Tuesday, 20 September 2022

 Mr SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (19:00): (6536) My adjournment is to the Minister for Planning, and the action that I seek is for the minister to implement mandatory height limits across the City of Glen Eira. You have heard on many occasions me raising issues around overdevelopment in the City of Glen Eira. Under eight years of the Labor government the Caulfield electorate has taken more than its fair share of development, and from 2016 to 2021 the City of Glen Eira has had more building permits for new dwellings than any other area throughout the Southern Metropolitan Region. As we have seen, all too often this has been in the form of towers out of scope with the character of the local community and endangering many of the heritage homes that have been there for hundreds of years.

Unfortunately the government has not provided infrastructure support to follow the development that we have seen. We have had no support for school upgrades, no support for hospitals or health, no support for public transport and roads and no support for public open space. In fact we have said on many occasions Glen Eira has the lowest amount of open space of any municipality, and under the Andrews Labor government we are jamming people into suburbs like sardines and doing nothing for people’s mental health and wellbeing.

Unfortunately the current Caulfield structure plan is heading down the same path, and we desperately need to pull the handbrake on overdevelopment. In the Caulfield station precinct, the state government want to jam as many residential towers as they possibly can into a confined space. I am told that we have just recently had 5000 recently built or permanent apartments in the area around the Caulfield Racecourse, but the Andrews government wants to jam more and more in. In fact in Grange Road, bunched together 12-storey towers will soar above residential streets of Caulfield East and Carnegie, overlooking local infrastructure and creating unlivable box apartments.

The Liberals have consulted. We have listened to the community, and we want to put forward ideas of mandatory height limits in Caulfield, Elsternwick and across Glen Eira. As the Stop the Elsternwick Towers campaign has showed us, the community have had enough, and they are sick and tired of overdevelopment. Residents want heritage protection. Residents want mandatory height limits and appropriate setbacks. Residents want tree canopy protection. Therefore in light of the Caulfield structure plan, in light of overdevelopment, in light of what has happened with the Woolworths overdevelopment in Elsternwick in particular and the areas also of Caulfield, Elsternwick, Ormond and Glen Huntly, I urge the planning minister to come to the party and join the Liberals with sensible planning controls to protect the livability of the City of Glen Eira.