Tuesday, 8 March 2022

Mornington Peninsula planning

Mr BRAYNE (Nepean) (19:18): (6253) The action I seek is for the Minister for Planning to update my community on how our green wedge is being protected on the Mornington Peninsula. The Mornington Peninsula shire has been included in the Melbourne metropolitan area for many years, since the 1960s. In the 1970s planning minister Alan Hunt helped to establish the green wedge, which sought to protect our green spaces within the entirety of the Melbourne area to ensure the Melbourne areas remained livable, and the creation of the green wedge as part of an intrinsic aspect to the metropolitan Melbourne area was a key vital planning decision that has seen the protection of the Mornington Peninsula from becoming overdeveloped for literally decades. It is the last line of defence for our peninsula against becoming an overdeveloped suburbia.

At this critical juncture we are seeing for the first time in a long time the greatest threat to the green wedge on the Mornington Peninsula. There is a big business lobby group called the Committee for Mornington Peninsula, which is actively pursuing the regionalisation of the Mornington Peninsula. All candidates for the Liberal Party on the Mornington Peninsula are standing with the aim of making the Mornington Peninsula regional. Since I began to get the word out about the necessity of preserving the metropolitan status of the Mornington Peninsula in order to preserve for the long term the character and livability of the peninsula, some of these candidates have now started changing their language. The line they now use is, ‘We will make the Mornington Peninsula regional while maintaining green wedge protections’. This is sort of like saying, ‘We want to get rid of the monarchy whilst also we want to keep the Queen’. It does not work. Long term, actively pursuing a regional status—

Members interjecting.

Mr BRAYNE: And they are getting frustrated by it right now. Long term, actively pursuing a regional status and rescinding our metropolitan status would see the loss of the green wedge and an increasingly developed and unrecognisable Mornington Peninsula. This push has been opportunistically made by the Committee for Mornington Peninsula. But even their own report on the benefits of the peninsula becoming regional states that the green wedges an acceptable casualty of us becoming regional. I will not stand by and let this business lobby group, which counts ExxonMobil and Hillview Quarries among its members, and some political candidates sacrifice our green wedge.

We should fight for better metropolitan services, though. We deserve a better public transport system, which we are getting now: the 788 running every half an hour, the 887 express bus now running. We deserve rebuilds of our schools, like what is happening at Rosebud Primary School, Dromana Primary School and Rosebud Secondary. We deserve better sports facilities, like the new lights in all the tennis clubs, the new cricket nets at Rosebud Cricket Club, Main Ridge and the ones we are fighting for at Dromana Cricket Club. When it comes to the green wedge, though, there is no room for movement. It is important that our green spaces are protected, and I look forward to hearing how the government is supporting our sacred green wedge on the Mornington Peninsula.