Wednesday, 5 March 2025

Petitions

Residential planning zones

David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (17:48): I move:

That the petitions be taken into consideration.

I am pleased to rise and make a contribution to this petition debate, a new form that has been introduced to the house which means, where there are a large number of petition signatures, either electronically or in this case in hard copy – hard copy petitions with 4145 signatures have been tabled – there is an opportunity to debate that petition in the house and to take note of what has occurred.

I want to thank my colleagues Ms Crozier and Mr Mulholland, who have helped table these petitions in waves over the last period, and I want to thank those in the community, the Boroondara heritage group and many others in the community, who have helped with this process. This is a cry from the heart. This is about the Melbourne we love. This is about ensuring that the Melbourne that was built by our forebears is protected. This petition is about the future of our suburbs, it is about the livability of our suburbs and it is about our democratic way of life and whether we are prepared, as democrats in this state, to stand up and say, ‘We don’t want our planning system controlled by the minister alone. We don’t want our planning system controlled by faceless bureaucrats. We want a proper planning system where councils that are elected by our communities are in charge and a proper process where our councils are able to listen to communities and communities are able to put their views forward openly, honestly and in a democratic way.’

What we have seen with a number of the steps taken by the government in the recent period is nothing short of an authoritarian approach. What we have seen is that the minister has begun to take control of our planning system in a way that is completely and utterly undemocratic. Of the 10 large pilot activity centres, three of them are in Southern Metro, the electorate that Ms Crozier and I represent. Those three areas have risen up as one and said they do not want this imposed on them without their consent, without the opportunity to speak and without the opportunity to make their points and design the community that they want. People have moved into these areas and have done that because they want a quality of life. Some say the developers should have more certainty. I say those who live in the area, those who are part of an area and those who are part of the genuine community in an area should actually have the certainty and the clarity. Over here I am quite happy to see what can be done to smooth processes, to make things quicker and to make things more straightforward. But that does not mean the removal of protections. It does not mean the removal of a democratic opportunity for people to have their say and for councils in a local sense to not make decisions. It is not just the 10 large activity centres either; it is the 50 nominated activity centres. Some are near stations, some are not. A huge number are in the region I represent in Southern Metropolitan.

It is also about the imposed dwelling targets. I am going to pick the example of Boroondara, but I could pick Stonnington, I could pick Glen Eira, I could pick others across the state. 190 years of European settlement has seen 70,000 dwellings in the City of Boroondara, and this government says that within 25 or 30 years it now wants to add another 65,500 dwellings – more than a 90 per cent increase. Where are the schools? Where are the hospitals? Where are the parks and the open space? Where are the ovals that would possibly deal with this enormous and frightening number that will irrevocably change our community? The same is true of Glen Eira and Stonnington. These are the two municipalities in Melbourne that have the lowest amount of open space per head, yet these are two of the municipalities that have been targeted for special attention, with high levels of density being forced upon them.

This is a dystopian dream. It is a dream that the government is wanting to force on people. It will see shocking high-rise wind tunnels without the proper support and open space.

Interjections from gallery.

The PRESIDENT: I warn the gallery: that is your one clap. If you clap again or you cheer or you boo or whatever, I will leave here. This will end today. Today’s sitting will end, and I might come back tomorrow.

Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (17:53): I am pleased to rise to speak on Mr Davis’s petition. Obviously there is a great deal of interest in housing in our communities. Like Mr Davis, I represent the Southern Metropolitan Region. I have spoken with many of the people who are sitting in the gallery today who have signed these petitions and who are concerned about these issues. I will say today what I have said to them already, which is that I support policies that will give more Victorians the opportunity to own a home in the communities that we all love, in the communities that our families live in, that we may have grown up in and that have access to great schools, great jobs and transport infrastructure. I think it is an obligation that we all have as Victorians to think about how we can best provide more homes to others who seek to also live in this great state. Creating the opportunity for those people to have a place to call home in the communities that so many of us dearly love is at the core of what this government is attempting to do with its housing policies, because there are too many people who cannot get a home where they want to live. This government wants to make sure that Victorians have a place to call home.

What I think has been unfortunate about the way this debate has rolled out since the pilot activity centres were first announced in October 2023 is the degree of misinformation and fear that has characterised some of the material that has been put out in communities – images on social media that are just not true and falsely represent the draft plans the government has put out, the use of phrases like ‘authoritarian and undemocratic’ that seek to whip up insecurity amongst those in the community, when what we did in October 2023 was announce some pilots. We put out draft plans, and throughout the course of 2024 consulted with the community on those draft plans. We listened to the community, and those plans were changed in the latest versions that were released last week. I do not have time, because of the time limits in the debate, to go into all of these matters in detail. I have done this in conversations that I have had outside the chamber, and I am more than willing to continue to have those conversations.

I think there are a few key points. Despite the misinformation that might be spread by the Liberal Party to suit their own political ends, the heritage and landscape overlays in these activity centres will not change. That is clear. The minister has said this quite clearly. The feedback we have received from the community, and this was certainly the feedback that was given to me when I was out – for example, the people I spoke to in some of the heritage groups for the City of Boroondara’s Camberwell Junction activity centre – was that they were generally supportive of the plans at the core, because they were based on structure plans that had been developed by the City of Boroondara in the years prior. They had some concerns about the catchment areas, concerns about height and concerns about distance, and over the course of the consultation process, what did the government do? We listened. The heights in the final plans were reduced. The walkable catchment areas were put back in and refined. That is exactly the kind of approach that people should be able to expect, where governments propose drafts and engage with the community. There have been more than 10,000 consultations, submissions and engagements with members of the community about the 10 pilot activity centres since they were first announced in October 2023. Here we are 16 months later continuing that conversation. But the fundamental point is that we need more homes here in Victoria because we need places for our family members to live. That is the fundamental issue.

David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan) (17:58): I welcome the opportunity to speak to this petition. I guess I speak informed by my 13 years as the president or secretary of the Kensington Residents’ Association, so I have certainly experienced the utter frustration with the propensity of the department of planning to simply walk away from extended consultations between residents and local government and unilaterally overrule both.

The petition before the chamber is not without merit, but I guess somewhat misses the mark in places as well. Firstly, it is not just the activity centres or centre programs that are removing third-party rights and deeming certain types of development to comply, meaning that they will not be subject to advertising and a full planning assessment if the cookie-cutter planning controls are adhered to. So it is a bit disingenuous, if I may say so, to single out the activity centres as the thing that should be reviewed. I suspect it is actually much broader. Secondly, the loss of thousands of irreplaceable heritage properties is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but hey, let us just put a pin in that. Victoria is facing enormous population growth in the years ahead and we need to plan for it, and we need to build a lot more homes within established urban settlement boundaries. While we are broadly supportive of the government’s objectives, I would caution the government against implementing policies that alienate communities and ignore local knowledge. How these objectives are executed will make the difference between communities that are well serviced, with decent amenity, open space and infrastructure, and communities that are not great places to live. This concern is well founded; let us face it, our city is littered with lost opportunities and planning disaster stories. Southbank is a concrete canyon, overshadowed and lacking amenity; Docklands, an extraordinary opportunity to engineer community, is a largely lifeless failure; and perhaps most recently the Joseph Road precinct in Footscray, which is still a work in progress, is a planning disaster, with closely stacked high-rises, no meaningful open space and a streetscape that is reminiscent of a war zone.

In this context of the abject failure of the Department of Transport and Planning to be able to craft community-rich precincts, the concerns of the petitioners are entirely reasonable. The connection they feel for the neighbourhoods where they have made their homes is something the government must consider and must understand. Across Victoria communities want to know that their values and the things that make each community special will be included in structure plans and activity centre planning controls and pieces of public policy, for that matter. In my electorate there is one activity centre slated so far – that is the Niddrie Keilor Road and North Essendon activity centre – although there are two more flagged in Plan for Victoria as well as three metropolitan activity centres, 25 or so other activity centres and one day perhaps – that is a long way away – three or more Suburban Rail Loop precincts. I do not think that will be my problem.

How these precincts are planned is important. The government’s greatest asset is the local knowledge held in these communities, and when those things that make local communities special are recognised and built on it adds great value to the planning process. That means real consultation, giving local residents and community groups access to the process as well as councils and traditional owners. It means draft proposals with details that can be meaningfully engaged with, not just cookie-cutter planning controls.

The government’s plan for Victoria and target for 70 per cent of new homes being built inside established areas is a massive change, but it is possible and it is desirable. But will it be done in a way that retains the diversity and individuality that make our communities different and special and matches housing growth with infrastructure and amenity? Only if the planning is done with, not to, local communities. With a bit of time and openness and a lot more detail these precincts could be a great success. If communities feel some ownership and connection to the plans, it will pay dividends in the long term, both politically and in terms of policy implementation.

I encourage the government to ensure that this round of planning for the next 50 activity centres is more open than for the first 10. Bring locals along; listen to locals and listen to their local councils and planners, and you will build great places and great communities.

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (18:03): I rise to speak to the debate on the petition that has been tabled by Mr Davis in Mr Davis’s name, but I have also contributed to that –

A member interjected.

Georgie CROZIER: and Mr Mulholland has as well. As we have been speaking to members of our community, and as Mr Ettershank has just said, the local knowledge is terribly important; I think that I completely concur with you in relation to many people who have expressed their concerns around what the government plans to do.

Professor Michael Buxton, who is eminently renowned in this area – in environment and planning at RMIT University and as a former senior bureaucrat in the department of planning here in this state – has said about these activity centres:

It’s not going to achieve affordable housing. It’s going to achieve a city that’s very difficult to live in, and it’s incomprehensible the government would throw away what makes Melbourne so great.

This plan that the government has thrust upon the Victorian community was never taken to the people. It was not taken to the election just over two years ago, and so much has occurred in that time given the government’s plans and announcements that was never known. You have people that have questioned what are the activity centres. People have no idea, and when they learn of what is going on, they are absolutely horrified.

There have been a lot of concerns in the area that Mr Davis spoke of, our electorate of Southern Metropolitan Region, which takes in Bayside, Stonnington, Glen Eira, parts of Kingston and Boroondara. Many, many constituents have expressed their concerns around the government’s plans. At a Boroondara meeting where the government’s bureaucrat came and spoke to that meeting, when the issue around heritage was raised, there were no guarantees from that bureaucrat, despite what Mr Batchelor has said. It was ‘to be considered’. That is not a guarantee. The heritage is incredibly important, like the local knowledge is incredibly important, and that is I think where the Labor Party and the likes of Mr Batchelor are trying to brush over the concerns of tens of thousands of Victorians.

This petition will not stop today. This petition will continue, because I have an e-petition and it is gathering signatures from more Victorians, because they too are concerned about the government’s processes and the way it has gone about thrusting these developments, these activity centres, on a city that we all love and we all want to see thrive. We do not want to see it destroyed, as Professor Buxton has described. He goes on to say in some of his comments:

We’ll end up with a completely different city …

We’ll end up with a standardised high-rise, medium-rise city based on apartments.

We’ll lose much of what attracts people to Melbourne and makes Melbourne a liveable city.

That is the point. We want our city to be liveable, we want our city to be great, we want to attract tourists, we want to attract people to come to this city and live in this city and make it their home. We do not want to trash this city, and these activity centres and the plans that the government has thrust upon the community will do exactly that. That is why this petition is so important. That is why the likes of Bayside council, when they have gone out and expressed concerns, speak about the forums that they have had where they have had presenters and panellists, people that are renowned and specialised in urban design, specialised planning, all aspects of law around environment and local government, looking at city planning and amenity. Mr Davis talked about amenity and the services that are going to be required. It is an enormous undertaking to get services like education, water and sewage, electricity, health, policing – all of these services that governments are responsible for.

A member interjected.

Georgie CROZIER: I said water and sewage. All of these issues have not been considered by the government. I say again, this is an important petition and an important debate that will continue.

Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:08): I could speak for probably an hour on this topic, because it has certainly been on the minds of my community in North-Eastern Metro, particularly those in Whitehorse where we have equivalent petitions of equivalent scale and bigger because we have seen the premonition, we have seen the advance view of this when dealing with the government in the Suburban Rail Loop precincts. Everything that is coming to pass in these activity centres was foreshadowed in the way the government misled the community through the SRL process. They said it would only be 20-storey towers, but then shortly changed that to 40-storey towers, then changed it to 50-storey towers and six-storey apartments in residential streets.

But I will start somewhere earlier than that. I will start back in the 1920s. One of the reasons for Melbourne’s great success as a multicultural city is because we were a low-density city. We were the Garden State. The reason we were a low-density city was because in the 1920s and 30s, coming out of the Great Depression, we looked at places like the Richmond slums and said never again. Never again will people have to live side by side in these situations. We will put planning processes in place that mean people have the dignity of their own homes with their own gardens, with their own entrance, where families can grow and where health and education outcomes are maximised. That is a social technology that we have lived and benefited from for many generations. The middle suburbs of Melbourne did not happen by accident. They were a template that said that this leads to a good society, a healthy society, a good life, a sustainable city.

Yet bizarrely we are consciously moving from that model to a model where we say we want the families of the future to live in tower blocks. Instead of having a back garden with all its utility or a front garden and the infrastructure that is calibrated to the scale of the community, we are going to one where we want to maximise density on the existing infrastructure, completely out of kilter with the infrastructure that is there. But worse than that, we are actually planning for the worst of all possible worlds, because not only are we going to overwhelm the infrastructure in the middle suburbs, but there are communities across the fringes of this community that have never received the infrastructure in the first place. We are going to have overwhelmed infrastructure in the middle of Melbourne and we are going to have no infrastructure on the outer ends of Melbourne. The arrogance and the hubris of this government to say there will be no consequences, that we are not layering up vulnerabilities in our community – vulnerabilities in education, where the outcomes are worse; vulnerabilities in health; vulnerabilities in social isolation, because we saw through the 1960s and 70s when we put people in tower blocks in Carlton, Fitzroy and other places that people became isolated from their communities, became distant from their educational and career opportunities and we decided to knock them down. But here we are back again doing the same thing.

Within the time limit I also say there is a fundamental underlying economic problem with this. They say that this is in order to build new homes. It is untrue, because on one hand they are saying that by liberating all these planning zones we are inviting developers to come in and build, but in order to do so they want to take a windfall gains tax, so the incentive has vanished. The only properties you could build are high-yield properties – high-end, high-yield properties – where they can absorb that tax. There is no affordable housing coming to middle Melbourne – no young couples, no families, no backyards, no social infrastructure, no extra schools planned, no extra hospitals planned, no more open space and in fact far less open space. This is bad urban planning. It is bad design. It is bad economics at a time when we cannot afford bad economics any longer.

The last consideration, the people who are considered least and last, are the people who already live there, where these fantasy properties are going to go. This is a nothing policy. It is a hoax. It is a policy that is trying to serve two masters: one, to build home – allegedly – but the true master is to raise tax. The only reason these activity centres exist is to raise tax from the community and raise tax from developers to fill up and backfill their losses in other things, especially the Suburban Rail Loop.

Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (18:14): I rise to speak on this petition debate, and I am glad to contribute to the petition debate from my constituents in the north-west, particularly in Essendon but also in Niddrie. I was at the Moonee Valley Festival a couple of weeks ago, and a few tents down from my tent was one Danny Pearson and one Ben Carroll. The interesting thing is that many residents came up to me and spoke to me about the activity centres and asked me questions about the activity centres and then made their way down to Ben Carroll and Danny Pearson. It was quite amusing, because they all reported back to me, obviously, and they were saying they are also concerned, they are advocating to the Minister for Planning and have raised their concerns to the Minister for Planning because they do not agree with the current activity centres.

They were very quick last week when this all came out to post some videos on their websites, claiming credit for the fact that their activity centres would be reduced in scale and go from 12 storeys to 10 storeys – so not even the Deputy Premier agrees with the Premier’s plan. But what does it say to those communities, particularly those communities that are not in Labor-held electorates? That because of where you live, the Labor Party will not listen to you. You do not get a say. You do not get a say at all, just like you will not get a say in what happens in your community. Mr Welch was right that this is all a revenue exercise. The government wants to build 70,000 homes around the outside of the SRL East. In order to do that, in order to gain $11 billion-plus of value capture, the government would have to charge $160,000 per home. No developer is going to agree to that. This is a revenue-raising exercise – (Time expired)

David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (18:16): I want to make a very clear point in summing up: this is about democracy. It is about the future of our city. It is about what sort of city we want to live in. But it is also about our heritage too. I was shocked that one of the government officials at the large City of Boroondara-sponsored meeting said that heritage ‘will be considered’ in the future – that is all he said. So layer, layer, layer, planning overlay, planning overlay, planning overlay and many of them at tension including, as was pointed out earlier, the ResCode changes. All of those are at tension but overwhelmingly pushing in one direction: height, density and control of the area. Height and density, unfortunately, will likely overwhelm the heritage protections that are so important for our city.

We know, for example, that the Victorian Planning Authority has been modelling a 50 per cent removal of heritage protection – that is what they have modelled. That is a disaster. We will lose those important streets, those important streetscapes, those important heritage properties that are part of our city – they are part of us. Local built environment is a part of us, and I say it has got to be protected. I thank all those who have contributed to this debate, but this is an opportunity to go forward and to actually try and protect our city, to try and look into the future and say, ‘What sort of city do we want?’ I do not want a dense, unfriendly, cold city without proper open space and without what we would regard as the proper heritage protections. That is why this petition is so important.

Motion agreed to.