Tuesday, 29 October 2024

 Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (22:23): (1216) My adjournment is for the Minister for Planning, and really it is a bit of a lament. Once upon a time we were the Garden State. We were a state where the norm was that every family had a garden, had a backyard, and it was an incredible social equaliser that, rich or poor or working class, you had your own backyard and that was your own kingdom as a child. Children could play safely under the eyes of their parents for those 10 minutes before dinner, and open space was integrated to the living space, not a park three streets away or somewhere where you need to make a booking to go to.

We talk about getting kids off their phones and off their devices, but we are constructing social infrastructure that makes that almost impossible by locking them up. Instead we are talking about making ourselves the townhouse and tower and density capital of Australia – towers where we know education outcomes are worse, health outcomes are worse, domestic violence is worse and there is no capacity to share a life with extended family. And yet we vilify the outer suburbs. We vilify them by calling them sprawl, we vilify them by not providing them with infrastructure and we vilify them by calling them 1950s throwbacks, when what they really do is provide families with dignity and children with the right environment to grow up and become constructive members of a society they have a stake in. Give me a new suburb with infrastructure any day of the week over an urban ghetto where we put families in two- and three-room apartments.

My action for the minister, and for the government, is for the minister to recognise that having usurped all the planning rules, having usurped all these things to yourself, you are taking direct responsibility for the layering of vulnerabilities into these communities – the educational vulnerabilities, the domestic violence vulnerabilities, the health vulnerabilities, the lack-of-active-play vulnerabilities and the socialisation and alienation vulnerabilities of high-density living. You have taken these responsibilities on, so therefore you are accountable for what happens in the next generation and the legacy you leave. Please consider that in your planning.