Thursday, 6 February 2025

Preston Market

Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (17:18): (994) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Planning, and the action I seek is for the minister to visit the Preston activity centre to chat about her department’s ongoing work in our area. I would like to take this opportunity to update the house regarding Preston Market specifically. As members may know, most of Preston Market – over 90 per cent – has been owned by the Salta and Medich corporations for 20 years now, and they have had permission for many years to build a 14-storey apartment building in the Murray Road corner of the car park. But back in 2014 they proposed to do something much more radical, which was to move most of the market to the eastern side so that it would run from down the back of the High Street shops, from Cash Converters down past Gold Leaf to Cramer Street. They would put all of the car parks underground, and they would then build apartments not only on Murray Road but right down the train line side.

I think it is important to say that I do not think Salta and Medich were intending to destroy the market in any way through that process. I do not think that is in their commercial interests. But it was clear from those plans that the new apartment buildings were the priority. They were getting the higher value locations on the site, and there was also a lot of new retail on the ground floor of those buildings ‍– new cafes and restaurants and a new Coles and so forth.

In the state of Victoria you cannot just go and build things; you need to get a building permit. In most cases, certainly this case, you need a planning permit, and the process for obtaining that permit is the process by which the interests of other people are taken into account. I think it is fair to say that a lot of people opposed those Preston Market plans in a lot of different ways over a long period of time. People like Maria Poletti and Chris Erlandsen spent the best part of a decade writing submissions on the topic. Eventually, in 2023, this state government finally put a heritage overlay on the site and essentially made the decision that apartments could be built, noting of course the objectives of our housing plan and the benefits of building apartments near a train station, but in doing so they would have to ensure the market continued to operate substantially in its current form and location. There is a little bit riding on the use of ‘substantially’ in that decision, but effectively that put the final nail in the coffin of the 2014 plan.

There were worries after that that the operators would close the market for various reasons. Many traders were on month-to-month leases, which was not good for them or their workers. Fortunately, new five-year leases have been issued and the usual negotiations are going on, and it does seem that the future of the market at least for the next few years has been secured, broadly in the same form that it has been for the last 20 years. That will give everyone a chance to catch their breath, but those years will pass quickly. That is why we hope to chat to the minister and have a further discussion about what she thinks the future might look like, how things might proceed and what options are available to us if things do not proceed exactly as planned.

We thank the minister for her consideration, and we thank her and her department and her team for the very considerable body of work that they are doing to implement this government’s housing statement.