Urban policy in Australia, despite our historically high level of urbanisation, has made only on-off appearances at the federal level of government. 

Mostly, it’s been missing. But Labor’s election in 2022 returned to a longstanding strategic interest in the better management of cities and towns.

However, Anthony Albanese inherited the same caution that Brian Howe had back in the Hawke/Keating days with the Better Cities program which attempted to avoid the major structural reforms that Gough Whitlam and Tom Uren had instigated with the Department of Urban and Regional Development in the 1970s.

Driven fearlessly by its deputy secretary Patrick Troy on secondment from the ANU Urban Research Unit, Whitlam’s groundbreaking urban initiatives managed to upset Canberra’s institutional orthodoxy. The push then quickly earned the enmity of Treasury and then, inevitably, the Opposition as an annoying big-spending upstart wandering onto other turfs, including those of hostile state governments.

After that, when urban policy has periodically resurfaced, it has occupied a secondary policy tier, working variously through demonstration projects, information dissemination, best practice guidelines, and scattered place-based initiatives under a rubric of intergovernmental co-operation.

Labor, under Kevin and Julia Gillard, launched both a feel-good framework of aspirations led by a new Cities Unit complemented by a national urban design protocol, both given some grit by tying infrastructure funding to consensus-driven strategic objectives. The Turnbull-led Coalition turned to “smart city” projects and adapted the British policy of collaborative City Deals to put their spin on things, while the Morrison Coalition government avoided any explicit engagement with city policy-making.

Albanese told an Australian Financial Review Business Summit in 2021 that “ cities policy has been one of the abiding passions of my time in public life" and spruiked his credentials ahead of the 2022 election. The government didn’t disappoint. Catherine King was appointed Minister for Cities, supported by a new Cities and Suburbs Unit in a restructured Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts.

Nearly 200 submissions on a draft policy picked up just how inclusive and far-reaching such a policy could be. The final National Urban Policy, not far removed from the draft, was duly delivered to a muted reception after parliamentary sittings in late November 2024.

While welcome, the NUP amounted to little more than an incontrovertible list of principles and propositions culled from best practice manuals and various strategic planning documents. Encouraging action statements focused on the need for urban places to be “liveable and equitable”, “productive and innovative”, “sustainable and ‘resilient”.

True, a separate National Planning Reform Blueprint does hold out some hope for housing. And some small-scale funding programs were initiated to support modest urban and regional based initiatives, but nothing resembling a coherent policy or robust implementation framework was proposed to tackle more substantial urban and regional challenges.

And there are plenty. Many of them have been extensively canvassed in policy, academic and community forums. Consider some of the key issues shaping the forthcoming election: housing supply and affordability, cost of living, safety and security, population and immigration, social vulnerability, and climate action and environment. With seven in ten Australians now living in urban areas, these issues are substantially urban issues and require policy approaches which explicitly recognise this fact.

Yet even this modest national urban policy aspiration has once again slid from public view – clearly not a 2025 election headline. Labor wants to build for the future, but the framing and the timeline is fuzzy. The key drivers of the NUP — liveability, equity, productivity, innovation, sustainability and resilience — let alone its very existence, are hardly up front, despite Albanese’s self-confessed passion. The Coalition campaign is silent, derailed by more seductive promises and with the need to satisfy the staunchly anti-urban predilections of its National Party. Just as the US Department of Housing and Urban Development is facing major ideologically-driven cutbacks courtesy of DOGE, there is a sense that Albanese’s small Cities Unit in the Department of Infrastructure might not last very long in the event of a Coalition victory.

The real irony, though, is that the only prominence being afforded urban policy in this election is that of the Trumpet of Patriots, with its endlessly repeated pledge to ease housing affordability by building satellite towns on cheap peri-urban land only 20 minutes away from central business districts by fast train.

While hardly a coherent and costed urban policy framework, this does at least introduce a spatial dimension into the policy debate that has been missing. Major issues of climate, demographic pressures and, indeed, housing are dealt with as if there are no real spatial implications or outcomes. The federal government feigns a collective spatial amnesia; it’s the provenance of state governments. Treasury’s Centre for Population website ignores the NUP altogether and showcases only two policy documents dating from the Morrison-COAG era.

Tackling issues of long-term population growth, immigration, water supply, environmental protection, inter- and intra-urban transport infrastructure, and locating and designing the spaces living up to the high standards of the NUP to accommodate the hundreds of thousands new dwellings to be built ultimately requires an explicitly spatial approach.

If it is to be a Big Australia, then what does it actually look like and where do we optimally live? The Planning Institute of Australia and the Australian Institute of Architects, among other bodies, have made their expectations clear.

Networks of human systems, transportation, housing, sewerage, food security, energy, water and greenspace are closely entangled, yet these interdependencies are poorly understood and reflected in siloed urban policy decision-making processes and practices. Part of the challenge lies in establishing clearer links between urban policy and critical urban infrastructure as connected frameworks for co-ordinated and strategic action at different scales.

When thinking about and acting on national urban policy is undertaken after the election, as we trust it must, then strengthening it into a transformative and visionary approach that recognises the interdependencies that power urbanisation and its effects would be a strategic move in the long-term national public interest.