Mr. John Moran:

At the time, everybody in the profession was well aware of the spatial strategy. It enabled towns as gateway towns and it was pro-development to the extent that people were anticipating that population growth. Where the issue arose is it was very difficult. If the Senator will recall, we had a rapidly growing population at the time. We had quite significant immigration and there was a view afoot that the population was going to continue to expand and that we were going to have to provide both residential and commercial accommodation to all these new population centres. Hindsight proves that we were completely wrong. Did it assist in fuelling development in locations where perhaps development was not sustainable otherwise? Absolutely.

One point I will make, and which I feel quite strongly about, is there has been a lot of blame delivered at the doors of the banks, estate agents, developers and various other stakeholders. The town planners in this country are also equally as culpable for fuelling the development boom. Planning policies were extraordinarily lax. They were difficult and virtually impossible, and incoherent in a number of respects. Certainly, in a chase for rates income and in a chase for each town wanting to out-develop each other, they led to completely and totally unsustainable development.