there's nothing preventing any entrepreneurial spirit from anyone doing anything, but I guess there's a limit in terms of the number of people that want to visit these sort of places.

DR BYRON:   Okay.  Tony?

MR HINTON:   Mark, your submission makes a number of references, particularly on page 6, to the so-called regulatory system, the regulatory framework for councils to consider, whatever.  That's statement of fact.  Can you try your hand at, given your experiences across 79 local government areas, a view as to whether or not the regulatory system is working or not.  Sure it can provide guidance, but we'd value your comments on whether or not it's working well, it's working badly.  Where are the deficiencies?  Where are the good things about it?

MR MARSDEN:   Sure.

MR HINTON:   Can you give me some qualitative feel for your 79 members who have got, I thought feedback to date, quite varied experiences regarding the regulatory framework.

MR MARSDEN:   Okay.  In Victoria, the councils administer a system that's developed at the state level.  The Planning and Environment Act requires all councils to have a planning scheme, and there's a concept called the Victoria Planning Provisions where each council must apply zones and overlay controls.  So, my understanding compared to other states, it's a bit more centralised in terms of the way that the system works.  But it is up to councils to choose where the overlays apply for example or where the zones and overlays apply, and in the case of a heritage overlay, a rigorous process would need to be gone through before any such overlay was introduced, and that process would include a heritage study, you know, based on principles that have been well established, for example under the Burra Charter and other such guidelines.  There's opportunity for submissions to any proposal to undertake a heritage study, but (b) to introduce heritage overlay.

	The heritage overlay is basically a standardised control that applies across the state, and it's my understanding that a number of councils do have concerns that the heritage overlay requires a permit almost to do anything, and that there are many situations where there are buildings and works proposed that do not have a heritage implication and yet a person still has to go through the process of applying for a permit.  So I think there is a case in which to look at changes to the heritage overlay to have either more deem-to-comply provisions - that is, if you do certain things and meet certain objectives, you do not need a permit - or you have got exemptions of works that don't have a heritage impact.  So I think there is a case to review the heritage overlay in Victoria.

MR HINTON:   If you did a survey of your 79-member local governments as to whether or not they thought that the conservation of heritage historical buildings is working well or badly, what sort of reaction do you think you might get?

MR MARSDEN:   I think it goes back to the comment I made before.  I think that councils are finding it a bigger challenge than what they used to, and that does get back to basically the size or the amount of heritage assets which have protection.  At one level, it would be my view that there's a lot of increased or ongoing community interest ensuring that important heritage is protected, so that that puts pressure on councils to ensure that there is adequate protection to heritage assets.

	At the same time, with councils under financial constraints, it's becoming more difficult, and another example in terms of the application for heritage overlay, there is a shortage of planners in Victoria and probably a shortage of heritage advisers, too.  So councils have a backlog of applications and delays in decision-making, and this isn't confined just to heritage, but it's heritage applications as well as other applications that suffer as a result.

MR HINTON:   The main feedback there seemed to be, Mark, in relation to compromising the achievement of the heritage objective, as opposed to another category of complaint that we've been getting in this inquiry, and that is the heritage objective in fact is being - the credibility of it is being damaged by poor administration and poor decision-making under the guise of trying to achieve the heritage objective; that is, the home owner, the house owner who feels that they're being curbed inappropriately.  But that didn't come through in the flavour in terms of the views or your best guess at the views of your council members.  I don't want to put words in your mouth in terms of talking about the views of all 79, but you seem to only give one half of the debate in the hypothetical reactions of your 79 members.

MR MARSDEN:   I think, Mr Chairman, that heritage issues - there can be some element of subjectivity in terms of the way that they are administered.  Sometimes the redevelopment of a heritage building is a question of the degree of change and whether that's appropriate or not appropriate, and as a result of that, there is sometimes conflict between applicants, owners of buildings and councils.  But there is the opportunity for independent review through to VCAT, and I think that is an important step in the process; that if indeed people do feel aggrieved by the way that the heritage control was administered, there is the right of the review.

DR BYRON:   I think that's a very important feature of the system in Victoria which doesn't seem to appear in a lot of jurisdictions - of the right to independent review which may well be part of alleviating these misgivings or disinformation or misunderstandings that some people suffer from in terms of the consequences of having their property listed.  There does seem to be a lot of sort of shock-horror stories out there.  Would you agree with the proposal that one of the best and cheapest ways of maintaining historic heritage buildings and gardens, et cetera, is to have them continue in use, and if not in their initial or original use, then in a sympathetic adaptive reuse?

MR MARSDEN:   Yes, I do believe that.  I think that there has to be - "adaptability" I guess is the word in terms of use of historic heritage buildings in particular.  In Victoria there is an interesting provision in the planning scheme whereby with respect to the use of a heritage building that a prohibited use can be permitted.  It has to still go through a process of consideration, assessment and so forth, but I think that's one example of the system trying to be flexible and allow the reuse of historic buildings.

DR BYRON:   We heard an example of that this morning where a heritage listed building in what is normally a residential area may be permitted to be a coffee shop or a restaurant or something.

MR MARSDEN:   That's right.  So that scope exists.  It's been my experience as I've worked for councils as well that sometimes owners of buildings have their heart set on a particular design and then realise a little bit later that the design does not meet the heritage objectives, but often by sitting down and working through alternative designs to meet their needs as well as meet the heritage objectives can be achieved.  So with those sort of processes as well as the process of independent review, it's my view that the system is working okay.  There might be examples of higher stories, but the approach of the councils is not to ride roughshod over owners, but to try and work with them as much as possible so that they can get to a mutually satisfactory outcome.

DR BYRON:   I guess it's probably just a fact of life that horror stories tend to spread far and wide through the media and shock jocks and so on compared to good news stories.

MR MARSDEN:   Just watch A Current Affair most nights.

DR BYRON:   Yes.  One of the things that has come up a few times is the suggestion of rigour and consistency in the documentation in the listing of heritage places, and the  more precise that is about the values that are to be conserved, the more guidance that it gives of what sort of uses could be sympathetic with those values and what uses would be totally unsympathetic and therefore restricted.  That, it would seem to me, would give an owner of a heritage building a much clearer picture of where they stand and would avoid some of this shock-horror reaction.

	But that seems to become a circular problem; to do the work to require the thorough documentation of places being listed doesn't come easily, and you need people and money to be able to do that.  Are we in that sort of circular trap?

MR MARSDEN:   I think so.  I think that there is a case that basically the policy framework with respect to heritage places could be stronger, but councils are confined - and states as well - in terms of the amount of money that is available to do heritage studies, and I know that - I've worked for a couple of councils that have undertaken heritage studies, and basically what we wanted to achieve but what we were able to achieve with our budget were different.  So, yes, I think that there is an issue about the limitations of the policy framework as a result of lack of funding to undertake proper analysis.

DR BYRON:   Just one last question on funding.  You mentioned low interest loans and revolving funds and so on.  Is your experience that councils normally only make those available to private residential properties?  In particular we've had somebody raise the issue of commercial buildings which are heritage listed, but local governments - state governments, too - seem to be very reluctant to offer any sort of concessional finance to what they see is commercial properties that might stand on their own two feet.

MR MARSDEN:   That's not my experience.  My experience has been that - I'm thinking of two examples in particular where councils have been willing to look at providing low-interest loans to commercial owners as much as it has been to residential owners.

DR BYRON:   Okay.  

MR MARSDEN:   Look, that's just my experience.  I haven't heard otherwise.

DR BYRON:   Is there anything that you wanted to say that we haven't talked about by way of closing?

MR MARSDEN:   I don't think so.  Thank you.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much for coming, Mark, and thank you for the written submission and the time and effort that's gone into that.  Next on the program, we have Mr Marriner from Marriner Theatres.  Thank you.  If you'd like to just take a seat there anywhere and when you're comfortable and settled with your papers, if you'd just introduce yourself for the transcript and if you'd like to summarise the main points in your submission in maybe 15 minutes or so, then we can discuss that with you.  Thanks for coming.

MR MARRINER:   Thank you.  Can I give you - I've just marked up some copies which ‑ ‑ ‑

DR BYRON:   Yes, certainly.

MR MARRINER:   This is the submission which I'll read.

DR BYRON:   Great.  Thank you.

MR MARRINER:   Good afternoon.  My name is Jason Marriner.  I'm the general manager of Marriner Theatres.  Marriner Theatres is a theatre business operating in the Melbourne CBD and is the owner and/or operator of four heritage theatres in Melbourne's central business district; the Princess, Regent, Forum and Comedy Theatres.  The other heritage listed theatres in the CBD include Her Majesty's and the Athenaeum Theatre.

	In the 21st century, Melbourne is in a unique position  having preserved a significant number of its heritage theatres within the central business district, so much so that it can claim a distinct theatre district.  This is unique in Australia and really comparable only to London's West End, New York's Broadway and the City of Toronto.  There can be no doubt that the preservation of these historic theatres has contributed significantly to Melbourne's imprimatur as a cultural capital.

	Heritage theatres unlike many other heritage properties can remain as relevant today as they were 100 years ago because with improvement to the stage house, they can remain capable of staging the very best theatrical events.  This is evidenced by the Princess Theatre's history of successful productions including Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, currently Dirty Dancing and Disney's The Lion King currently playing at the Regent Theatre.  Each of these productions is considered to be world class and will attract many hundreds of thousands of people to the theatre.  The reason the theatres are as relevant today as they were a hundred years ago is perhaps threefold.

	There is a definite value attached to the experience of attending a performance in a heritage theatre providing the amenity of the theatre is presented in a first-class condition.  The history, tradition and stories of the past each contribute to the value of the patrons' experience in a way that cannot be replicated in a modern value.  Secondly, given the pre-eminence of the West End and Broadway in the creation and development of live entertainment product, the productions are designed in such a way as to fit in to the reasonably confined space of their theatres which are comparable to our theatres.

	Thirdly, over many centuries, the art of performance has changed very little.  In essence it remains the same as it ever was; story-telling on an intimate, personal level.  Therefore the theatre building itself has not needed to evolve greatly to remain relevant.  It remains a small group of people performing to a relatively small audience of people.  Therefore heritage theatres are perhaps unique in comparison to other heritage properties in that there is a discernible value attached to the history of the buildings, and most importantly they can continue to operate as effective and efficient venues within the modern marketplace.

	However, there is a direct and potentially lethal threat to the continued viability of Melbourne's heritage theatres and it is that the distortion of the marketplace by the provision of unchecked subsidies to the competing state government operated venues and the loss leading operation of the casino-controlled theatres.  These competing theatre venues include the Victorian Arts Centre, and it's principally four venues; the State Theatre, Hamer Hall, Playhouse and Fairfax Studio; Federation Square and the BMW Edge Theatrette, Crown Casino Showroom, and the impending $100 million‑plus development of two new theatres in the Southbank area, the MTC Theatre and the Recital Hall.  None of these venues have to operate within the usual parameters of a commercial environment, ie operating profitably, whereas somewhat perversely, the heritage theatres which are acknowledged as being of cultural importance must operate profitably to remain viable and must do it in a grossly inequitable marketplace.

	For example, the Victorian Arts Centre, which in the main competes for very similar productions to the heritage theatres, in the 10 years between 1992 and 2001 received assisted revenues in excess of $200 million, and I've set that out in the chart.  Some years ago, Marriner Theatres recognised the impending threat to the continued viability of its heritage theatres if the state government did not recognise that its provision of subsidy was having a profound effect on the market in which the heritage theatres operate.  The issue was first raised with state government informally but without reaching a solution.  Marriner Theatres' second step, together with the other heritage theatres operators over the course of the next few years was to pursue other options available to us in seeking redress to the issues.

	Firstly a rates and land tax remission proposal was made pursuant to section 144(2)(a) of the Heritage Act which was lodged on 28 May 2002.  Secondly a competitive neutrality complaint was filed against the Victorian Arts Centre Trust, and that was lodged on 28 July 2003.  In both cases, the submissions were unsuccessful in achieving a favourable outcome for the heritage theatres.  I've supplied a copy of both our submissions and the outcome of each of these submissions.

	With the rates and land tax remission application, the treasurer decided his preferred approach is for these proposals to be considered in the ERC - Expenditure Review Committee - process as part of the departmental output funding.  "If additional funding from the Heritage Council for Marriner Theatres or other projects is considered a priority, then it should be ranked with other proposals from your department and evaluated by ministers against alternative uses of taxpayer funds.  This is preferable to the provision of land tax exemption."

	In the case of the competitive neutrality complaint against The Arts Centre, the competitive neutrality found The Arts Centre were not in breach of the competitive neutrality policy as it was considered to be excluded from CN policy because it was not considered to be a significant business enterprise, despite the fact that The Arts Centre of its own admission in its annual report stated that it was just that, and secondly that The Arts Centre was fulfilling a public policy objective despite the fact that the operations of the heritage theatres are, to all intents and purposes, exactly the same.  It would now seem that there are few avenues available for the heritage theatre group to pursue a level playing field.

	In summary, heritage theatres are in a unique position that they can be valued contributors to society and can continue to operate viably providing consideration is given to ensure that the marketplace is not detrimentally affected by government's subsidisation of the industry.  Heritage theatres should not be subject to market conditions less favourable than otherwise provided to state and/or casino-operated theatres.

DR BYRON:   Thank you.  Well, that's a very specific example of one of the issues that we've been talking about quite a lot in this inquiry.  Thank you for bringing that one to our attention.  Where do you think the future lies if there's no policy change or no action?  Where are we headed?

MR MARRINER:   We started raising these issues about five years ago in a formal way.  There's been a silver lining to the cloud, if you like, in that we've been working on The Lion King production for a long period of time - six years - and we could see that in the offing, but immediately prior to the opening of The Lion King and Dirty Dancing which opened one month beforehand, all of our four theatres were dark and non-operational for a period of eight months - non-operational.  

	We're fortunate enough to be in a position where we now have one of the biggest theatrical products available in the market at the moment.  But after that, again it's going to be a very, very, very challenging market, particularly when the state government in their wisdom, despite the fact that we're not reaching capacity in the utilisation of our venues, are planning the development - well, not planning; have commenced development of two new theatres to complement The Arts Centre; the MTC venue and the Recital Hall.  Part of me coming along today is just to essentially dot the I's and cross the T's because we are really talking about the end of the heritage theatre group as we know it.

MR HINTON:   My thanks as well as Neil's for your submission and your participation, Jason.  I had a couple of questions.  Are there any other commercial theatres that are pursuing commercial activity that are not in heritage buildings other than those ones that you flag as being run in your submission?

MR MARRINER:   No, not that ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   Those that are getting state assistance.

MR MARRINER:   Practically in Australia today, there's really only - Melbourne is quite unique in that there's six privately owned heritage theatres.  There's one in Perth, the Regal, and the others are owned by casinos and/or state or local government.  So it's a very unique environment within Melbourne - sorry, I should say the State Theatre in Sydney which doesn't operate in the live theatre market.  It's owned by Greater Union.

MR HINTON:   You flag in your submission and your presentation this afternoon two avenues of action both to date proving to be unsuccessful.  One is the sort of seeking to get matching assistance the way your competitors get assistance in effect.

MR MARRINER:   It's not so much matching assistance, and we've never asked for funding per se.  What we've asked for is recognition of the market in which the heritage commercial theatres operate, and that in principal is when The Arts Centre compete with us on shows like - commercial productions predominantly like Shout.  Saturday Night Fever was in The Arts Centre this summer.  The Dusty Springfield Story is going in this summer, but in addition to that, there's a large number of concerts which go through Hamer Hall which are again in the commercial marketplace.

MR HINTON:   But wouldn’t that be the outcome of the competitive neutrality test?  If it's judged to be not competitively neutral, then that either leads to taking away the advantages given to your competitors or you getting similar treatment.  Isn't that the end result if your application had been successful?

MR MARRINER:   Yes, and that's what we're hoping for, is that in the commercial marketplace as a start, that The Arts Centre when pricing their venues would be fully cost reflective of their costs, which they're not.  But if you turn it around, the finding of the competitive neutrality complaint, after we'd gone through a number of - firstly with a government bureaucrat Bill Cushing who established that there was a case to be answered, then we waited a year while The Arts Centre developed an outputs framework policy so that they would be able to be measured, and when that wasn’t forthcoming in a period of a year and a bit, that's when we lodged the competitive neutrality application.

	But the reality is everything that The Arts Centre does, be it commercial and/or for the state-funded or the Commonwealth-funded arts companies, what The Arts Centre does and what we do is essentially exactly the same.  We provide venues.  We provide venues to the companies which hire the use of the hall, and we provide services in staffing, technical expertise.  We're infrastructure providers.  So in finding - despite the fact that in the annual report in both the 2002 and 2003 financial year annual reports, it said, "The Victorian Arts Centre is a government business enterprise, and as such, derives its funding from both state government and entrepreneurial sources."  

Yet in the findings of the CNU, they found that it wasn’t significant, despite the fact that on every level, they were judged to be a significant business enterprise.  Their revenues exceed $10 million.  They have annual revenues of $40 million a year, and secondly it was that they were fulfilling a public policy objective.  But that's great.  The public policy objective that the state-operated venues are fulfilling is exactly the same as our objectives in operating a theatre business.

MR HINTON:   I'm certainly not party to competitive neutrality tests, but it seems to me prima facie that's the issue that is fundamental to your current operating circumstances.

MR MARRINER:   The decision has essentially been made, but I have to say I think it was a very, very odd decision and it was obviously favourable for the continuation of status quo, and people find it difficult to believe, but in the graph that I've given you, that essentially is representative of the revenue that The Arts Centre has earned over the past 10 years in excess of revenues derived by the operation of the venues.  So in particular, yes, I think it's up to $40 million.  That would seem hard to believe, but that's the market we compete in.  

	As I said, a hundred million dollars being spent on new venues which will not be able to operate on a cash flow neutral basis.  They will require future funding.  We compete with the casino venues.  Melbourne has adopted a Las Vegas model where we use showroom and entertainment facilities to essentially loss lead.  If you read the Herald Sun in Melbourne, half a page in the early general news is devoted to casino advertising which is of enormous value to theatre hirers.  In other words, the casino will use entertainment as a marketing initiative to attract people into the - and again the operation of the casino and the operation of the Showroom has absolutely nothing to do or has no effect on the outcomes or operation of Crown Casino as a business.  In London, as an example, it doesn't happen.  Casinos are casinos and theatres are theatres.

	One other point I might just draw your attention to is I've also given you a copy of Act Now, and it's interesting to note that in London, the Theatres Trust are facing very similar issues in that over many years the lotteries - there's a word for it, but the lotteries have funded the development and restoration of state-operated venues to the extent that the West End theatres now are suffering as a result.  So this is a publication that they'd put together recently to outline their case which despite the fact that the West End theatres have no issue in terms of utilisation.  It's a very, very busy theatre district.

	They do have problems creating a commercial case that will enable them to reinvest in the upkeep, maintenance and amenity of the venues because in essence the point we make is unless there's a commercial case that says, "You're going to be profitable in the long term," that justifies a reinvestment in capital expenditure to keep the buildings up to a standard that people enjoy coming to, what is currently considered to be heritage theatres will just become old, and as soon as they become old, they become second rate.  In essence that's our issue.  We have no commercial case to justify future investment in the heritage infrastructure.

DR BYRON:   Are there other complications in the sense of disabled access, fire protection, heating/airconditioning systems, occupational health and safety, any of those sorts of things?

MR MARRINER:   Probably, yes, but all of our theatres all have compliant airconditioning systems, all have compliant disabled access, all are sprinklered and are equipped with modern fire technology at significant cost.  Probably one of the bigger issues at the moment though is insurance costs in operating older buildings; public liability risks.

DR BYRON:   Is the insurance cost higher than for a comparable non-heritage ‑ ‑ ‑

MR MARRINER:   Well, again I make the point that there's very few other non‑heritage ‑ ‑ ‑

DR BYRON:   Nothing to compare to.

MR MARRINER:   And that's a cost that's not borne by state-operated facilities because they're self-insured.  Insurance is a big cost.  Capital costs are large, but more problematic than that at the moment is just being profitable.

MR HINTON:   This is probably a hypothetical, Jason, that you might not want to answer, but if there was a heritage conservation fund program of sorts being run out of the public sector that sought to provide funding for maintenance of the heritage theatres, would that put you on an commercially enough sound basis to compete with those other non-heritage theatres that are continuing to get the support that you flagged?  Which matters of degree is the maintenance and upkeep sufficiently significant to warrant attention that might help or is it just irrelevant.

MR MARRINER:   Almost irrelevant.  We've made applications to the Melbourne City Heritage Restoration Fund and received approval for a $50,000 contribution to a $750,000 restoration project which would be the restoration of the facade of the Princess Theatre.  We've made, over the years, a number of individual submissions to Heritage Victoria, again all on projects of half a million dollars or more and they've all been turned down, although most recently and the only example of us having ever accepted a funding was recently with the installation of disability access to Forum 2 which we thought we just had to do, and that submission was accepted.

	But the reality is it comes down to just the commercial marketplace.  If the competing properties are not in a position where they can lose money, then we were always in a position where we've got to try and actually make money from our hirers.  Whereas the casinos, the arts centres - and I use art centres generally as well for the broader state-owned operated facilities - their modus operandi is the number of people that attend over the course of a year rather than making a commercial return.

DR BYRON:   Can I  just ask a question about the land tax.  Would that have been a significant exemption or would that also have been a relatively small amount?  I mean, I realise you don't want to go into precise figures.

MR MARRINER:   No, we've been on the record as - absolutely.  We thought that that was one and we'd explored the option with Heritage Victoria, and they thought it was a very good option to pursue in terms of - because it was provided for under the act and we had a very good - and again I've given you our application and the response, but that would be relatively significant because rates and land tax combined is in the order or magnitude of about $400,000 a year which would give us a reasonable ability to reinvest.

	Again I make the point that our competing venues, with the exception of Crown, but a monopoly casino operator, the state-operated theatres are on crown land and therefore are not applicable to either rates or land tax in the first place.  So it's a little bit of a vicious cycle, and we know - and the only reason that Melbourne has The Lion King is because the theatre community around the world - the best example is the reason we won Mama Mia was because Bjorn and the producers from London loved the Princess Theatre because the Princess Theatre has a reputation in what's a relatively small marketplace as being one of the finest lyric theatres anywhere in the world, despite the fact that the theatre was built over 120 years ago.  That's proven again and again and again and again by the success that shows have at the Princess Theatre.

	The Princess Theatre is considered globally as one of the great lyric theatres, full stop.  Cameron McIntosh, Andrew Lloyd-Webber have said as much.  But our problem is the restoration, we originally contributed $22 million in 1987 to refurbish what was then a derelict building, that refurbishment is now 20 years old, and we've got to look at a way to keep the venue modern in terms of amenity, services and facility.

DR BYRON:   Just coming back to the land tax issue, I think it might have been in the Adelaide hearing, somebody suggested that any commercial building, if it was on a state heritage register, might be exempt from state land tax.  So I was wondering if that was a line that you had argued, not specifically for theatres, but the block - a commercial shopping centre or anything that was commercial which incurred substantial maintenance costs more than a modern equivalent building would have which provided some sort of heritage benefit to the public at large, that might be one way for a state government to make an explicit recognition at the expense of its own state revenues if they wanted to.

MR MARRINER:   That's always been the reason why they've never accepted the theatre's argument is because they say to do it for the theatres would create a ‑ ‑ ‑

DR BYRON:   Precedent.

MR MARRINER:   - - - precedent, and therefore why wouldn't it be just as relevant for the block arcade and other heritage buildings and therefore there's obviously a loss of revenue.  Whereas we've argued not so much on the heritage front:  (1) the theatres are important historically and heritage listed for that reason, but (2) if the buildings are important and if they're recognised as being historically and culturally important, then in the theatre business where none of those taxes are applicable to our competitors, with the exception of the casino, why isn't it a separate precedent?  But again as I've given you the letter from the premier, it says that it's not.  We have to apply individually for each individual project.

	I'm also actually led to believe, too, that there's only been our accepting of the $50,000 for the disability which was two-thirds the cost of the installation of the wheelchair lift into the Forum 2.  It was only the second project that Heritage Victoria had funded outside of state-owned and operated properties.  So it was relatively unique to Heritage Victoria as well.

MR HINTON:   I don't have any more questions, but where do you go from here?  We don't have very many solutions either, but it's important that we get these sorts of cases drawn to our attention because we can then record it as indicative of a tension within the existing system that is currently operating, where you get the sorts of tensions associated with commercial activity versus the heritage objective.  So thank you very much for drawing it to our attention, and your written submission and your participation this afternoon.

MR MARRINER:   Thank you.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much, Jason.

MR HINTON:   Unless there's something else you want to add that you think you've left out, Jason, that you haven't covered.

MR MARRINER:   No, other than I think that, you know, reasonably this - other than a public fracas which would be inevitable - and we're in a very, very tough position when the MTC theatre opens and the Recital Hall opens for the very fact that it will draw existing hirers of The Arts Centre, principally the MTC, the MSO, Music Aviva out of The Arts Centre.  It will open up a lot of available weeks, and there's never been a case where we've won a show which could otherwise have been fitted within the VAC.  So for that reason, theatres like the Comedy Theatre, potentially The Athenaeum, Her Majesty's Theatres which have all historically run at very low occupancies, the reality is that their future is - unless we want to preserve derelict shells is very, very limited, simply because the market is not there.

MR HINTON:   Thanks very much.

DR BYRON:   Thank you.  Is Susan Balderstone here?  It's a tag team, is it?

MS BALDERSTONE:   It's not.  It's pure coincidence, but I was the person who had to try and push through that land tax application and I can tell you that previous land tax applications under previous governments have been successful for other heritage buildings, but this current government doesn't see it as the way to go. 

DR BYRON:   Would you like to just introduce yourself for the transcript and take us through the main points of your submission which we've received and read.  Thank you very much for that and thanks for coming today. 

MS BALDERSTONE:   I'm Susan Balderstone.  I'm a former government heritage architect.  I was the assistant director for strategic support at Heritage Victoria until I retired in June this year, and prior to that I was an associate director and heritage architect at the Building Services Agency which replaced the Public Works Department and its successors in 1996.  I've worked on conservation projects of  historic government buildings since 1984, and my submission is really in relation to historic government buildings.

	The main first point of my submission is that I'm concerned about the former state government historic buildings in particular which demonstrate and show our visible identity as a democratic nature.  They are the work of the various state public works departments throughout Australia.  They were the public facilities provided by government for the people, funded by the taxpayer, and they represent the visible face of government in the state.  Their architecture, deriving from British and European colonial models, tells us about ourselves as a people and our history.

	I would say that the importance of such buildings in the context of Australia's democratic nationhood justifies federal government funding support.  I'm really primarily addressing the first point of your inquiry, what is the rationale for government involvement in historic heritage conservation, and I'm talking about funding involvement rather than regulatory involvement.  I would also submit that there is ample environmental social economic benefit justification for government funding support.  

	What particularly brought this on I suppose is the fact that the current federal funding for the Natural Heritage Trust amounts to a billion dollars over five years for the whole of Australia, whereas the historic heritage funding according to the issues paper is 13.3 million over four years.  So that's 3.3 million a year for all historic heritage as against 250 million a year for natural heritage.  That's a huge sort of imbalance there it seems to me, especially if you consider that the former historic government buildings could be said to be a distinguishing feature of Australia to the same extent as our natural heritage is.

As far as the justification for funding goes, looking at your first two terms of reference, the first one, the main pressures on the conservation of historic heritage places, I would say that the redevelopment of established urban areas is arguably the greatest negative pressure particularly for shopping strips and residential precincts in urban areas and also in rural and coastal centres that have become populated in recent years.  Then conversely the abandonment of rural settlements in the face of declining population in those areas and consequent closure of public facilities is also a negative pressure.

	In considering this, I think it's important to look at the environmental sustainability issues around reuse of heritage places, particularly the large amount of embodied energy contained in historic buildings and the amount of waste generated in new construction.  I would say that these factors place an obligation on us as a community to keep using historic buildings in a viable way in order to contribute to sustainability.  There are measurable environmental gains to be achieved through the maintenance and conservation of heritage building stock.  A number of people have produced reports on this, and in the discussion paper which I used as a source for this submission, I give a number of sources where those reports and data can be accessed, and I will table a copy of that.

	The detail of that including some tables and diagrams which sort of portray it visually are contained in part of this Victorian draft heritage strategy in the section on how heritage contributes to our society and economy.  It deals with the economic benefits, the social benefits and the environmental benefits, and it's really taken directly from that discussion paper.

	Under the second term of reference, the economic, social and environmental benefits and the costs of the conservation of historic heritage places in Australia, I would say that market failure exists in relation to the forced redundancy of historic government public buildings such as schools, courts, mental hospitals, police stations, prisons, post offices, defence buildings, et cetera, because they usually become the responsibility of local government or community groups who have few means of financing their conservation.

	State and federal government grants are necessary to initiate rehabilitation projects which may then attract funds from private and commercial sources, and again there's more detail about that in some of these documents which I will table including a couple that have summaries of the reviews of the public heritage program which have been carried out over the past 10 years, measuring economic and social benefits.

	One of the key factors that emerged from the reviews of the Victoria funding programs was that government support in the form of grants for the conservation of former government heritage buildings has leveraged funds from other sources to triple the total investment, and in fact the most recent review showed 4.5 times the government investment providing a clear and measurable cost benefit from government intervention.  Many of these projects were directed at increasing tourism to rural and regional centres, and it's important to consider that the economic contribution made by Heritage Tourism cannot be measured merely in terms of direct revenue income.  There are flow-on effects via retail and catering sales, employment and other multiplier effects for local economies.  These in turn affect the social sustainability of the relevant communities in terms of viability and community identity.  Again in the discussion paper there is more detail about that, and it refers to previous work that was done on the analysis of historic mining towns in Australia which you may already have seen.

	In terms of figures of historic government buildings throughout Australia, it's hard to come up with a final sort of definitive figure, but in Victoria up until the 1970s, more than 4000 schools had been constructed, up to 500 courthouses, 12 prisons, about the same number of mental health institutions and approximately 900 police stations, the early ones including lock-up stables and powder magazines.  Of these, maybe 20 per cent have been demolished and 60 per cent are in other uses.  Not all of those are included on heritage registers.  The number of government buildings on the heritage register in Victoria represents about 5 per cent of the total number built.  I can't give you a figure for how many would be included on local government registers in Victoria, but there are around a hundred thousand places on local government registers in Victoria in total.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much for that.  There were a couple of things that I particularly wanted to ask you about.  In the written submission in a couple of places, you use the phrase "forced redundancy of historic government buildings".  I'm just wondering if you'd elaborate a bit on the choice of the word "forced" and how you meant that.

MS BALDERSTONE:   Well, generally the redundancies come about through government departments deciding to rationalise their assets according to their own operational business plans so that they have consolidated services in the larger country towns and closed services in the smaller rural settlements.  But in some cases, they wish to keep a courthouse, for instance, operating one day a month or two days a month, but they didn't consider it to be economically viable, but with the injection of some funds from the public heritage grants program that enabled that building to be used for other purposes during the times the courts weren't sitting, that meant that the court could actually stay operating in that place and it was still then economically viable for the government department to use it.  But when I talk about forced redundancy, that's really what I mean; that it's forced by the government sort of operational business plans.

DR BYRON:   I guess I was thinking of - you list mental hospitals, and I was thinking Beechworth.  I would assert that that's probably genuinely redundant.  You wouldn't want to see 19th century lunatic asylums still in use.

MS BALDERSTONE:   No.  

DR BYRON:   And Portsea Barracks I think is probably redundant from a military sense and Point Cook airfield, et cetera.  So I was just wondering in what cases it was genuine or legitimate redundancy because of changed circumstances in technology as opposed to what you were talking about, forced or arbitrary redundancy.

MS BALDERSTONE:   I didn't really mean that they were arbitrary.  I mean, I think that operational redundancy is legitimate, but it's forced by operational factors just as closure of mental hospitals et cetera is forced by other sorts of factors.  I didn't really mean that that was unreasonable to close them, just that - and also all those places you've mentioned can be recycled for other uses and they have been.  Kew mental hospital here for instance is now housing, and Ararat mental hospital is now part of a TAFE college et cetera.

MR HINTON:   Ms Balderstone, thank you very much for your submission and your appearance today.  You particularly focus on "state government historic buildings".

MS BALDERSTONE:   Yes.  

MR HINTON:   I assume you mean by that Victorian state government, owned by the Victorian government.  You then go on to argue that the benefits for conservation are significant and such that conservation warrants intervention by government.  You then conclude that therefore the federal government should fund the conservation of the state government buildings.  I was wondering if you could sort of help me do that jump to explain to me why it would not automatically fall to the state government as opposed to the federal government to fund the conservation of these buildings.

MS BALDERSTONE:   That's right.  Most of these buildings were built by the colonial state governments before federation.  So when I call them "state government buildings", that's probably not a good description and it's sort of something we in the system probably understand, but I see that to an outsider it's a bit confusing.  But post offices for instance are Commonwealth buildings now, but they were built by the state governments and handed over to the Commonwealth at the time of federation, the same with the ‑ ‑ ‑

DR BYRON:   Defence properties.

MS BALDERSTONE:   - - - defence properties, et cetera, yes.  I'm talking about former state government buildings as well, not just current - not the ones that might be still used.  I mean, there are a few 19th and early 20th century state government buildings that are still in use.  As far as expecting the Commonwealth to do it, that really gets back to my point about the Commonwealth is funding distinctively - has a distinctively Australian program, and I would say that these state government buildings, as I call them, do belong in that distinctively Australian category; that they're part of our democratic identity as a nation and that they have a claim to be considered in that capacity.  

	As far as the funding amounts go and the demand, in the period that we've been giving money through the Victorian heritage program, the state government provided 19 million over four years from 1999 to 2002/3 and then another 4 million, and the successor program has provided an extra 4 million over two years.  In 2003, there were $19 million worth of applications for only $2 million allocation.  10 million of those 19 million met all of the criteria that we had for the program.  So that meant that $8 million worth of applications  missed out, and that's a pattern that has been going on for about 10 years.  The Victorian government has been providing really 4 to 5 million a year up until the last two years, but there's still a continuing shortfall in demand from community groups and organisations using former government buildings and other heritage buildings in Victoria.

	So I'm suggesting that this could be a partnership that - sure the state government has a role in still funding these projects.  But I'm suggesting that there is a role here for the federal government as well because of the importance to these buildings, not just in Victoria, but every state had a public works department and every country town in Australia replicates this situation in Victoria in a general sense.  So I’m saying that because you can see that these state government buildings are the sort of visible Australian identity, they're not particularly Victorian or particularly New South Wales or particularly Canberra.  They all originated from the original colonial architects office in the beginning, but they have as a class a more national identity if you like.  This is what I think would justify the Commonwealth government in supporting the state government with funds in particular for these projects.

DR BYRON:   I'm not certain of the details, but I thought that the COAG agreement between the Commonwealth government and the states suggested that each jurisdiction or each level of government would take responsibility for the places that they listed within their jurisdiction.  I can understand your argument that the Australian government might well decide that the traditions of looking after the properties that they themselves either own or have listed, they may choose to make some additional contribution to each state and territory to help them with former colonial architecture.  At this stage I'm not certain of what was actually in that agreement between the premiers and the Prime Minister.

MS BALDERSTONE:   According to the issues paper, it does say that that was the agreement, but it also points out that there's considerable disarray about how the different levels of significance are determined and therefore how the jurisdictions are actually divided, and I'm suggesting that this is another way of looking at dividing up those jurisdictions.

DR BYRON:   One of the other funding issues - and I guess having just heard from Mr Marriner about the claim for some sort of public funding support or non-penalty for heritage theatres, the conservation grants program, the Uniting Church of Australia in their submission to us point out that something like 57 per cent of the $3 million grant went to state government agencies, and his concern was that if there was a heritage funding program that I guess implicit in that criticism is they thought that the state would fund its own undertakings directly and that the grants program was for non-state organisations.  Could you just clarify that for me?

MS BALDERSTONE:   The grants program has evolved.  Initially 10 years ago it was for government-owned buildings, but over the 10 years it's evolved into being - in the intermediate period it was really for community-operated buildings on crown land, and now the criteria have evolved to allow churches and other community-type organisations to apply for funds for places that are privately or even commercially owned.

DR BYRON:   But I understand that it's intensely competitive.

MS BALDERSTONE:   It is intensely competitive because - well, as I just said, $19 million worth of applications for $2 million worth of money and 10 million of those met all the criteria, and that's a common sort of annual situation.  So it is intensely competitive.

DR BYRON:   The other thing I wanted to raise with you, you said that, "Listing on Commonwealth, state or local heritage registers should be taken as evidence that the community does wish to keep these places," and I think most people that have appeared in these inquiries would strongly support that statement.  But the corollary question is do you think that listing could confer some sort of commitment for funding support because an accusation has been made that unless we're willing to put up the money, listing is merely an empty gesture.  It's a statement of what we'd like to achieve, but if there's no money there to actually look after the place properly and do the necessary work, it's - as one cynic said to us, these are lists of places that we're going to lose rather than a list of places that we're determined to preserve, unless there is that serious funding commitment that comes every time something is added to the list.

MS BALDERSTONE:   There are places that are privately or commercially owned that are able to fund their own operation and maintenance, et cetera, and government departments now have learned that they have to budget for works to their heritage buildings in their normal submission for funding and that they can't rely on getting money out of the heritage program.  I think major companies on the whole are the same.  I think the heritage theatres are a special case and I think the churches are a special case as well.  Maybe there are others that you've heard from also.

MR HINTON:   It's a bit like kindergarten children, they're all special.

MS BALDERSTONE:   Yes.  I don't really think that it's feasible to commit to funding all the places that are on the register because some of them can find funds in other ways.

DR BYRON:   I don't think I should have implied that, but maybe when a place is to be listed, the listing authority might say, "Well, are we confident that there will be funds available from wherever to do what's necessary, and if we're not confident of that, what, if anything, can be done about it?"  I'm not suggesting an automatic bankrolling of every place that's listed, but simply a sort of a checklist.  "Now, if we put this on the list, is there somebody somewhere who's going to do what's necessary to look after it, and if not, we'd better start thinking about it."

MS BALDERSTONE:   Yes, but on the other hand, some places have been on the register for years and nothing has been able to be done to them for years.  But they haven't disappeared, and then when the opportunity has come along, they've been able to be resurrected, and if you don't have them on the list, there's nothing to stop people just demolishing them or getting rid of them whereas 20 years down the track or 50 years down the track, that building may be able to be used and saved, and if it's not causing a problem or costing people anything in the meantime, there's no real problem with that.

DR BYRON:   So does that mean that there may well be an accumulated backlog or deficit of ‑ ‑ ‑

MS BALDERSTONE:   There would be.

DR BYRON:   - - - maintenance that a lot of buildings which are heritage listed - there's places that have been identified that we want to pass on to future generations - are deteriorating until we get time and money and resources to go round and restore them properly.

MS BALDERSTONE:   I think so, yes.

MR HINTON:   I had one last question.  It was probably related to my first question; me trying to get a better understanding of where your concerns primarily lie, that is, those buildings that you were very concerned about, is there a sort of pre, post-federation aspect to that or is there any state - previously - government owned building that is now no longer being used that needed to be subject to conservation and therefore requires and should be subject to federal funding?

MS BALDERSTONE:   Yes.  

MR HINTON:   I wasn't sure.  What is the definition of the target building that you are concerned about?

MS BALDERSTONE:   That's what I said which is former state government historic buildings.  So generally they're the ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   Pre-federation.

MS BALDERSTONE:   - - - pre-federation, yes, but there are former state government buildings right up until the 1970s when the Public Works Department ceased which also need looking after.  It's just that most of the funding applications that we have are really for the older buildings which are in more trouble I suppose.

MR HINTON:   Yes.  By definition they're older and they're deteriorating, some are more wooden-based.  It's getting back to really a concern that a number of interested parties have drawn our attention to and that's there's no shortage of category that some would like to have conserved.

MS BALDERSTONE:   That's right.  

MR HINTON:   And there's certainly a shortage of funding.  In those circumstances, some sort of prioritisation or allocation system is necessary, and I was really seeking sort of to get a better understanding of your concerns to sort of address that rationing issue that's clearly emerging.

MS BALDERSTONE:   Yes, and I mean the attempt to sort of quarantine the federal government money to the places on the national list, in my view that's not feasible and I think that the federal government has to consider other places which are important to Australia as a whole.  I mean, these former state government buildings individually wouldn't make it on to the national list, but as a class, I would argue they do rate as nationally significant.

MR HINTON:   Especially those pre-federation.

MS BALDERSTONE:   Yes.  

DR BYRON:   I just had one last question in your wrapping up.  When you mentioned, "The economic contribution made by Heritage Tourism can't be measured merely in terms of direct revenue income," we're trying to get whatever handles we can on the contribution to Heritage Tourism.  It's pretty difficult to measure by any means.  But I guess one of the things that we've got to try and explore is just how significant heritage buildings are to the tourism industry or tourism business, and some of the state tourism agencies have been not particularly effusive when talking about the contribution of 19th century buildings to what makes a high-quality recreational experience for tourists.  

	Would you care to elaborate any more on what you see as the heritage tourism opportunities  because we've also come across a couple of sort of celebrated examples of steam trains that got $5 million of taxpayers' money and within two or three years are in liquidation.  It doesn't seem to be a terribly useful way of spending scarce heritage funds on what seemed like it was going to create regional tourism opportunities, but it didn't.  Is there some way that we can do heritage tourism smarter?

MS BALDERSTONE:   I think there would be, but there isn't a lot of data that can be analysed to help in directing effort in that regard.  I mean, the data just isn't collected, and Tourism Victoria has had various surveys carried out establishing very general sorts of things.  They established that 63 per cent of the total number of cultural tourists to Victoria visited a heritage site or building in 2003 for instance, and the number of international cultural visitors to Victoria was recorded as 638,000.  So that gives you an idea of what the total number of people visiting heritage sites would be, but they don't break it down into what sorts of sites visitors want to see and where they visit and what places they go to.

	So the data really isn't there to help direct where we might be smarter with heritage tourism.  We don't know for instance whether historic country towns draw a lot of tourists in actual numbers.  There's anecdotal evidence to say that some do, but there's nobody there collecting the figures.  The best source that I found about tourism was a set of conference papers from a conference the Australian Heritage Commission had in I think it was 2000 - I've referenced it in here - and there was a particular article on three heritage mining towns which looked at Maldon in Victoria, Burra in South Australia and Charters Towers in Queensland, economic benefits for the surrounding geographic regions of Maldon and Burra totalled 4 million, and they were seen as significant in the context of regional economic development, you'd need to look at that paper to see whether it sort of satisfies the sorts of things that you want to know.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much for the tip-off.  We know where to look now.

MS BALDERSTONE:   There are other papers in that collection that have different indicators about tourism.  But on the whole I think there just isn't the data that's needed, and with a lot of the questions in the issues paper, there isn't the data to be able to answer them really.

DR BYRON:   We're finding that out.

MS BALDERSTONE:   Yes, and with public heritage program reviews, we've always had to pay for them out of the grant allocation.  So we've always allocated a certain amount at the end of each year of the program to review the sort of - do the cost benefit analysis, and we have to do that in order to get the next lot of money out of the Department of Treasury and Finance.  I think that if you want answers to these sorts of questions, you have to pay for the sort of research surveys, et cetera, that are necessary to produce the data.

DR BYRON:   Thank you.  Any questions?

MR HINTON:   I'm right, thanks.

DR BYRON:   Was there anything you wanted to say by way of conclusion; anything that we've failed to pick up?

MS BALDERSTONE:   I don't think so.  I've got a number of documents here that I thought I would table for you.

DR BYRON:   That would be most valuable if you could spare them.

MS BALDERSTONE:   I've listed them and I've made a note if there's something that might be of particular use.

DR BYRON:   Great.  Thank you.  I think we can now break for about 10 or 15 minutes for a cup of tea, and then resume with the Residents 3000 Inc, Carlton Gardens Group.  Thank you.

____________________

DR BYRON:   Thank you.  Can we resume with the representatives from Residents 3000 Inc and the Carlton Gardens Group.  If you'd just like to make yourselves comfortable there and sort out your papers, and whenever you're ready, if you could each introduce yourselves for the transcript, and then we're looking forward to hearing what you have to tell us.  Thank you.

MS O'BRIAN:   Mr Byron, Mr Hinton, thank you for ‑ ‑ ‑

MR MATTHEWS:   This is Margaret O'Brian, the convenor of the Carlton Gardens Group.  I'm Peter Matthews, president of the Residents 3000 group and I also represent the Carlton Residents Association and the Eastenders.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much.

MS O'BRIAN:   We hope to have another colleague arrive shortly, Anne Ritter, who is here to represent the Carlton Residents Association.  As the convenor of the Carlton Gardens Group, I'm just going to make a few opening comments and Peter is going to carry the responsibility of the major part of our presentation.  Our position is that the Carlton Gardens and the Royal Exhibition Building is World Heritage listed and the first site on the Australian government's new National Heritage list.  

	The gardens are substantially degraded and many significant heritage features have been lost.  There are no agreed standards required for the gardens.  Funding for capital improvements and recurrent management is inadequate.  The present custodial arrangements have failed to protect the site.  We believe accountabilities have not been set up between the three levels of government that are responsible.  Its continued use for high-impact events is inappropriate and causes further damage to the gardens, the natural and principal asset.

	We believe the Carlton Gardens and Royal Exhibition Building site is a test case for the effectiveness of the legislation and government as custodians for the future to protect our national asset.  To this point there is no evidence that the listings are going to ensure the gardens' future as a heritage site.  Unless the Carlton Gardens are looked after, the non-replaceable national asset will be lost, the public and visitors will not be attracted and the economic benefit will not flow.

	We've identified some solutions to the problems that we've identified; policies and mechanisms in place that ensure all three levels of government work together.  There needs to be an agreed definition for standards required for the gardens as a World Heritage and national estate site.  Formal and effective accountabilities need to be in place, and that means an audit regime as well.  Funding for capital is needed to restore significant heritage elements and to accommodate contemporary uses including the presence and activities of Museum Victoria.  Formal community involvement is needed at strategic and operational levels of site's management.  This is a requirement of World Heritage listing, but at this point there is no formal arrangement for community involvement.  

	Our particular issue that we present today and which Peter will handle in detail is that we believe there is a question of heritage gardens or whether the Carlton Gardens is in fact an event site.  The Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show has been held in the southern part of the gardens since 1999.  The use of the gardens by MIFGS, that is as it is called locally, is of great concern to community groups and some members of the public.  The MIFGS is classed as a major Melbourne event, and as such, the damage to the gardens and the loss of public amenity is tolerated by the City of Melbourne, the responsible steward.  This event is a clear example of the contradictions between government's commitments to heritage values and pressure by business.

	The grassroots reality is that each year the gardens are treated as a construction site and take months to recover.  Funding goes into repairs instead of improvements.  Surely this is not sustainable.

MR MATTHEWS:   Thanks, Margaret.  Can I pick it up from there?

DR BYRON:   Please.

MR MATTHEWS:   You've got a document that looks like that which is much the same as the one that was emailed except that it's got a few editorials and it's got a nice heading on it.  Also in your folder you will find a plan of the gardens with the exhibition building which you can see from your window over there, and you'll also find a photocopy of this article that comes out of the Financial Review over the weekend, and while that appears to refer largely to the Formula One Grand Prix, it also mentions a number of other things, and as Margaret has said, the gardens and the MIFGS show are seen as major events, and indeed a letter from the council - the chairman of the committee that looks after this in the council says, "It's a hallmark event in attracting significant visitation and economic benefits to Victoria."

	That may be the case, or if one takes a look at what the Victorian auditor‑general may say, there  may be some different view to that.  Certainly we are not convinced by our own observation nor by any figures that council have been able to produce that a large number of overseas visitors come.  In that sense it's less like the Chelsea Flower Show which they like to compare themselves with.

	As Margaret said, the major problem that we have is with the MIFGS, the garden show.  It's significant that the city council has decided that this will be the only event in the gardens.  So while they use the reasoning that the gardens were part of the whole exhibition complex and were used as part of the exhibition complex, that is the excuse for which they say we can use the Carlton Gardens south as an exhibition space for this garden show which is more than a garden show.  It includes Ford motor cars, Tupperware and a range of other delectables.

	You can see from the map in front of you - the plan in front of you - that the southern garden is the piece that we are concerned about.  The southern garden is in the front of the main entrance to the Royal Exhibition Building.  It comes off Victoria Street and it's the entrance from the city.  If you consider that, you consider that the purpose of those gardens, the specific design of those gardens was as an introduction to the Royal Exhibition Building.  You can see there's a central avenue up the middle at which you can look at the Hochgurtel Fountain which is also very, very famous and a beautiful fountain, and see the exhibition building.

	That meant that the design and looking after the gardens ever since when they have been looked after well involves real horticulture and real beauty.  They were built initially to let people go to the Royal Exhibition Building through a beautiful entrance, not to put exhibits in there; never had exhibits in until this time, and of course people then wandered around when they came out of the exhibition building, as I've said in the text, you know, startled and amazed by the innovations and technology that they've seen inside the building and they come out and have a nice quiet sit-down there.  There were a few statues about, but no exhibits of any kind whatsoever.

	The only part of the gardens that was ever used for exhibits is in fact on the other side, the north side, where the museum now stands, and some temporary buildings were put up there in the late 19th century for the big exhibitions that really brought the Royal Exhibition Building into fame.  They were built there, temporary buildings, and later were knocked down.  So what we are talking about is the southern gardens, and that is a very different proposition from the northern gardens which are very attractive also, but you can see the design, you can see the number of trees and you can see the avenue there.  What we had in the 2005 MIFGS exhibition was 191 exhibits on that small space amongst all those trees and on the lawns.

	We are members of the events advisory group of the city council which looks at this issue, and we've been fighting - struggling I should say - for the last two or three years about this issue.  We don't have any problem with the garden show, but it shouldn't be there.  It's a major exhibition.  The organisers boast about the number of people who come, and if you'd like to take a look at the back of that stapled group, you will see some colour photographs of what goes on in the gardens.  Many of the trees are heritaged - I don't know which ones, but there are supposed to be tree protection zones around each tree.  You can see that during the construction, this doesn't occur.  In the top left-hand one, you can see brickworks being done.  In the next one you can see fairly heavy - I think that's mostly wood.  Then down the bottom there's another tree which looks as if it might be used as something to lean on, and down the bottom again you can see concrete works under the tree and brickworks going on there and on a concrete base.

	If you turn over, you will see similar things occurring.  The picture of the exhibition building there is just to give you a sense of the real place, although if you have a look at that big truck that's standing in front of it - it is on a hard surface, but that's the size of the operation.  It is huge, and again if you look to the right, you will see a truck.  Now, they tell us no trucks go on the grass.  There's a truck on the grass, and in the closing - when the gardens were available to the public again after the MIFGS had closed, I counted just personally 12 trucks on the grass, and the edges of the grass, because they drive along the pathway, but then they drive onto the edges to park so that they can load or unload, they are now covered in strips of new turf which, in spite of the recent rains, you can still see it's a totally different colour and in fact it looks like different grass.  I'm not a horticulturalist, but visually it just looks totally different.  You can see the size of the machines from those two bottom pictures that operate in the gardens in preparation or dismounting of the exhibition.

	As I say, the reason the council have given us for pursuing this line is that the gardens were traditionally part of the exhibition complex.  They were, but they were not used - the southern part of the garden was not used for exhibits.  It was used as a beautiful entrance to the Royal Exhibition Building which as you know is a thing of beauty in itself, and it was simply - there were some statues originally in the garden, but they were not exhibits.  They were statues in a beautiful garden.  It's a pleasure garden, and every year we have this - as I said, last year, 191 exhibits.  Many are extremely heavy.  

	They have huge trucks, which supply energy around the place, on the grass; very large trucks, refrigerated trucks which carry ice-cream and all those things, but I mean as large as that one in the picture, and toilets are also there.  To our mind this is a very unhappy situation which we believe the council is pursuing only because they regard it as a successful event, and there is I'm afraid a sort of thing about events in every country and every city and every town in the world.  This we feel has overwhelmed the gardens and it is a commercial exercise from which the gardens gain absolutely nothing and are badly damaged every year and never recover in time.  As I say, we're now in August and the grass - this grass hasn't recovered.  I'm happy to leave it there if that's all right with you, and we're pleased to answer any questions or comments that you care to make.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much.  Just looking at the conclusion, we've been saying publicly up till now that the Commission is not really empowered to resolve specific matters of interest, but we're very interested in cases like this where they demonstrate that for whatever reason, the system for the protection, management, conservation of historic important places doesn't seem to be working as well as it might, and given that, as you say, this was - it's the only World Heritage place that's a built place as opposed to a natural ‑ ‑ ‑

MS O'BRIAN:   That's right.  

DR BYRON:   - - - and the first on to the new National Heritage list, it's already been recognised as a very special heritage place of international significance.  So if there is something about the system which isn't working for this place, then it might create some fears about how well the system would work on lesser places.

MS O'BRIAN:   Mr Byron, that's the point we wanted to make.

DR BYRON:   Okay.  You must have some suggestions about the diagnosis of what's gone wrong and why and what could be done about it, but from a quick reading of the documentation here, there seems to be some jurisdictional issues for example between the World and National Heritage listing, the state register and what the city council does.  It's state crown land that's under the control of the city council.

MS O'BRIAN:   That's right.  

DR BYRON:   Is the answer as simple as sort of jurisdictional confusion or is that only the start of the problem?  Is there more to it than that?

MS O'BRIAN:   I think there's a dichotomy between values; the values of heritage protection and those of short-term commercial benefit for the events; people who benefit from events.

DR BYRON:   Those who are in favour of events - I never heard much about events until I came to live in Melbourne, but ‑ ‑ ‑

MS O'BRIAN:   Melbourne is supposed to be - you live in Melbourne?

DR BYRON:   Yes.  

MS O'BRIAN:   I need to say no more.

MR HINTON:   If I may interrupt.  I'm new to Melbourne.  I now live in Melbourne, but I don't know when MIFGS is actually held.

DR BYRON:   April.

MR HINTON:   It's in April?

MS O'BRIAN:   April, yes.

MR MATTHEWS:   You saw the Formula One cars going around the city no doubt.

MR HINTON:   Yes.

MS O'BRIAN:   That was March.

MR MATTHEWS:   End of March.

MS O'BRIAN:   So MIFGS happens in April.

MR MATTHEWS:   I think this is comparable.  They were dangerous.  This is I think damaging to our heritage.

DR BYRON:   I was going to say, those who are in favour of events, including MIFGS, would they say, what, that the damage to the gardens is only short-term and by March next year they would have recovered in time to have another display or did they recognise that there were some costs to the gardens, but do they argue that the benefit to the city and to the state outweighs the costs to the gardens?  I'm probably asking the wrong person, but you must have heard their response.  Maybe you could summarise it for me.

MR MATTHEWS:   I don't think we've ever had an economic response on that sense, one thing against another.  We know, and a whole lot of people in the City of Melbourne and visitors, suburban people also know that the gardens do not recover.  It depends on the weather - greatly on the weather.  Last year was a real problem because of the drought.  This year it shouldn't be except that they chew up an enormous amount of grass.  If you go and have a look at it - I already have - lately it's like a jigsaw.  There are patches of new grass and it simply isn't the same as the rest of it, and along the edges particularly of pathways, you can see where there are long strips of new turf laid because that's where trucks run over.  We've been assured a number of times that that wouldn’t happen.  Trucks are not allowed on the grass.

MS O'BRIAN:   Peter, I think there is also evidence that it doesn't recover.

MR MATTHEWS:   No.  

MS O'BRIAN:   Grass can't mature in one year, and also we find that exhibits get bigger each year, they take up more space to a point now where there wouldn't be a space not penetrated either by an exhibit or people walking over the grass as part of their visit.  So we believe it's a bit of both, Mr Byron, that they argue very strongly that it recovers, but then you have a matter of defining recovery.  They argue that there is an economic benefit, and reports are presented, but as the Financial Review says, it's not a cost benefit, it's a general statement of economic benefit and we're supposed to have faith that in the churning effect of money changing hands will be testament to the value of having the public and heritage gardens used for a commercial event.

MR MATTHEWS:   Can I just say we've been talking about grass.  This isn't grass actually.  It's supposed to be lawn, and you know what the British say about the lawns surrounding the manor house or the castle or whatever is, "How do you get it like that?"  "Well, you sow it and you mow it for a hundred years."  Now, that's lawn.  This is no longer lawn, believe me.

MS O'BRIAN:   No, and when ‑ ‑ ‑

MR MATTHEWS:   Although they call them lawns.

MR HINTON:   Has there been a proposal or an alternative site, and if there has, is one of the arguments that the special nature of this site makes it valuable that a second site or alternative site wouldn't have?  What's the debate there?

MS O'BRIAN:   Both.  You two have managed to capture the issues . The attractiveness is of course that it is by its nature a garden site and they love the canopy, but the people who come and set up are construction workers.  Were you aware that in the heritage gardens, a planning permit is not needed for construction work that anywhere else would need a planning permit?  They build houses.  The people who come into our gardens to build those constructions next week will be down at Caroline Springs with their bobcats.  They're indifferent in effect to the fact that it's a heritage garden.

MR HINTON:   So has there been proposals for alternative sites?

MS O'BRIAN:   Yes.  

MR MATTHEWS:   We have suggested Birrarung Marr down on the river.  They say that is not suitable.  We suggested Birrarung Marr and Federation Square because they're adjacent to one another.  They say that is not suitable.  I'm not quite sure why.  Did they say it's not big enough?

MS O'BRIAN:   They say it's not big enough, but I think that they lack imagination.

MR MATTHEWS:   Yes.  Actually it would be a terrific site for it as a matter of fact, yes, because it doesn't ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   Especially from your perspective.

MR MATTHEWS:   Yes, and the other site that we've proposed is the showgrounds, and currently the state government is renovating those showgrounds, and clearly that would be an ideal place because that's what it's for, you know, and it's got toilets.  You don't have to bring in a huge big truck to provide toilets.  It's got food outlets already in there.  You don't have to bring in trucks and have people trucking stuff around.  It's a proper show place, and we can't get any response from the council on that issue.

DR BYRON:   Do the promoters say, "Come and see the Melbourne International  Flower Show.  It's in the World Heritage ‑ ‑ ‑"

MS O'BRIAN:   Something like - yes.

MR MATTHEWS:   Well, yes and no.  I think fundamentally they didn't mention it much this year.

MS RITTER:   Several years ago when the flower show was a much smaller affair, it was held in the Fitzroy Gardens, and it had to be moved because they considered it was too large and intrusive for those gardens.  So they moved it to the exhibition, but in actual fact the Fitzroy Gardens are much bigger than our ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   Those comments are from Anne Ritter who has since joined us.

MR MATTHEWS:   Sorry, yes.

MS O'BRIAN:   Can I suggest, too, that - Mr Byron, you brought up the issue of the breaking down of the system or the regulations.  The City of Melbourne has a licence, and that licence is signed by the state government as well as the City of Melbourne, and we have pointed to a number of noncompliance matters - quite substantial.  For instance, the licence defines the event as horticultural.  Our view is that marketing Ford cars, constructioning a Tupperware kitchen, having a significant percentage of the site as being food outlets doesn't constitute horticultural, and yet there seems to be a disconnect between the licence which our advice is it's significantly flawed as a legal document anyway and what they purport is the event anyway.  

	So even at an operational level, we as part of the advisory group have been trying to get the council to address fundamental issues like the compliance even against their own licence, and basically we're ignored.  We have raised the issue of internal audits or external audits in the past to a committee meeting.  Once again none of this is taken up.

DR BYRON:   My understanding is that both the state government and the Melbourne City Council worked very, very hard in pursuit of the World Heritage listing for the REB and the gardens.

MS O'BRIAN:   Yes.  

DR BYRON:   So what you're saying is that their behaviour now is not consistent with their arguments.

MS O'BRIAN:   Before and after.  I mean, I really think, too, that those who have sponsored the site really don't have an understanding of the grassroots realities of it.  I don't know what their view is of what it's like, but it's very substantially degraded.

MR MATTHEWS:   I think everybody fought for the World Heritage thing.  Everybody supported it, but now it's commercially taken advantage of by the people who run the MIFGS show and by the city council who - you know, it's another event just like the rest.

MS O'BRIAN:   And we can't get proper funding even after several years of working with the council to establish a master plan.  This year in the council's budget, there was $50,000, and that was not even for capital improvements or a current capital to improve the existing problems in the gardens.  It was purely for design work.

DR BYRON:   Isn't there a responsibility on the Australian government under both World Heritage listing and National Heritage listing to ensure that there's a conservation management plan.

MS O'BRIAN:   Yes.  We understand that's happening.  We haven't seen it.  The community groups aren't yet involved.  We have asked to be involved.  That hasn't happened.  There's no funding this year.  There might be funding for people resources to start writing it.  We don't know, but we have attended meetings where representatives from heritage and environment have been, and they have said there was no money yet.  So the application in reality and the theoretical support, it's as if there was a tick.  "We've got a tick now.  We've got a World Heritage site."  So?

DR BYRON:   Well, that does certainly suggest that the system is breaking down a bit.  Tony?

MR HINTON:   There is an issue, Neil, of ‑ in response to Neil's comment that we will not be ruling on individual cases but will be using individual cases to enrich our understanding of the system and how it operates, and you said that's exactly what you want, it's not quite matched by the actual words in your written submission and I wanted to make sure there was no misunderstanding there.  I think it would be beyond our remit for example to make a recommendation that the MCC should proceed with the Carlton Gardens master plan.  We will not be receiving submissions on that issue directly speaking.

MR MATTHEWS:   No.  

MR HINTON:   I wanted to make sure that I'm not misrepresenting what you think the Commission is really going to be doing here.  That's not a judgment or a comment as to empathy or lack of sympathy.  It's really making sure we have clarity as to what the Commission's responsibilities really are.  We have enough challenges actually.

DR BYRON:   You might be surprised.  The details are different, but the same sort of fundamental issue has arisen in other states, too, where for example the Adelaide parklands around the one square mile of the Adelaide CBD, there are questions there about how well is the state protecting.  That isn't actually National Heritage or World Heritage, but there are still similar questions about how well is the system working, and people there expressed rather similar concerns to what you've expressed here.

MR MATTHEWS:   It's very historic.  I mean whether it's heritage or not, in a technical sense it's certainly - yes.

MR HINTON:   Some have made application to put it on the national list.

MS O'BRIAN:   The people from Adelaide?

MR HINTON:   Yes.  

MS O'BRIAN:   I would support that, too.

MR HINTON:   That's now on the transcript.

DR BYRON:   The point that I was trying to make is that although we don't have a magic wand to resolve this specific issue, to the extent that it's a class of problem where the system doesn't seem to be working, we can draw attention to it and try and see if we can make the system work better where it's much clearer who's responsible and accountable for outcomes when places are heritage listed at particular levels.  But given the exceptional case of the Royal Exhibition Building as our only built World Heritage in Australia, one would have thought that it was being extraordinarily carefully handled as if money was no object in getting it right, but that's not the message that you're giving us.

MR MATTHEWS:   As the director of the museum is sitting there, we did say in the paper, the Royal Exhibition Building to my mind is well used and certainly very well looked after, and it's a distinction between there and the gardens.

DR BYRON:   The southern gardens.

MR MATTHEWS:   Yes.  The Royal Exhibition Building is being used in its traditional way.  The gardens are being exploited in - I won't say not traditional; a very modern way.

DR BYRON:   Okay.  I think we'd better leave it there and move on to the museum.

MR MATTHEWS:   Thank you very much.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much for coming and for bringing this matter to our attention.

MS O'BRIAN:   Thank you, Mr Hinton, Mr Byron.

DR BYRON:   Dr Greene.  Thank you very for coming.  Thank you for the written submission.  The usual way of conducting these hearings, if you just introduce yourself for the transcript and summarise the main points that you want to give to us today, and then Tony and I would like to discuss that with you.  Thanks for the input.

DR GREENE:   First of all, thank you for agreeing to my submission to the Productivity Commission's inquiry.  My name is Patrick Greene.  I'm the chief executive officer for Museum Victoria.  I've held that position for three years now.  Museum Victoria is the state museum organisation for Victoria, and our four main buildings are Melbourne Museum which is a new building of course.  It opened five years ago; Royal Exhibition Building - and I've just come in on the tail end of that last one and I heard those words ringing around the room - the Immigration Museum which is in the very fine Customs House facing onto the Yarra down on Flinders Street; a setting which is in the process of being enhanced actually by the demolition of the flyover over King Street which has been I think a blot on the landscape ever since it was built, and Scienceworks which is in the Spotswood Pumping Station which is where we have our science museum and interactive science centre in a wonderful building built towards the end of the 19th century; a station built to pump Melbourne's sewage up the hill so that gravity could then take it down to Werribee, disguised as a sort of French chateau.  So it's an interesting building in all sorts of ways.

	So we are custodians of those buildings which we look after and which we interpret to the public.  One of the things which has struck me since I arrived in Australia is two remarks.  One remark is, "Look, you're a medieval archaeologist.  You're from Europe which has a long history.  Why have you come to Australia?" to which I answer, "Well, Australia has a long history, too," Aboriginal history which our museums interpret as well as post-settlement Australia, but secondly the buildings and townscapes and indeed rural sites of the colonial and post-colonial periods are, for me, fascinating.  

	In the context of somebody, as you see from my submission, that ran a museum in Manchester and was part of the regeneration of Manchester very much based on historic buildings, I find a tremendous affinity with a city like Melbourne or Sydney which are, like Manchester, creations of the late 18th and 19th centuries.  Manchester is as much a creation of the era of the new world as Melbourne would be.  In Melbourne there are - and indeed regional Victoria - a fantastic range of sites of interest and buildings of importance, including - and you can see them from these windows here - fascinating suburbs which I suspect, I think anyway, the significance of which is yet to reach an international audience and which I also believe are still not appreciated fully by people who live here.  I think they're absolutely extraordinary survivors and very important to respect.

	So one of the big steps forward in the past year was of course the inscription of the Royal Exhibition Building on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and I know from discussions with for example Stephen Hare who I believe has also spoken to you, that that very act alone has helped to - in that process of building public awareness of the importance of historic buildings certainly in Victoria, but also in its setting.  I think it's very important, the setting of the gardens, but the setting of the gardens within an area.  If you walk around the perimeter of Carlton Gardens, you see assemblage of buildings on the four sides which are utterly fascinating, ranging from the headquarters of the Royal Society of Victoria to churches to convents to hospitals to domestic residences to public buildings; a real snapshot of marvellous Melbourne.  So the Royal Exhibition Building, its setting and then its wider setting I think provide a market really for the rest of the world.  Yes, Australia has got some very special things, and this is one of them.  

	The other thing which I suppose came into my submission was funding of course.  You'd expect that.  My experience in Europe and my experience here tells me that the heritage and historic places contribute in a number of ways to the national wealth.  One of the ways is the national sense of identity, of history, of place in the world; another is the economic one.  Visitors to a place like Melbourne don't come for the sunshine, although it shines a great deal more than in my previous city, but they do come for a rich and varied experience which will have all sorts of experience; cultural, sporting, retail, gastronomic, but also historic ambience, and the built environment of an exciting city.

	The evidence from Tourism Victoria is that the number of overnight stays of overseas visitors in Victoria has been going on.  The number of overseas visitors coming to Victoria has been going up, and I certainly believe that what Victoria has to offer in terms of Melbourne as a city which still has quite a lot of its historic character intact - not all of it regrettably, but a lot - plus cities outside, Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine and many others - and today I've been in Geelong and looking at some of the buildings of the wool heritage there which are very important - these all add to the range of attractiveness of this state which I think is a vital component of Australia's tourism offer.

MR HINTON:   Dr Greene, you mentioned the Royal Exhibition Building and you also mentioned the streetscapes surrounding it.  Is the juxtaposition of those buildings to the Royal Exhibition Building in itself make those buildings that much more worthy of heritage conservation so that particular residence there along Rathdowne I suppose it is ‑ ‑ ‑

DR GREENE:   Rathdowne and Nicholson and Carlton Terrace, yes.

MR HINTON:   That particular residence for example would warrant greater effort for conservation than say a similar house in a suburb further out?  Is that a valid issue?

DR GREENE:   That would certainly be the expectation of UNESCO because one of the conditions of placing a site on the World Heritage list is that the setting of that site should be protected.  The Victorian government has just established a steering group and I've just agreed to be a member of it to advise on the legislation which will go through the Victorian parliament to provide that extra level of planning protection for that environment of the World Heritage site.

MR HINTON:   Does it then follow that government funding for the conservation of that particular hypothetic residence should also be commensurately higher relative to its counterpart out in the suburbs as well?  Is that the necessary consequence?

DR GREENE:   I think that most planning regimes that I’m familiar with work on an assessment basis where a series of factors are taken into consideration.  I would hate it to be thought that a building in Kew or wherever - Williamstown - would be less well regarded as a result of this; quite the reverse, I would hope that the very act of seeking to protect the setting of the World Heritage site would raise awareness generally and lead to a positive attitude in terms of  both a planning regime, but also historic building grant scheme that would be to the benefit of the whole of the historic fabric of Melbourne and its suburbs.

DR BYRON:   I was just wondering whether the inscription of the Royal Exhibition Building on the World Heritage list and national list, too, reinforces a sort of stereotype in the public mind about the beautiful, the grand, the sandstone or bluestone in some case, because a number of people have said to us there's a real bias towards the grand and the aesthetic, the material that is charismatic and would appear on calendars.  Does it detract from the humble worker's cottage, miner's cottage, meatworker's cottage or whatever, and does it also distract from places which may be of great historical or technological interest, but not particularly aesthetic?  I think you're the right person to ask this question because the Spotswood Pumping Station, sewerage is hardly a glamorous topic, but we talked about the gasometers in Bendigo.

DR GREENE:   Yes.  

DR BYRON:   Old meatworks, old abattoirs and so on that may be extremely important in a historical cultural sense, but very unfashionable and unattractive.

DR GREENE:   When I was in the UK, the museum that I ran there was established in the five historic buildings of the world's oldest railway station which were all derelict when the project started and which the owners, which was British Rail, had one ambition for which was to demolish and turn into a carpark.  There has been a very interesting and steady change of attitude in the UK towards industrial sites and their importance, and I've seen that elsewhere, for example in Catalonia.  

	The Catalan Museum of Science and Technology consists of a network of sites of industrial importance from Turasa, which is where the headquarters are which is a textile town, out to one of the sites I went to about four years ago which was a concrete construction plant where all the concrete for the buildings that Gaudi adorned Barcelona with was created, and in fact the Gaudi family has some interests in the concrete plant.  I can point to examples in Germany - for example steelworks in the Ruhr which have been reserved, and the rapid pace of de-industrialisation has made this an urgent issue to consider, and the same is true of course in Australia.  

	I think that change of attitude is also reflected in the Royal Exhibition Building because whilst it may be adorning calendars now, it came within one vote of demolition 20 years ago.  So the fact it survived is only by the skin of its teeth and through a change of attitude.  So the argument for putting that on the list is not an argument against looking to preserve other important sites in the state.  The pumping station, Scienceworks, could easily have been stripped of the steam engines which are inside the building.  They could easily have been sold for scrap by Melbourne Water who were the owners.  Fortunately they weren't.  There was some sense that they were historically important.

	Part of the importance of Scienceworks, of the pumping station, is not just the buildings, their external appearance which is important of course in its own right, but the fact that intact within there are the pumping engines, one imported from Leeds I think it was, and the others which were copied here in Melbourne.  So it is the degree to which that site is intact that is important.  

MR HINTON:   Isn't there a tension there - to interrupt you - on that point because adaptive reuse is seen by many as a very powerful driver for ensuring continued occupation which means it's a very powerful driver for conservation.

DR GREENE:   Yes.  

MR HINTON:   Retaining the shell enables for adaptive reuse, but if you keep a lot of the internal equipment that was its previous use, then that almost precludes or it certainly makes it very difficult to pursue adaptive reuse option.  Do you have any reactions to that line of argument?

DR GREENE:   Yes.  It is a balancing act to be struck where internal features and fittings may be very important historically and may score very highly when it comes to assessing the heritage significance of the building, but there are other buildings where the shell of the building - it may only be the shell of the building that's surviving in many cases.  It may be stripped, the roof may have rotted beyond repair, all sorts of things.  Heritage conservation is always a matter of weighing up the best outcome, and that's what makes it so interesting.

	Something like the Customs House which we have the Immigration Museum had gone through all sorts of different uses, different government offices and not treated too well.  So in terms of the interior, some of the areas have been suitable for a sort of freer hand than others simply on a judgment of intactness whereas the Royal Exhibition Building one would not wish to interfere with at all or only in a very, very sympathetic way in order to make it useable today.  We have a challenge with that building.  One of the things we would love to do with it were funds available - and they're not at the moment, which is another subject of course but it's a subject very much related to your deliberations - is to do something which was one of the thrilling experiences if you visited Melbourne from 1880 onwards, which is to go as a visitor up to a promenade which surrounded the dome.  You paid thruppence to do that and it was the equivalent of going up the Rialto Tower today.  We'd love to reintroduce that.

DR BYRON:   For thrupence?

DR GREENE:   That would be a very generous donation, but the present staircase arrangements would not meet the current regulations.  So there again is one of those balancing acts to be struck.  I'm sure, because I've worked on a number of historic buildings in the past of importance, it is possible to strike that balance.  All the time one is having to do that.  This is the objective.  How do we reach it respecting the integrity of the building, but also meeting contemporary regulations and requirements of visitors including those with, say, mobility difficulties?

DR BYRON:   I was very interested in your observation about the international tourism potential of Australian heritage.  I should preface my question by saying that my children would allege that I'd taken them to every museum, castle, art gallery, monastery, abbey, et cetera in Western Europe and the UK.  I'm sure we missed a couple, but having been in places where there are so many places of outstanding and very long heritage significance, some people have said to us that why would Europeans or North Americans or Japanese come all the way to Australia to see buildings that are 50 or a hundred or 150 years old when they've got 1000, 5000‑year‑old buildings in China or whatever.  

	So what is it with your eyes that you can see that makes the Australian heritage sufficiently attractive to bring people from distant parts of the world?  Is it the uniquely Australianness of it - you know, the bullnose verandahs or is it the  mix of built with natural heritage including landscape and indigenous culture?  What's the attraction and how do we capitalise on that?

DR GREENE:   Just to comment on that first remark about European countries with a lot of stuff, one of the things we ‑ ‑ ‑

DR BYRON:   Technical term.

DR GREENE:   One of the things which Australia does not have is that sheer quantity, and of course Italy for example always says it has a third of the world's cultural monuments.  Whether it's a third or not, it's a lot, and it requires a lot of looking after.  So in a sense Australia has an advantage in that the stock of things calling upon resources to look after them is actually less.  Therefore there's a good argument for doing it really well and making the most of it.

	I was looking at some figures just this afternoon.  If you take Britain and the  British Isles which has a vast number - not as many as Italy, but a vast range of sites, of buildings, the money which the Heritage Lottery Fund has invested in heritage.  3 billion pounds has been distributed by the Heritage Lottery Fund over the past 10 years - 3 billion pounds - of which roughly speaking, 1 billion has gone to museums and galleries and similar institutions.  1 billion pounds.  We're talking $A2.3 billion at today's exchange rate.  Another billion has gone into natural - so‑called natural, because there aren't many natural sites that aren't affected by man - and built heritage, so a staggering investment.

	I put that on the table because that in turn has often levered other money because most of it is partnership funding and that other money may come from the private sector, it may come from governments, it may come from the European Union which has put considerable sums in through the European Regional Development Fund.  So we're talking about a very, very big investment.  I think that's worth the Productivity Commission bearing in mind when you're looking back at Australia and saying is there the right sort of funding regime, and I've suggested that some sort of partnership funding might be appropriate here, in dealing and making the most of Australia's heritage.

	So what is there to appeal to the overseas visitor?  One is the way in which Australia has taken ideas from the rest of the world and made them its own, and if you go to Castlemaine or you go to Bendigo or Ballarat, you see streetscapes which are gold - they are of the gold era, built in a remarkably short period of time from 1851 onwards and built with such panache and confidence and wealth when Victoria was the richest place in the world and which is still there today, and you contrast that for example with some of the gold-mining areas of New Zealand which are built later where there is nothing like it in terms of the built heritage.  These are places really well worth seeing, and somewhere like Sovereign Hill which sets itself up to interpret that era and does so in a very good way provides that link.

	In Sovereign Hill, the Chinese market has developed the stories of the Chinese miners who came here in an incredibly effective way and is now very much on the tour route for Chinese visitors.  So actually understanding what it is that came from elsewhere and relating what happened to it here back to the countries from which tourists come is one of the very effective ways of doing it.

	In the case of somewhere like Melbourne, there are few cities around that can boast the way in which Melbourne took the idea of the European park which largely comes from - well, ideas that accompanied the Crystal Palace, the development of Central Park, Joseph Paxton, his ideas which were developed in Birkenhead in the north-west of England.  Birkenhead believe it or not - not many people do - influenced Central Park in New York.  This was the era at which Melbourne was developing, and Melbourne put this idea of the sort of lungs within the city really put it to life in a most extraordinary way, and it is something which is, I think, very, very special.  

	You can almost walk from one end of Melbourne to the other through parks, and that's very special.  From those parks you can then walk to, for example, streets of workers' housing in Port Melbourne, South Melbourne, North Melbourne, Carlton, these areas, where the workers' housing was done in a completely different way to, say, the red brick terraces of the north of England.  Here you see these what are quite often modest houses, and now quite expensive ones, with these grand facades on, and every piece of tin roof has in front of it an elaborate Etruscan, Grecian piece of - sort of like icing sugar often with a name on which is evocative of where the people who built that house came from which may be from any part of the world or many, many parts of the world.

	I find this constant fascinating to walk around these streets, and then you get other eras where as you know, in some areas the money was flowing and the buildings went up.   Then it might stop and then money might flow again and more buildings go up.  So in terms of art deco buildings, there are wonderful art deco buildings around the suburbs here - absolutely fantastic - which take those art deco motifs but interpret them in a Melbourne way actually because they're different in Sydney, and Sydney has tremendous appeal.  Perth - again if you look around the suburbs up from the river at these extremely expensive houses, but go for a walk and you find something which is distinctively Western Australian in that case.

	So I think the built environment is something which I think I can be bold enough to say is not yet - I don't think Australians yet realise just how special some of these environments are, but they are special enough to attract people from overseas who will absolutely marvel at them.  I've seen them do it so many times.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much.  Tony?

MR HINTON:   I'm fine thanks.

DR BYRON:   I don't think I have any other questions.  Was there anything you wanted to say by way of conclusion; anything that we've overlooked?

DR GREENE:   I suppose one thing that I am particularly aware of is the number of small museums around Australia occupying historic buildings, but often operating on a shoestring.

MR HINTON:   Volunteers.

DR GREENE:   Volunteers, often ageing volunteers.  There are some real issues around that, and I think one of the opportunities of looking at partnership funding arrangements or challenge funding arrangements, to try and sustain or give a lift - I think the way the Heritage Lottery Fund in Britain has worked is it's been good because it hasn't got drawn into long-term funding.  What it's done is invest in ways which will put right, if you like, several decades of decay and get something on the right footing.  Help that little cafe to develop which will help to sustain the running costs; those sort of approaches, and I think looking at ways to help people help themselves would be a very effective way of investing in heritage and historic infrastructure of Australia.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much, and thank you for coming today.

DR GREENE:   Thank you very much. 
 
DR BYRON:   We now have representatives from the Roman Catholic Trust Corp.  

MR CANNON:   Mr Hinton, Mr Byron, my name is Dermott Cannon.  I'm the property officer for the Catholic archdiocese of Melbourne.  Thank you very much for taking our late submission which you're probably going to spend the next couple of minutes reading as we talk through it.  Today I've got Richard Falkinger, our architect, who will take you through his report centralising on the issues that he's been centrally involved with which is basically St Patrick's Cathedral.  Whilst we have a number of people that we'd call upon today, I think we use that as an example and take it through with regards to the sort of common themes that are prevalent in the management of the heritage and historical buildings that we have in our portfolio.  That is what we would call it.  Richard, thank you, if you could take it through.

MR FALKINGER:   Sure.  Thank you.  I have been the cathedral architect for St Patrick's Cathedral since 1971 for 28 years, and I served four archbishops, two deans, a sacristan and a very good business manager.  The last five years I'm now engaged as a cathedral architect for St Paul's.  It's an extraordinary situation that one man should be allowed to work on two cathedrals in the same city.  It's fantastic.  I can't get over it.  I have to pinch myself sometimes, but the reason I guess why I'm here is because I have witnessed 27 years of conservation in a practical way on an everyday basis always believing that good conservation is good outcome; good outcome for the building, for the fabric, good outcome for the client and for the general public.

	So what is it in a nutshell that I can tell you other than you reading what I've been saying?  I think basically the cathedral, if it had the money, would have preferred to do the work much earlier and would have preferred to do it not just in stages, but do it as a big package.  But one of the things that I've learned very quickly, particularly once Archbishop Little accepted my recommendations that we needed to really seriously start about restoring the fabric, that they went out on a limb and said, "Well, Richard, $10 million is a lot of money.  Where the hell do you think I get it from?"  I was always confident we would raise it.  The state government gave us $2 million.  The federal government at the very end of the project gave us another million dollars.  We've raised $4 million from the parishes through a program of five years of donations, of giving, and we've raised the remainder through public donations of very generous people, including business community.

	It won't be anything new to you if I tell you that I'm doing the same thing again now with St Paul's except it's $20 million and they've been given more money from the federal government and more money from the state government and more money from other people.  So we are half point at St Paul's.  $10 million we have.  We need another 10 to go.  All these years I have been actively involved in actually fundraising.  I am going cap in hand to all my rich friends and say, "What about it?"  I am making appearances at various churches and parishes and say, "Look, we really have to do this together."  It's a difficult task, and of course coming from Europe, I'm reminding myself what a different picture it is there.  

	You may be aware of the concordat of the late 19th century which took away from the Vatican the rights to look after the churches, and it meant that the governments have since the paid for all the churches, all the works, including the priests' salaries.  That picture is Germany, France, Italy, Austria and a number of other countries, and it has struck me that one of the things that we are missing out on is that whilst it's okay to ask the general public to donate money, it is not okay that we don't have enough money to maintain the buildings in a proper way like in England.

	You are surely aware of the quinquennial surveys that require the church on all historic buildings to have a survey carried out every five years and to implement what is found over the next five years.  I wish we'd be so lucky here.  We don't have that.  We are struggling to carry out this huge restoration that has absorbed all the moneys over a period of 10 years - $10 million in St Patrick's case - and then what we should be doing is - this is now six years ago that we finished - we should be starting to plan the next lot of work.  We don't, and I would have thought that that was definitely - there's definitely a need for Heritage Australia to accept more responsibility understanding that if we don't maintain those beautiful buildings in the way they should be maintained, then the final outcome won't be as good as it is in Europe where there are buildings that are a thousand years old and still going well because there is an ongoing program of maintenance.

	Recently I went to Strasbourg, very fine cathedral.  Strasbourg has created a cathedral fund in the 11th century which is now so big that it can afford 2 million euros a year for maintenance.  Look, we're a young country.  We haven't had that kind of background, but nevertheless we ought to be channelling some sort of energy into believing that that's possible.  

	So in short, the experience of doing St Patrick's has been on a number of levels.  There is the exterior fabric and the restoration of it, there is the upgrading for the services which of course as you know won't last more than 40, 50 years, and then there is the renewal because a church is a living thing.  It's not something that you can say, "This is the church.  Have your mass there for the next thousand years."  It doesn't work that way.  It is something that needs to be accepted as a change.  So when Vatican II in 1966 came about with the new liturgy, it had an enormous impact on all the Catholic churches, in fact all the Christian churches; an impact that had to be understood because it wasn't just a matter of putting the altar somewhere in the front and having people surrounding it, it  needed to be done with the feeling that goes with a cathedral.

	So in 1971, I was lucky enough when I started at St Patrick's to design the first temporary altar for the Eucharistic Congress.  That became a model for many, many churches throughout Australia in the way that the church can go forward to celebrate the Eucharist in a way that wasn't possible in the old days.

	In 1970 when I started, there was no Heritage Act.  The Heritage Act came in in 1972.  So I had to deal with only the National Trust, and that was a different ballgame.  They came along on the ride, but they had their very different attitudes towards preservation than we would have had in terms of the need for renewal.  I have to say that things have changed.  The National Trust who are remembered vividly was very much against us when we built the new archdiocese offices in 1970 because it saw the demolition of the college - the Cathedral College - but I was very pleased when 30 years later, the National Trust has then decided to actually nominate the same building to the Heritage Council for a listing.  Furthermore the same building has now been rewarded the 25-year award by the Institute of Architects.

	I think from my perspective of doing the work and travelling around the world and working in other countries, what is the biggest drawback from my point of view is that I have no immediate future after I surveyed the fabric and say, "My God, this needs to be done, the pinnacle is falling off," et cetera, et cetera, and then I have to wait for years until the funding kicks in and we've got enough money to do the first stage.  So it's all a bit of a - it's too slow in response to the needs of the cathedral.  I understand the problem and I'm part of it in the sense that I am fundraising and being available for all that.  But being the cathedral architect, it would be so much easier if I had a budget that I could use over and plan for the next 10 years in advance, because as you know, the costs are always linked to the scaffolding, to this and to that, and if you can combine the skills of everybody, you get a better outcome, rather than doing it in a piecemeal way because you haven't got the money.

	So whilst it has been an extraordinary privilege for me as a person to be on the journey to look after St Patrick's Cathedral and now St Paul's Cathedral, I trust that I will continue to carry out my work for as long as it takes.  I said to the Prime Minister jokingly when I saw him a couple of years ago, "Don't give up so early.  I'm 10 years older than you and I'm still working," and he laughed.  It's true.  I'm 75 and I hope to do another 10 at least.  So I think at this time I'll take a rest and let you ask me some questions if you have any.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much.  One of the first things that occurs to me is that this problem is not unique to Melbourne or to this diocese.  There's a mention in the submission that you concur with the comments made by the Uniting Church from whom we'll hearing tomorrow.

MR FALKINGER:   Yes, I do.  I'm very much aware of that.

DR BYRON:    The former minister for heritage in Queensland who I believe is an Anglican priest was saying about the pieces falling off the roof of the Anglican cathedral in Sydney only recently.

MR FALKINGER:   Yes.  

DR BYRON:   So the theme is one that actually has come up almost everywhere we've been, I guess particularly in rural areas with declining populations, declining congregations, and yet very significant to the local community, the church buildings.

MR FALKINGER:   Indeed.

DR BYRON:   But often old, in need of a lot of maintenance and very little capacity to pay for it.  As you know, the Uniting Church submission talks about the problems in the public perception when they do the terribly wicked thing and close down a building simply because it cannot be safely maintained and used any more.

MR FALKINGER:   Yes.

DR BYRON:   In Queensland, the minister was saying how, you know, they have people in tears when he has to close down the church because they want to be buried there.  It's the same church as three, four generations before.  So this is a very real issue of historic churches of all denominations which are very culturally significant to their local communities, are typically in need of a lot of money, and that money is very hard to find.  Have I summarised that?

MR FALKINGER:   Yes.  

DR BYRON:   You've referred to the European example, and I guess that is very different.  I wouldn't want to speak for them, but I imagine either the Australian government or the Victorian government would say, "Well, if we had to give X million dollars each year for cathedrals and churches, then that's money that we can't use for banks and post offices or miners' cottages."

MR HINTON:   Theatres.

DR BYRON:   Or historic theatres or any number of other - one of the things that has really struck me is that there is no shortage of claims with merit, and the amount of funding that is available at the moment seems to be very, very small compared to the claims that are being made.  Would you agree?

MR FALKINGER:   Yes, I do.

DR BYRON:   So from the point of view of any government anywhere I guess, the balancing act is how much resources and in what form for conservation of heritage churches and cathedrals and who else will not get funding if it goes there.  Fortunately I don't have to make that trade-off, but somebody presumably does.

MR FALKINGER:   Yes.  

MR HINTON:   How much weight would you put on the importance of community contribution as being an indicator of community support as being a strong basis to convince governments to also support?  Could you give me a feel for how significant that is or if it's not significant?

MR FALKINGER:   Yes, I can.  May I just respond to you first by saying that I'm very conscious of the fact that both St Patrick's and St Paul's are of course the limelights if you like and attract because of it public attention and money.  My experience with the smaller churches through the country is the opposite; not a cent - not a cent, not a farthing.  So therein lies the problem that it's very difficult to know how to distribute the moneys available because there is more pressure from the archbishop or from the main church onto the governments of the day to help them than there is from a small community in Woop Woop.  So that was the first thing.  So I'm very much aware of that.

MR CANNON:   Can I just follow up Richard on that.  What follows on from that is that the significance of the actual buildings doesn't dissipate because what you find is the cathedral will have a significance to its community that goes there and that is diminishing, and we can understand, throughout Australia.  But what happens is it's disproportionate with regards to the local environments insofar as whilst the parishioners are decreasing locally, the significance doesn't decrease.  In fact it often increases and often to the detriment of the parish.  

	So you might have a situation - and John Preston from Uniting will raise it because it is an issue that he has close to his chest - where you will have made a decision, but you will find that someone external raises it from a local sense, be it from local council or through Heritage Victoria and gets involved in the process with a lack of consultation from other parties, relevant parties and that has a huge burden.  You talked about the issues of escalating R and M costs.  One of the issues that I would raise is OH and S.  If there is a chart as to how you apportion the funding, I would have thought that OH and S would be one of the parameters which you would look at insofar as determining how you apportion an amount.

	One of the other things that I wanted to raise also was the adaptability of use, and you raised it earlier in the previous discussions.  It's not only churches that we have on our portfolios.  It's convents, presbyteries and myriad of other properties that we have, and one of the things that we need to be mindful of is the evolution of the church and the continuing role of the church changes over time, and what might have been a worship centre 150 years ago needs to reflect the change in attitude.  

What we are finding is that from a local perspective, we were coming up against brick walls in the ability to actually apply that ability.  I can cite a number of examples where we'd have a parish hall, and you may have a control that is not only external.  It might be internal, and you have the inability to alter its state for it to continue, and what you will often find is that those objections often come from our own bodies, and John will raise this as well; that it's often the parishioners that are getting involved and they're normally of small numbers, but enough to put a spanner in the works.  That's not to say that we don't want to be seen as responsible owners of heritage buildings.  It's just that to continue ownership, which we'd like to do, becomes very, very difficult.

	Richard already raised the issues of the costs and the lack of money pumped in from the local level, and I know because I just don't see money being pumped into them, and ultimately they cross my desk when the decision has been made by the local parish priest that, "Well, we've reached a point of in time where we're just going to have to stand back and make a hard decision."  Of course in come the emotive issues from a local sense.  So I  hope that gives you a perspective.  Sorry, Richard.

MR FALKINGER:   No, that was important.  I have said from the outset that I was trying to concentrate on the big picture on terms of the cathedral because that's my expertise.  On the other hand, I'm very much aware, and I've mentioned in the report, that there is very much a different picture with the smaller communities and the various parishes, and the fact that the numbers are dwindling and in some cases, you know, there's a church that was designed originally for 200 people, now there are 15 and 20.  That can't be good, not in the long term.  Who is going to pay for all that, for the upkeep.

	So we have to face up to yet another dimension as we continue on.  The big buildings,  the cathedrals maintain their presence because they are icons, they are tourist icons in a sense and they are well known, but the smaller buildings are often forgotten and yet they are just as important.  In the local sense, they are just as important.  

	There is one other thing that I'd like to say in relation to Dermott's comment about the problems with different use and the change of use, and that is that in my experience working with the heritage people - Heritage Victoria - I have established a good rapport, one that allows us to negotiate the process of conservation together, and that's good.  When it comes to the local level, that's not the same thing.  There is an enormous lack of understanding because it's driven by heritage consultants who come and go and everyone has a different perspective on it.  So councils are not always aware of the real issues, and very often the outcome is draconian to say  the least, without any understanding of the blight the people who are making the submissions are in.  I think that needs to be understood.  I don't know how we would do it, but something needs to happen.

MR HINTON:   On adaptive reuse, how does the church go about making decisions as the owner of the property?  I think Dermott referred to the example of very few objecting, but it's very few of a small number who actually use the building.

MR FALKINGER:   Yes.  

MR HINTON:   Yet the value of the building's retention and conservation might in fact be community-wide which in turn would be larger again.

MR FALKINGER:   Yes.  

MR HINTON:   How does the decision-making manage that sort of numbers game that's part and parcel of communities.

MR FALKINGER:   Do you want to answer that?

MR CANNON:   Consultative and at a very early stage and it often doesn't resolve the problem.  Sometimes it inflames it.

DR BYRON:   I doubt that there's an easy answer to that.

MR CANNON:   No.  

DR BYRON:   Can I change the subject slightly with coming back to cathedrals.  A couple of people have suggested to us that having identified work that needs to be done and even raising some or most of the money, is there then an issue of people with the technical skills, the artisan skills, to look after something like the cathedral where - you know, the steeples, the slate roofs.  Are there sufficient stonemasons or people who can deal with 100‑year‑old glass rather than modern glass and these sorts of things.

MR FALKINGER:   The answer is there is no shortage, not in Victoria.  I'm not aware of other states, but in Victoria, we have what I call the A-team of very good people who have been in the business now for 20, 30 years and are available for whatever task is thrown at them.  So we've got good stonemasons.  There are three major firms who can tackle whatever comes simultaneously or in stages.  We've got very good glaziers, companies who work in that field.  We've got good roofing companies who are expert slaters and what have you.  So from my experience, I've never had a problem in finding the people who had the expertise to do the work, never.

DR BYRON:   Is three a succession plan?  I mean, these tradesmen aren't all your age, are they?

MR FALKINGER:   There is a problem when you go to the country and there's a problem when you have small jobs.  When you have small jobs, "We haven't got time."

MR CANNON:   Extra money.

MR FALKINGER:   Yes, but if it's a big job, you have no problem finding people.

DR BYRON:   That's very reassuring.

MR FALKINGER:   Yes.  

DR BYRON:   Did you have any other questions?

MR HINTON:   No, I'm fine.

DR BYRON:   I don't think I have any more questions.  I don't know that I have any answers either.  I think you've got some very good questions.  There's some thorny issues but ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   Is there anything not covered that you'd like to pick up before we move on?

MR FALKINGER:   There is.  Given my age, I haven't got that much more time to continue on my work, but ‑ ‑ ‑

MR HINTON:   Will you be telling the Prime Minister this as well?

MR FALKINGER:   Yes, exactly but, look, it's like this:  I was born in Munich.  When I left in 59, Munich was - particularly heritage buildings, 60 per cent were destroyed by the war.  The people of Munich said, "Well, we want our buildings back."  So there was an instant recognition that there was a need.  They established a need very quickly and they said, "Okay, let's have a tombola, let's have a national tombola to create money for this job," and within 10 years, up till 70 for the Olympic Games, the city looked like new.  It was just extraordinary the amount of money that was found to pay for it.

	I think that we need to change the way we think about heritage in terms of money.  If the European example is to say that 4 per cent of the GDP is all spent on heritage, I wonder what our percentage will be.  It certainly wouldn't  be 4 per cent, but I don't think that people have understood the great values of having a city with fine buildings from the point of view of people coming here from all over the world, and we don't spend enough from public money.  It needs to be increased, significantly increased, to make a dent in the problem.  That's what I would suggest.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much for that.

MR HINTON:   Thank you.

MR FALKINGER:   Thank you.

DR BYRON:   Thank you both very much for coming.  That concludes the advertised agenda for today.  Is there anybody in the room who would like to come forward and put something on the public record today rather than tomorrow?  In that case, I shall adjourn until tomorrow morning, and thank you all very much for your attendance and participation, ladies and gentlemen.

AT 5.32 PM THE INQUIRY WAS ADJOURNED UNTIL
TUESDAY, 9 AUGUST 2005

INDEX

		Page

AUSTRALIAN HERITAGE COUNCIL:
TOM  HARLEY		356-376
JANE LENNON

AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL OF NATIONAL TRUSTS:
SIMON MOLESWORTH		377-398

NATIONAL TRUST OF VICTORIA:
DIANNE WEIDNER		399-412
STEPHEN HARE
JIM GARD'NER

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR RENATE HOWE:	413-421

MUNICIPAL ASSOCIATION OF VICTORIA:
MARK MARSDEN		422-431

MARRINER THEATRES:
JASON MARRINER		432-440

SUSAN BALDERSTONE:		441-450

RESIDENTS 3000 INC:
PETER MATTHEWS
CARLTON GARDENS GROUP:
MARGARET O'BRIAN		451-461

MUSEUM VICTORIA:
PATRICK GREEN		462-469

ROMAN CATHOLIC TRUST CORP:
DERMOTT CANNON
RICHARD FALKINGER		470-478