Tim Williams
Regeneration and Renewal blogger Tim Williams is director of Publicani consultancy and is currently working on projects in Australia where he now lives and the UK. He is a former special advisor to the Blair government and the Welsh Assembly Government. Prior to moving to Australia in December 2010 he was a managing director in Navigant Consulting’s 70 strong public services team.He has worked on projects for ,or advised, CEOs and key decision-makers in major public and private organisations in the UK such as Lend Lease , Homes and Communities Agency, Tenant Services Authority, National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts(NESTA), HOME(one of the UK’s biggest social housing providers),London Councils, London Mayor, DCLG, Olympic Legacy Company ,English Partnerships and a dozen London Boroughs including Ealing ,Tower Hamlets,Hackney, Barking and Islington. In Australia he has written a major report on broadband and public services for Huawei, the second largest electronics company in the world and is an advisor to Coffs Harbour and Knox City councils in New South Wales and Melbourne respectively. He is currently working on a project for the major Australian social/community housing providers and a digital strategy for Coffs Harbour.
Tim has a Ph.D from the University of Wales,a degree in history from Cambridge, a teaching certificate from Oxford and was called to the Bar from the Inner Temple.he thinks he intellectually peaked at 18….
The Aussie dollar has hit $1.07 to the Yankee dollar and some are suggesting the ceiling might be still some way off at $1.20 . To put this in a British perspective in 2009 the pound was worth around $2.40 Aussie dollars and is now staring $1.40 in the face. The Aussie dollar is being upgraded due to a number of factors. Partly, it’s because the situation of the US and UK economies is so dire. Partly it’s because of the Aussie resources boom. The simple excellence of Aussie banking regulation before the Credit Crunch has played a role. However, the Aussie has also become a proxy for the Chinese currency which does not itself float on the exchanges. Finally, investing in the Aussie dollar has become a self-fulfilling speculative play where money traders park their cash in dollars because they believe it will carry on going up. With the arrival of that last force – which has all the hallmarks of a bubble – the Aussie dollar has lost contact with Aussie economic fundamentals. And at these stratospheric levels little will remain of the economy outside the resources sector.
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Sydney needs a new planning system and better metropolitan governance
As a resident of the former and a native of the latter, and passionate about both, I’m wondering how both are doing at the moment. One thing that coming from one and living in the other does for you is give you a sense of perspective. That leads to this immediate judgment: however anxious New South Welshman are currently about the future on average they are well on their way to being twice as wealthy as the average South Walian. Their GDP per head is already 1.60 times that of Old South Wales and on current trends they will be twice as wealthy by 2025. This wasn’t always the case. But then the two have been going in opposite directions since the 1920s.
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A commitment to open data and open government is a must in this process.
There is a review underway into the planning system for Sydney. I wrote a submission for it for the Committee for Sydney whose strategic advisor I am delighted to report I now am. The Committee was formed by a number of the most strategically minded companies, Not for Profits and Councils in Sydney who combine a deep engagement with the City with a passion for seeing it succeed. As Australia’s only global city, it’s vital it does. Planning is pretty central to the fate of cities so the Committee was bound to take a view on planning reform for New South Wales and given the weighty nature of its membership, it’s likely to be an influential view. The punchline? The planning system is broken: do fix it. Don’t tinker.
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South Australia is producing some great stuff on the future of public policy and on how to transform cities. It is providing a model on how a place can punch above its weight in strategic discussions of international significance while also effecting change in its own back yard . Have a look at the work being produced from the ‘Thinkers in Residence’ programme in Adelaide and by the Integrated Design Commission. My former colleague and always friend John McTernan is the current Thinker in Residence ,though as a top level advisor to Blair I thought of him as a contract killer kind of intellectual. He knew where the bodies were buried because he put them there. I’m a big fan and think that the role of violence in bringing about public change is hugely under-estimated. And yes, I’m kidding,more or less.
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Every year at around this time it has become a tradition for the Williams family and the local Community Council in Llantrisant ,Wales, to honour my late father’s musical career through the Ifor Williams Awards . These are like a Valleys version of the X Factor but for young people with actual musical ability.
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This is based on a piece I wrote for English Heritage before I left the UK at the end of 2010. It still has resonance , in the UK and Australia I think where housing design and location challenges are also considerable. I draw attention to the bits in brackets pointing out the failings of CLG then and now – and how the same people responsible for messing up then have messed up over planning today . Does no-one senior get whacked for failure in that place?
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Australia is beginning to feel the heat from the resources boom. Jobs are now being lost in the export-led manufacturing economy because ,driven ever upwards by the demand for and speculation around, its coal,iron copper,gold ,gas , uranium ,you name it , the dollar exchange rate has reached dizzy levels. It’s now at 1.05 to the US dollar when the historic average is just over 70 cents , and 1.55 to sterling when less than 3 years ago it was at 2.50 to the pound. This is a seismic shift in a short period. If only federal government economic policy had moved as quickly – and in the right direction.
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I haven’t said this in recent years and possibly ever:two cheers for Tony Blair.Come to think of it, possibly one and a half.His comments on the recent riots made some sense to me but were also typically self serving. Essentially, he thinks that blaming the riots on a general moral malaise is wrong and indeed leads to bad policy. Rather he blames a minority of disaffected youth who live lives ‘outside the social mainstream’. The best policy therefore is to target that minority with policy interventions – running from better policing through to welfare penalties on the harder side and parenting lessons on the softer side.
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