Tuesday, 8 March 2022

Shepparton electorate planning

Ms SHEED (Shepparton) (19:15): (6252) My adjournment is for the Minister for Planning, and the action I seek is that he visit the Shepparton district to meet with local government and developers to discuss the current crisis in land availability for future housing and industrial needs. We have a land supply crisis in the Shepparton district, particularly in Shepparton and Tatura. The shortage of land for housing and industrial purposes is creating inflated prices for housing stock. People are being forced to look to existing properties in residential areas to refurbish them, leading to less investment properties, fewer rentals and therefore an increasing demand on social housing.

Our community is missing out on opportunities to grow, to recruit professionals and other workers and to increase economic development in our region. In what should be a time for opportunity for our region we are now faced with the challenge of a lack of availability of land. There has been significant government investment in our region in recent years—almost $800 million invested in the regional rail project that will connect Shepparton to Melbourne with nine VLocity trains a day. Major works on stage 1 of Goulburn Valley Health are nearing completion at a cost of $230 million, and it is providing the infrastructure that we need to have a fit-for-purpose health service. The investment of $120 million in the build of the new Greater Shepparton Secondary College—just opened this year—means that we have the breadth and depth of education opportunities that we have not previously had in our state education system. The $20.5 million integrated early learning centre at Mooroopna is a strong investment in early childhood education, and the recent opening of the Shepparton Art Museum, a $50 million state-of-the-art gallery, is an outstanding opportunity for the cultural development of our community, with a strong emphasis on Indigenous art.

People are looking to the regions as a place to live and work, experimenting with new ways of doing so, but in looking to the regions the major issues that people identify are supply of housing, education and health services. So while we are addressing the latter two, we have a real problem in relation to housing supply and it has been identified as one of our major challenges. So in seeking that the minister visits Shepparton district the agenda will be very much to highlight the much-needed government support necessary to ensure that all parties, including local government and our land developers, can find a way forward, whether it be through rezoning, change planning or assistance from the government with planners and the resources that we need to really ensure that we can get the subdivisions and land supply that we need.