Tuesday, 29 October 2024

Housing affordability

David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (22:09): (1210) My matter for the adjournment tonight is for the attention of the Minister for Planning, and it relates to the government’s recent announcement about high-rise, high-density zones and in particular the one not very far from my office, the one that centres around the Hawksburn station.

Georgie Crozier interjected.

David DAVIS: Ms Crozier, it is not just about Hawksburn here. It is actually a conurbation of urban planning areas that cluster together – Toorak Village but also Toorak railway station and the Hawksburn station overlapping with the Hawksburn Village. When you map the 800-metre zones that are proposed by government you do end up with, I think, conurbation – that is actually the right word. It is a huge, dense area that is proposed for urban consolidation. What I am pointing to here is the government’s high-rise, high-density planning approach and its top-down model, rolling over councils, rolling over communities. There is no democracy here. This is fundamentally an arrogant dictatorship-type model that is being used by this government. We all want to see more housing. The City of Stonnington actually has plans and has proposed housing targets for the government, but the government has rejected those, imposed different ones and imposed these new planning zones, the conurbation that we are talking about, on the area. When you look at it this will destroy many of the village aspects of this area. If you were to wander down to Hawksburn Village on a Saturday morning, you would see people moving through the area, having coffees – people buying their vegetables, their fruit and so forth. It is an area that is actually well loved by many people. But there has been no consultation and no engagement by government with people in this approach, nor with the city council. The strong statement put out by the City of Stonnington points to this very directly.

What I want the minister to do is come clean on these matters and release all of the background planning documents that have been involved in each of these three zones – Hawksburn station, Toorak station, Toorak Village and the overlapping conurbation – as to how she has developed this particular planning approach. I also want her, as part of that, to release the specific targets for each of these three village areas to understand how this is going to occur. What are the targets? How has she planned this? Release all that information for those three village areas.