The revival of a federal urban programme in Australia, of which Building Better Cities is the centrepiece, coincided with deepening recession and increasing skepticism about the economic assumptions that informed Commonwealth policy throughout the 1980s. These events, which posed a real threat to Labor federally, saw the programme priorities change on two occasions as the bureaucrats sought to re-establish a legitimacy for urban strategy. The earliest version, Better Cities, appealed to disaffected Labor voters by proposing a ‘needs-based’ approach to area improvement and releasing ‘frozen’ funds for urban infrastructure. This underwent ‘strategic ref focussing’ in conjunction with the framing of the One Nation Statement to make the role of cities in ‘nation building’ more explicit. Finally, when the level of unemployment could be ignored no longer, additional BBCP funding was brought forward in the 1992–93 Budget to assist with job creation. Ultimately the purpose and content of Building Better Cities seems to have as much to do with its role as an instrument for crisis-management as with any of the normative tasks that rekindled the federal interest in the cities.
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