Wednesday, 9 February 2022

Environment and Planning Committee

Inquiry into Environmental Infrastructure for Growing Populations

Mr HAMER (Box Hill) (10:32): I rise to speak on the report of the inquiry into environmental infrastructure for growing populations, which was released today. I want to start by acknowledging the chair of the committee, the member for Tarneit; the deputy chair, the member for Mornington; all of my fellow committee members; and of course the committee secretariat and all the committee staff. As was pointed out by the member for Mornington, the process of the report was quite interesting in the sense that every hearing and site visit and all the deliberations were conducted online, which created, I guess, some level of difficulty and challenges throughout the process. I think the final report is a real credit to the other committee members and to the committee staff—for putting together a really valuable resource and valuable report, which does contain a lot of really useful recommendations in terms of improving environmental infrastructure.

I think it was a really interesting time when we were deliberating on this report. Obviously the inquiry was set down in 2019, prior to any knowledge of COVID. On the value of environmental infrastructure, we all value our open space and access to parklands, but we probably did not realise how much we actually did value them until we had COVID and we were trying to explore those areas close by and particularly those open space areas close by. I remember one time I was out at the magnificent Wattle Park in Burwood and it was just packed. You literally could not get a spot in the park because so many people were wanting to use that resource. And you saw across Melbourne, and across Victoria really, that people were flocking to their open space because it was a safer place to congregate with family and it was somewhere you could go and exercise and enjoy nature, not just in terms of enjoying the fresh air but also having those mental health impacts. That came out loudly and strongly from a lot of the submitters in terms of the importance of that open space, particularly the heightened importance of that in COVID.

As the member for Tarneit mentioned, there were some discussions and presentations about the quality of open space and how that varies depending on the size. Obviously many people have different access to that quality of open space. One particular piece of evidence that was cited, which came from the Heart Foundation, was that residents who live within 1.6 kilometres of larger neighbourhood parks engage in 150 minutes more recreational walking per week than those who can only access smaller parks within the same distance. When you think about that across an entire year or your entire life, how much difference would that make from a physical health point of view, from a mental health point of view from being able to access larger parks. In the inner and middle suburbs that is not always possible, but I think we need to pay tribute to our forebears who planned Melbourne, particularly in some of those inner areas and particularly in the inner and middle eastern suburbs where I live, for setting aside large tracts of parkland, particularly along the creek valleys, which provide this large recreational park asset— (Time expired)