Wednesday, 22 June 2022

 Ms STALEY (Ripon) (19:04): (6438) My adjournment tonight is for the Minister for Planning, and the action I seek is that he urgently develop new ways to assist rural and regional councils to manage the increase in subdivision and other larger planning matters. As we know, post COVID, people want to move to the regions and they want to move to country areas. As a result, we have a large uptick in developers wanting to develop multi-lot subdivisions, and yet we have a number of these rural and regional councils that just cannot manage to get these things through in any sort of timely manner. I am particularly thinking of Central Goldfields at the moment. They have a proposal, and they just cannot do all of the planning matters because they do not have the capacity within their—

Mr Wynne: Or they don’t have the skills.

Ms STALEY: That is right. Whether it is Ballarat, whether it is Central Goldfields or whether it is Loddon, they just need assistance on these bigger planning matters. They can do the infill, they can do the renovations, they can do all of those sorts of things, but when it comes to a multi-lot subdivision they get bogged down. They can take years, yet we have got demand now. This is when we want people to move to these areas. Let us strike while the iron is hot. So I am requesting that he develop some new approaches to achieve that goal.