Wednesday, 5 March 2025

Planning policy

David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (18:41): (1482) I want to raise an issue for the Minister for Planning. She has laid out 10 new pilot activity centres but also 50 nominated activity centre areas, some near stations and some not. These are incredibly dense proposals. They are huge proposals for increased numbers of dwellings in these areas. The activity centre proposals that I have seen, all of the ones that they have proposed, have massive numbers of new dwellings and consequently new people.

The services to support that need to be the proper education services, health services, dare I say sewerage and other key infrastructure requirements. One of those is open space. What I am terribly concerned about with these approaches is that the number of people pushed into these areas will see a significant diminution of the amount of open space per head. This is a well-measured point. Stonnington and Glen Eira have the lowest open-space-per-head ratios of any municipalities in Victoria, and now we are about to put much more into some of these areas. What I am seeking from the minister is an assurance that the ratio will not be altered. If you are going to put more people into an area, more density – the 50 activity centres, more people, more density – what are you going to do to make sure there is a commensurate, proportionate amount of open space? I want you to publish targets that lay out the amount of open space in each of these areas that you are going to produce. You are going to push the people in, you are going to strip away the community’s planning rights, strip away the council’s planning rights, put tens of thousands of new people into this area, but where is the equivalent of open space?

If you just put tens of thousands of new dwellings and people into an area and you expect them to recreate on the same open space – the parkland, the ovals, the tennis courts, all of those – you are going to see a difficulty with making sure that people have access to open space. This is about health, it is about quality of life, it is about livability. It is what we have come to expect in Victoria and in parts of Melbourne where the opportunity is there to go to an oval, to walk your dog in a parkland area, or to go to a public recreation space, whether it be some other sporting facility – (Time expired)