Wednesday, 30 August 2023

Planning policy

Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (17:46): As a former Mallee resident, it is always a pleasure to follow the member for Mildura. I rise to finish the grievance debate tonight. I rise to grieve for future planning decisions if the Liberals are elected to government in Victoria again, and if history is any guide, it is possible that the Liberals will be elected again at some point. I do admit that. I hope to live for another 50 years or so, and I would be very pleasantly surprised if Labor were in power for all of it. But we will campaign against the election of a Liberal government. One of the reasons we will do it is because we do not want Liberal governments making planning decisions in our area, and I feel all Labor members would agree: they do not want Liberal governments making planning decisions in theirs.

It is always a little difficult to tell where the Liberal Party sit on planning decisions because they are a little bit opportunistic, especially when in opposition. But we do know the broad perspective that they come from, and that is a free market perspective. We do know the circumstances in which senior Liberal Party decision-makers have often made their key decisions about planning, and that is over dinner and some very fine wine with some of our major property developers. Perhaps if I can, I will just take you back to 2011 when there were some very famous dinners.

Members interjecting.

Nathan LAMBERT: I could take the interjection. We could come to that particular matter, but before I get there chronologically, there were some famous dinners attended by the member for Bulleen as Minister for Planning. You can read all about them in the Age. Unfortunately they do not mention exactly which restaurants were involved; I am sure they were very pleasant. Following that there were some further decisions made regarding Fishermans Bend that also made it into the Age, about 20 times. You can also note that they ultimately ended up benefiting people close to the Liberal Party. As the media reported at the time, Mr Guy:

… stunned the political and property worlds when he rezoned a massive 250 hectares of … South Melbourne and Port Melbourne –

a decision described as –

… the most contentious decision by a Victorian planning minister for decades.

…

… CBRE commercial property director Mark Wizel estimated land values had increased up to 500 per cent since the rezoning.

I am very happy to be corrected, but I do not think a Labor planning minister has ever rezoned 250 hectares to deliver an overnight 500 per cent capital gain.

Of course in the same year, Deputy Speaker, as you might remember, we had the infamous Ventnor case where the planning minister went against the original advice of his own department, the local council and two independent planning panels. Now, I want to be clear. I am not saying that planning ministers always have to listen to the advice of councils or planning panels. Planning ministers are there for a reason, but we do note the land in question was owned by a Liberal Party member, and indeed you can read more about that in the papers or the Ombudsman’s report.

To be fair, a lot of us on the Labor side have met with property developers. I recently met with David Steele from Metro Property Development. They are building some fantastic new townhouses near Darebin Creek. They have a very good track record of sustainable development. We met with them to discuss some issues about the pathway along Darebin Creek. We recently met with Assemble and discussed the mix of dwelling types at the development they are proposing at Preston Toyota, and I have met with Sam Tarascio and the team at Salta to discuss Preston Market. I have a suspicion that my meetings with Mr Tarascio were perhaps not as pleasant as his meetings with the member for Bulleen. But of course we have those conversations because they are important. The point I want to come to is that we know from those meetings what they are like, and we know what property developers say. They always say the government has to get out of our hair, let business be business and just let us build what we want. They always say the same thing. They say, ‘If you were building an extension on your house, you would just want to do what you want, and we are only asking the same.’ Naturally they have a very free market perspective. That is their prerogative. But they also tell us that they get a very good reception from Liberal Party MPs when they make those comments. Indeed it is well known within the industry that there are some people who sit back and think, ‘You know what, I might go ahead with my development under the Labor government, but I might just land-bank and wait for a Liberal government to be elected’, because they know that they will get a greater capital uplift from that Liberal government. I understand some people even do the calculations, ‘What’s my time value for money having to wait for a Liberal government to be elected so that I can get a bigger capital gain?’

When we ask what do we fear about the election of a Liberal government, we fear that planning decisions will become too free market. I could talk about Preston Market in particular, but I think everyone in Preston knows what would have happened if the Liberals had been in power with respect to Preston Market. Instead I actually want to talk about something different, which is townhouses. About 80 per cent of our densification in Reservoir and Preston over the last 15 years has been townhouses, especially in the northern part of Reservoir. We have a lot of large blocks there, and a lot of them have now been divided up into two-bedroom townhouses. We are looking at thousands of dwellings in total. If we think about the way the Liberal Party would approach those townhouses, they would say, ‘Hey, just let the free market prevail. Build as many as you want’. But the reality is that even decisions like building townhouses affect the broader community.

In our part of the world, you are getting a significant population uplift, and an important thing you have to do is provide the services for those new residents. That is why we build new schools like Preston High, put in new ambulance stations like the one that we have got at Gilbert Road. But I want to note this, and I want to pick up some comments by the Deputy Premier yesterday. Building the transport infrastructure, in particular, for growing areas – and I know the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, who is at the table, knows this – is not easy. If we look at the part of the world I am talking about in Reservoir, you cannot just easily build a new road into the city. We do see a lot of pressure on our intersections, on Boldrewood Parade and Broadway, so that is why we in the Labor Party are always thoughtful about the community impacts, even on townhouse developments.

I am reminded that if you think about the last election when the Liberals went to that election promising to release 11,000 hectares of land, almost 300,000 lots, on the suburban fringe, they had no plan for how to manage the transport infrastructure or any infrastructure for that development. The point I want to make here this evening is that the same applies to brownfield development in places like Reservoir. If you are not thoughtful about the way you do it, you will have significant negative effects for the community.

Then, if I can, I will move to a different type of housing, the sort of gentle density housing, as it is known, that we are trying to see a bit more of close to transport infrastructure. We have a bit of a different problem with that – that we are not quite seeing enough of it in our part of the world. We have High Street, which runs from Keon Parade all the way down to Westgarth. The Mernda line runs along that street; the 86 tram runs on it. It is the perfect place to put in some higher buildings, some multistorey buildings, yet still to this day on most of High Street – you can go 10 kilometres – it is mainly two storey. So we are seeing some positive developments there, particularly south of Bell Street, but up in Preston proper, the original town of Preston, because you have got these smaller subdivisions we are not seeing the developments that we would like to see with respect to gentle density. I understand the Greens cannot really talk about private housing at the moment because they are locked into this existential battle with the Victorian Socialists, but the Liberal Party hopefully can, and we do hope to see some positive suggestions from them to back up their rhetoric.

Finally, I want to come to big developments in our part of the world. Now, it is occasionally the case that you do get sites that are thousands of square metres in established suburbs. Preston Market is of course one example. But the point I want to make about those big sites is that big sites are the ones that need the closest attention of government to the impact on the broader community, because you are not just building a single building, you are often building a neighbourhood. They will always be – those big sites – a site-by-site negotiation. The developer will have a certain expected return and the government will be looking for certain things for the community that we need. Ultimately, if the process works well, we will split the benefits: the developer will get a reasonable risk-weighted return and the community will get the surplus. But if we think back to those dinners I was talking about between Liberal Party MPs and major property developers – if they are down at Gimlet or wherever it is that they choose to go for those things – we know that the developers will always say, ‘We need simplicity. We need certainty. Things are held up too much. Why won’t you just let business be business?’

The point I want to make is that nobody holds up developments that are fantastically friendly and the community love. Developments get held up in this state because developers are trying to take a lot and give back very little, and that is always the reason. The Liberal Party will say to them, ‘Oh, don’t worry. We’ll just make things easy for you.’ As a Labor Party we say to them, ‘You need to make things easy for yourself: you need to work with the community. You need to be open and transparent about the way you negotiate, and you need to be prepared to accept a reasonable return.’

I just want to touch on the Joseph Road development in Footscray. I agree with the member for Footscray, who has spoken about it before: this is not always on the list of notorious planning decisions in this state, but it should be. The former Liberal Minister for Planning, the member for Bulleen, approved almost 7000 dwellings with no developer contribution down there. I used to live nearby, and I used to jog along Joseph Road. It was an extraordinary sight: you had a dirt road with 30-storey buildings next to it, none of the infrastructure those people needed and some of the buildings half-completed. I can tell you it was an absolute shock to locals in Footscray that you could get planning outcomes like that in a modern city like Melbourne. So to reiterate, that is not the approach the Labor Party takes, and it is not the approach we will take to Preston Market and other large sites.

I do want to speak very briefly about Preston Market. We are still in a relatively uncertain point in discussions about that market. I want to acknowledge that for the traders and for the workers – for the hundreds of people who work there – it is a difficult time. People in this chamber will know that I had a pretty robust contest with an independent candidate, Cr Gaetano Greco, at the last election. Cr Greco and I –

Mathew Hilakari: It all turned out okay.

Nathan LAMBERT: It all turned out okay – we did not agree on everything. But I will tell you, one thing we agreed on was that when it came to discussions about Preston Market, the Liberals and the Greens were nowhere to be seen. Every now and again in the other place they pop up for 5 minutes and they make a contribution, but the reality is they have not been on the ground doing the thoughtful work to resolve that issue. To my astonishment earlier this month the Liberal member for Northern Metropolitan Region in the other place stood up and announced Minister Kilkenny’s planning amendment, which she had worked for months on – it was incredibly detailed – was apparently the Liberal’s election policy. I am not sure how he extracted that. I am not sure they even put a media release out about it. But I thoroughly enjoyed that. It is like when we hear our friend the member for Mornington talking about better government regulation for rooming houses; I think he was talking about it earlier today. We know these people. We are talking about people who go to Institute of Public Affairs meetings and talk about freedom all day. These are people who sit down with developers and say, ‘We’ll fast track anything for you’. Half of them have got Trump posters up on their walls.

Brad Rowswell: On a point of order, Deputy Speaker, I have been listening quite carefully to the member on his feet. I would ask you, please, to pay very special attention to the member on his feet and the fact that he is skirting quite closely to casting aspersions on members in this place and the other place and remind him that that may only be done by substantive motion.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Imputations on members are disorderly. I do not see the member creating one, but I advise all members not to cast aspersions on other members.

Nathan LAMBERT: I will take your advice, Deputy Speaker. I will just note as a fact that the Liberal Party preferenced the Freedom Party in a whole bunch of suburbs up in our part of the world, and we will have more to say about that at a later date. But wrapping that up, I grieve for Preston Market quite seriously, because if they had been elected, the simple truth is they would have waved through 2200 apartments on that site without a moment’s thought. We disagree with the ideology, but we disagree with the thoughtlessness as well.

I had sort of hoped to speak at some length as well about the social housing plan currently in the federal Parliament, which has been blocked by the Liberals and the Greens. I am not sure I am going to get much time in my last minute to truly do that justice, but I do want to fully endorse the earlier comments of the member for Ripon on that particular topic. The policy that the federal government has put forward is a good policy. We support it. It is based on work done by the Grattan Institute. A lot of the criticisms of it are unfair. We do not expect the Greens necessarily to get the detail of it, but the important point is that we are currently having a big debate about the housing plan in the federal Parliament because we have a Labor government that has actually brought a housing plan to the federal Parliament, and it is notable that over the last decade or so we have not had many of those debates. The member for Kew, perhaps, who was working for the federal government at the time, might remember that they did not bring any high-profile housing policies to the federal Parliament.

In conclusion, I grieve for the possibilities if a Liberal government is elected. We do have a planning statement coming from this government. We all look forward to it. It will be a thoughtful one. It will not be a free market one. It will be one that makes sure our important densification is done in a way that thinks about the communities it affects.

Question agreed to.