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Howard Maclean

@howardfmaclean.bsky.social
235 followers 77 following 53 posts

Convenor of @greatercanberra.org.au- Lawyer, general purpose nerd. Building better cities requires actually building. Views my own.

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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Slowly, over the past few years, I've realised that the land use debate in Australia had an international generalisation problem. The economics of zoning and permitting reform on housing, energy and urbanism is global. The context - institutions, politics, history - is not.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
12.3% annual housing inflation in Brisbane is absolutely brutal, 8.6% in Perth is barely any better. It's an acute reminder that the contours of the housing crisis aren't uniform - some jurisdictions are doing a lot better than others. www.abs.gov.au/statistics/e...
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
As you might have heard, I'm honoured to be one of the 4 ACT nominees for Young Australian of the Year! We have an Oscars style award ceremony announce who the ACT Young Australian of the year is (along with the other categories), which you can tune in from 6 pm. m.youtube.com/watch?v=bnxV...
m.youtube.com
2026 Australian Capital Territory Australian of the Year Awards
YouTube video by Australian of the Year Awards
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
What does a proposal for a 55 storey tall tower in Woden Mean? It means that the height limit in Civic is far, far, far too low. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...
abc.net.au
Canberra's tallest buildings would be dwarfed by proposed new skyscrapers
A developer wants to add 17 towers to the Woden town centre with the highest proposed to stand at 55 storeys.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
A slow moving scandal in Canberra at the moment is that we launched a new public transport ticketing system which is *so bad* and unreliable that we no longer have any idea how many people are using transit or how.
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Reposted by Howard Maclean
Matt Cowgill @mattcowgill.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Impossible to read this passage in Seeing Like a State and not picture Canberra from above
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
Unsure about this one, in my view the meta-brain gives you insight into the takes of others and arms you with the rhetorical tools needed to combat or support those takes, but only occasionally does this equate to intelligence.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
@jonobri.com hits the grey elephant in the new city debate - that the vast majority of regional towns and small cities are determined to avoid growing any larger than they currently are.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
I once went seat of my uber to seat of my flight in 8 minutes flat at Canberra Airport.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
Potentially one of the weirdest things about Australian planning culture is how every planning department in the country is hellbent on ensuring that the public and private realm has the least protection from UV rays in the summer possible in the name of preventing "overshadowing"
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
One of the weirdest things about ACT Politics is that Light rail stage one ($675 million construction) is often cited as an example of unimaginable fiscal proclivity, when as time goes on we're reminded that it was actually a spectacularly good deal. www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05...
abc.net.au
The Block and Grand Designs have nothing on the RBA's billion-dollar renovation horror show
Renovating the Reserve Bank's headquarters is increasingly looking like a disastrous episode of home building show Grand Designs. The key difference? The budget for the horror reno is now north of $1 ...
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Jonathan O'Brien @jonobri.com · 12/07/2025
The Problem with Urban Planning: a professional silo is gatekeeping our nation's growth. My new essay w/ @inflectionpoints.work The problem at the heart of planning is not political—it's professional. 🧵
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 12/07/2025
If you think you have problems, spare a thought for this Rose Bay homeowner that is complaining that zoning changes have made her and her neighbours fantastically wealthy.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 12/07/2025
Australian journalism is defined by its low expectations of its readership, and so I'm super excited by @inflectionpoints.work and the potential for a masthead that treats its audience as neither stupid or likely to switch off at the 1000th word.
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Reposted by Howard Maclean
Inflection Points @inflectionpoints.work · 12/07/2025
Talking about reform is our national ritual: white papers, inquiries, op-eds, post-election promises. But too often, these calls create more process than progress. So we’re launching Inflection Points—a new platform for longform policy writing that aims to cut through.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
The Metro has ongoing near universal support in Sydney, despite being a fantastically expensive infrastructure project with cost overruns, precisely because it's by far the fastest form of transport. No matter how rich you are in Sydney, the Metro is your quickest option for getting through the CBD.
A graphic of Sydney Metro going zoom
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
Tapping the sign worksinprogress.co/issue/the-ho...
worksinprogress.co
The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress Magazine
Western housing shortages drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
Alright, I'm now back on this website more fully - appreciate firing any accounts I should follow as I attempt to build a timeline.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
As a Canberran, my first time in Germany was incredibly confusing, because it would be chilly out on the street and then tropical indoors, easy t shirt weather. The cool climate Australian practice of having winter indoor temperatures only slightly higher than outside (maybe 12-14C) is not standard.
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Ethan Gilbert ✨🏗️ @ethangilbert.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
If the heritage industry wants to be taken seriously, they should stop trying to argue the heritage significance of a petrol station on the West Gate freeway...
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Matthew Bowes @mbowes.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
There’s a deep tension between the value Australians place on freedom and the desire of some policymakers to restrict urban growth. Governments can control housing, but they can’t control people. The only way we can stop people moving to cities is to make them unaffordable.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Building on this, we collectively have a pretty good understanding on how pre-industrial human society + fantasy elements (magic, dragons, dieties etc) works, but very little on how modern society+magic works. This is why many urban fantasy IPs revolve around strict separation of magic and tech.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
There's a deeply rooted opposition in Australia to small homes. This recent support for continue the ban on smaller apartments is a continuation of mid 20th century efforts to ban terraces and "Street life" - with peter Harrison famously saying that Terraces were "unfit for human habitation".
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
Absolutely insane that real time tracking of the exact positions of buses in the network is an extremely solved technology and we have this happening for whatever reason.
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Howard Maclean @howardfmaclean.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
One thing that hasn't been talked about as much is that the nominal surge in rents in most cities in Australia stalled hard in 2024, dropping to around or below inflation everywhere but Adelaide on marginal (asking) rents.
SQM Weekly Rents graph.
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