Thursday, 4 December 2025

 Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (21:55): I am very pleased to rise to speak on the Planning Amendment (Better Decisions Made Faster) Bill 2025. We have got a really clear imperative in front of us here in Victoria. Victoria’s population is expected to grow from 7.2 million residents in 2025 to 10 million residents in 2050 – in all, an extra 3 million people in the next 25 years. Victoria’s Housing Statement, which we released about two years ago, in the decade ahead set a target to build 800,000 homes in 10 years. It is an imperative that we build homes for Victorians, not only because of the pressures that are there from our growing population but also because more homes mean more opportunity – more opportunity to buy a home, start a family and build your long-term wealth; more opportunity to live where you want, with the things near you, in places that you love, near people you care about, instead of having to make choices about living further and further away. The Allan Labor government is committed to providing more opportunities for young people to build, and that is exactly what these amendments in the Planning Amendment (Better Decisions Made Faster) Bill will do.

The only way to make housing fairer for younger Victorians is to build more homes faster, and that is why we are introducing in this bill some of the biggest reforms to our planning laws in decades, cutting red tape, speeding up approval, helping more homes to get built near transport, jobs, services, schools, infrastructure and, most importantly, our families and the people we love, because that is the core of what we are trying to do. Experts across the board back these changes because they know they will deliver more homes more quickly. These are really important statistics: Victoria is already the number one state in the nation for approving homes, for starting homes and for completing homes. More than 50,000 homes have been approved for construction in Victoria over the last year, almost 10,000 more than in New South Wales. We want to continue to be the number one in the country for homes approved. We have delivered these changes and other changes to make sure that people can get access to their homes.

This bill makes multiple amendments to the Planning and Environment Act 1987. Since its introduction and as our needs as a state have changed, that act has become complex, inconsistent and behind the times. The proposed reforms will reduce the time and costs associated with planning scheme amendments and planning permits while ensuring greater transparency and accountability in the planning system. The reforms in the bill have been the subject of extensive consultation in three phases between July 2024 and October this year, so a little more than a month ago those concluded. The consultation consisted of meetings, workshops and delivery of written materials, and additionally, we had separate programs of consultation and engagement occurring with registered Aboriginal parties in relation to the reforms. It was done with a panel of expert legal practitioners in relation to the reforms related to planning consultation. We consulted with a wide range of state bodies too. All the councils in the state were invited to participate; their planning directors were invited to attend, and 70 of the 79 councils took that opportunity. And we engaged with multiple different types of planning consultants and peaks. These reforms are designed to help meet our housing targets as set out in the Plan for Victoria, which sets out clear action we need to take in this state to address the housing crisis.

We have really got a choice when we look at the future of our planning system and the future of our building system: we can support laws that seek to build homes, or we can support action that seeks to block homes, and very fairly and squarely, the Allan Labor government is on the side of building, not blocking. We want to build homes for more Victorians so that more Victorians have the opportunity to find a home, a place they want to call home, and not be subjected again and again to those who seek to block and block and block, because that is what the impediments that many throw up to more homes being built do – they block people, particularly young people, from having the opportunity to buy a home. We need more than just words from our leaders who say that they are in favour of millennials; we need action. We need their representatives to stand up in the Parliament.

Business interrupted pursuant to standing orders.

Gayle TIERNEY: Pursuant to standing order 4.08(1)(b), I declare the sitting to be extended by up to 1 hour.

Ryan BATCHELOR: We need action to support the amendments in this bill. The bill provides for a number of reforms. It amends the Planning and Environment Act to introduce new pathways for planning scheme amendments – low impact, medium impact and high impact – that are tailored to the complexity and potential impact of each of the amendments. The structured approach, using these categories, will shorten timeframes, cut red tape and give proponents and the community greater certainty about the process that applies.

The bill also reforms the authorisation process for planning scheme amendments. Under current arrangements there is no structured process when further review is required, which can lead to significant delays. The bill introduces clearer decision-making criteria, defined timeframes and the ability for the minister to request further information or a revised proposal. It responds directly to recommendations from the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission’s Operation Sandon inquiry requiring the minister to consider specific decision-making criteria and be satisfied that any proposed amendment aligns with state and regional plans. The bill enhances transparency by requiring that both amendment proponents and submitters declare financial interests, including gifts and donations, helping to safeguard integrity and restore public confidence in the planning process.

There are a range of matters in the bill. I will not go through them all here tonight, but the central point is that, whether it is this legislation or the other reforms that the government is making, we are absolutely on the side of Victorians who want to own a home. We are on the side of Victorians who want to own a home, and those who are opposed to this are just trying to block this agenda and block homes being built for more Victorians. I commend the bill to the house.

 David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (22:02): I rise to make a contribution at just after 10 o’clock to the Planning Amendment (Better Decisions Made Faster) Bill 2025. It is an Orwellian title, and it could not be more inaccurate in terms of what is actually delivered by the bill. We have heard from the government’s speaker, the Minister for Planning and the Premier repeatedly that this is aimed at making more properties available, yet this bill does nothing of the sort. This bill actually makes a change in our planning system that removes protections and removes many of the controls that have built a livable and enjoyable community in Victoria – the very things that have made people traditionally want to move here, the very things that people have wanted to be part of in our state. They put at risk the quality of life and they put at risk the livability of our state.

It is important, I think, to note that many of the myths the government has peddled on these matters need to be struck clearly on the head. One of the myths is that there are not enough planning permits issued. There are tens of thousands of additional planning permits issued every year that are never acted upon. Not only that, there are real costs that are built into the system – taxes and charges that make up more than 40 per cent, often nearing 50 per cent, of the cost of the development of a property, charges that are built in and make housing unaffordable for not just young people but all people. They make it more expensive and more difficult for people to purchase homes when they should be able to purchase homes and homes should be available.

The supply of land, on the other hand, has been curtailed by this government. We recently had an inquiry – Georgie Crozier, Mrs McArthur and I were the Liberal representatives on it – looking at the government’s recent planning scheme changes that are part of its great sweep to change a whole series of our planning scheme arrangements and our planning rules. What we found was repeated examples where the government has sat on its hands and not brought forward planning scheme changes that could have developed new land. Wherever you look across the city, there is land that is available. It is often government land – some of it state government land, some of it federal government land and some of it local government land. There are opportunities everywhere where land should be brought forward for development in thoughtful and clever ways.

I want to put on record the huge – 80,000 – numbers that could be put into the Docklands, and particularly the Fishermans Bend development area. Matthew Guy, then planning minister with a sense of vision, saw the future of Fishermans Bend. He understood that significant development could occur down there – dense development in that location – that would have brought forward significant opportunities for new properties, new dwellings for younger people and for others as well. What has this government done in its 11 almost 12 years in government? It has done absolutely nothing to develop that. It has not put in the transport connections that are a significant underpinning to it. It has done absolutely nothing. It is a total and utter failure.

Examples that we drew attention to in our minority report include the example of a number of the development zones on the edge of the city. There are numerous examples here, but the one we quoted in our minority report was the Clyde South example. Here are 20,000 lots, a very significant development, some industrial land as well as residential land. What has the government done with that? This PSP – precinct structure plan – has been drifting without decision by the government for seven years. Seven long years of failure to bring forward the outcomes and the properties that are required. That is an example. If you go right around the edge of the city, you can see examples of precinct structure plans that are just drifting and not being brought forward. New land that could have been there for younger people or for others has not been brought forward and has not been developed.

The government is sitting on the GAIC; it sits on the growth area infrastructure contribution. It sits like a great dragon on top of all this gold that is held in the city. That is money that has been paid by developers and passed through to those who have purchased land. It is held by the government and is meant to be sent to those regional or edge of the city development areas, but it is not being sent. In many instances it is just being held by the government for very, very long periods of time, so the services and the development that are needed are not being brought forward.

Another example I have used many times before is the Maribyrnong defence site. This is 128 hectares, and what has this state government done in its nearly 12 years in government? Nothing. What have the federal governments – of both political stripes, I might add – done with that Commonwealth land to bring that forward? The answer is absolutely nothing. We know it is contaminated because of the usage of that land by the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth ought to clean that land up and the state government ought to dragoon them into cleaning that land up and bringing that forward and bring that large tract of land in the City of Maribyrnong forward so it can be developed as land. I could go on – example after example after example around the city where the state government has not brought forward the land that is required. It has failed to bring forward land when it could have brought land forward and brought down the price of properties, brought down the price for younger Victorians. Instead of that, the state government has sat on land. It has not brought forward its own land and it has not developed the land in the way that it ought to have.

The substance of this bill is stripping away all of the protections that have been there for many years to ensure that development proceeds, and we know that many of these changes will do significant damage because we have been told that by planning experts, by communities and by councils. This is one of those occasions where the councils are singing with one very clear voice. They have looked at these changes that are proposed and they have said they will lead to a lesser outcome, they will lead to communities being cut out of planning development processes, they will mean councils are cut out of those processes and they will mean more power for the minister.

We have got a minister and a Premier who are drunk on power – who have too much power already but want more power and more decision-making control for themselves and for Labor. The councils have been very clear on what this will do. It will lead to a worse outcome for many communities. I pay tribute to the Municipal Association of Victoria for the work that they have done with their Local Government Position: Planning Amendment Bill 2025. It is a thoughtful position. Without foreshadowing what others may do, I know that there are a number in this chamber who will bring forward amendments. I should say that our position is that we will oppose this bill. We will seek to defeat this bill because we think it is fundamentally anti-democratic and we think it strips away planning and control from local communities and local councils. We are aware that there will be amendments from a number of other parties, and I foreshadow that a number of those amendments are ones that we would support. We may not bring them ourselves, but we will support many of those amendments. We will allow those who bring them forward to put them on the record and to explain them, and we will go through them one by one and make sensible decisions about what is in the community’s interest to go forward on these points.

What I also want to say is not only is there a strong council push but there are local community groups that have had meetings right across the city. This bill cannot be seen in isolation. It is also part of the high-density, high-rise zone push that the state government has brought forward in recent times – this series of planning changes that it has made. These are planning amendments that the government and the planning minister have made. She sat in her office. She used section 20(4) of the Planning and Environment Act 1987 to strike away the rights of people in the community, to strike away the rights of councils and to centralise power and centralise control into her own office. It is in a fundamentally undemocratic, almost totalitarian way that this government is behaving. It is not a government that understands that participatory democracy is important. It is not a government that understands that freedom is important. It is not a government that understands that people who live in a community must be able to have a say about the future of that community. That community that they live in and that they are part of is something that they should be exercised about. They have a stake in it and their children have a stake in it, and they should have some say on the future of that community.

That is not what is proposed in this bill, and it is not what is proposed in the other steps that the government has been taking on a broad front. The government, on a broad front, has been assaulting those long-term democratic values that have been part of Victoria’s planning system: the right to object, the right to see what is being proposed. Many of the changes that were made with the planning amendments prior to this bill have swept away even the right of notification, so you could be surprised by a development that occurs next to you. The cookie-cutter approach that has been put in place by the government would see dense, tall and ugly properties put forward by neighbours and developers in a way that does not accord with the particulars in the area.

I want to say something too about the context of where the government is on these things. With those earlier changes that have been made and are now law, we tried to revoke some of those planning changes, unsuccessfully, using section 38 of the act. The government does not like the use of section 38. It does not like the democratic decision of the Parliament – the check, the balance of this Parliament, each chamber separate, sovereign and able to make its own decisions – and it does not like the fact that each chamber of the Parliament might exercise a democratic decision that is contrary to them, contrary to the government’s own view, contrary to the minister’s own view. So what do they plan? In this bill they are going to get rid of section 38 of the Planning and Environment Act 1987. They are just going to sweep it aside. There will no longer be the ability of a majority in each chamber to disallow or revoke a planning scheme amendment. They will sweep it back into a tight arrangement which says the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee has got to recommend this – and SARC has got a government majority on the committee. That will never happen. It is never going to happen. That is the truth of the matter. Those decisions by this government I think are quite reprehensible.

But as I say, this is not just the municipal association. I have received a number of pieces of correspondence from individuals, and I thank each of them for that. I obviously cannot mention all of them. Beyond the municipal association it is councils like Manningham. The Victorian Local Governance Association of course has made its views known and supports an inquiry, and I should say that we will seek to move this bill to an inquiry that actually seeks to bring public attention to these matters and test many of these matters in open discussion and open session. The Planning Institute of Australia has also put significant proposed amendments to these matters. The planning institute recognises that there are significant improvements needed. There are the City of Glen Eira, Wellington shire, Buloke shire, the Kingston Residents Association – and I pay tribute to the work of some of these groups – Whitehorse City Council, Yarra Ranges and Maroondah. Port Phillip has been quite clear about its views and the risk of the different pathways, and I will come to all those in a moment. The Maribyrnong council, Indigo shire, Moorabool – it is seriously almost every single council. Bayside council has been very clear, and I have been pleased to join my colleague the member for Brighton in a number of public marches. As I say, the community groundswell against the government’s undemocratic steps with this act is quite extraordinary. There is Cardinia, and I should say the combined residents association of Whitehorse – I could go on, and I am conscious of time.

I particularly want to pick up the National Trust and the Royal Historical Society, who have put a number of key points forward concerning a number of the earlier decisions of this government but are very exercised about heritage. I do want to say that I think our heritage is directly at risk. The planning amendments that have already been put in place can sweep away the heritage listings that are in place in our state at the moment. It was instructive watching those bureaucrats at the inquiry. When pressed and pressed and pressed about whether heritage protections would protect properties, they would not say that they would. The best legal advice is that in many respects it is uncertain, but most likely, at the end of the day, even a nationally heritage-listed property will not be protected or a state-listed property will not be protected. The truth of the matter is that all of this needs to be seen in the context of an assault on traditional arrangements for our planning. It is very clear that those heritage protections will not stand and can be swept away by the government’s planning changes, and this bill will cement further significant powers for these changes.

I want to talk about the centralisation of ministerial power. I am conscious of what this bill does, and there are a number of key points. I am going to talk about these as themes. I should note that the Master Builders Victoria and the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) also point to serious problems in these bills. It should not be thought that this is entirely pro developer or anti developer or any one side. Actually this bill is one of those where in many respects the state government has succeeded in having almost everyone of thought who knows about these matters concerned about what the state government is proposing. The centralisation of ministerial power: the bill grants the minister wide discretion over planning amendments, including the ability to prepare and vary local planning schemes – clause 14 – exempt amendments from exhibition, override local council decisions and abandon amendments. The repeal of section 38 I think is a travesty.

The minister’s ability to approve statewide planning strategy without public or parliamentary consultation further extends this centralisation. Stakeholders make the point that bypassing democratic processes opens the system to political manipulation and potential corruption – and this is a corrupt government; this is corrupt to the core. The union links, some of the hard-left CFMEU links that we just talked about in the last bill, and some of these other changes that are proposed here are opening the way directly to corruption. It is the sort of bill that you expect to see from a government that has been in power for nearly 12 years now. Labor, with the exception of the 2010–14 period, have been in power since 1999. It is a very, very long time. It is a government that is thoroughly corrupt, thoroughly at the point where it believes it has a right to make the decisions and a right to override local communities. There is the reduction of local government and independent panel roles. The diminishment of local council roles I think is a mistake. Local councils, in my experience, by and large, tried to do the right thing on planning and very often got it right. I think they added significantly and were an important vehicle where state government got it wrong, and they were where local communities were able to make their views well known.

The curtailment of public participation and notice rights – the bill drastically reduces third-party rights to be notified, to object to or to appeal planning decisions. Sections 17 to 19 of the existing act, which guarantee broad public notice and submission, are rewritten almost in their entirety. There is this idea of the low-impact, medium-impact and high-impact amendments, with low impact having no public notice, medium impact only requiring notice via limited online or newspaper publication and high impact allowing public submission but with restricted hearing rights. The restructuring of these excludes many citizens and community groups from participating in local planning decisions, and this does undermine basic participatory democracy principles. In a growing number of instances neighbours will not be notified of planning permits, but traditional owners, mind you, will have an additional say. In my view there is a stripping away of rights from everyday Victorians and councils but a further extension of rights to traditional owners. Concerns also extend to the permit application types. The bill introduces the categories, as I said. Only type 3 will see applications that require advertisement or allow any objections.

There is an erosion of environmental and social considerations. For example, the bill amends section 60 of the existing act, eliminating the requirement for responsible authorities to consider environmental effects of type 1 applications and potentially type 2 as well. Similarly, key objectives of planning under section 4 of the current act, such as ensuring integration of land use with environmental and social principles, are omitted. There are new objectives that reference climate change and traditional owner rights. Critics argue these inclusions are symbolic rather than operational. I am not sure that is true.

The industry-specific concerns that are raised – the UDIA and the master builders did provide significant feedback. On the growth areas infrastructure charge, the UDIA supports greater flexibility in using GAIC but opposes provisions treating advance GAIC payments as a GAIC event, arguing this would breach existing arrangements and contracts. On infrastructure contributions plans, the UDIA has welcomed the use of infrastructure contribution revenue for land acquisition but recommends it be extended to all precinct structure plans and include funding for major infrastructure such as drainage assets. Both groups emphasise limiting planning authority administrative costs to the ICPs only, and there are real concerns here.

On the issue of restrictive covenants, this is – and I am conscious of the time I have got here – a very significant concern. People who have bought into suburbs, into estates, will have those genuine covenants that have been put on estates just stripped aside. I raised an example of an estate in Canterbury the other day in this chamber. That estate has beautiful concrete roads and old-fashioned, gorgeous California bungalow homes – a real feel in that estate – protected by restrictive covenants. They are to be swept aside. The fact that they were signed – people bought properties in good faith, expecting those covenants to be honoured – is to be swept aside. Again, this is a centralising government that has really very significant issues in understanding what is fair and what is not fair. The lack of transparency and consultation and the absence of supporting regulations is a legitimate concern. What regulations will be made under this bill? This is a broader trend that is occurring but nonetheless one that I think we should be very concerned about, the loss of so many of the checks and balances that have been in our system for a much longer period of time.

I should, in the short time allowed to me now, make the point that I have had advice on a broad front, as has Richard Riordan, the former Shadow Minister for Planning and Housing, and now David Southwick. Richard has worked assiduously on a number of these matters around this bill. He has met with many different groups and has clearly understood what the impact of many of these changes will be. It will not be more housing, as the government claims. It will not be. It is the economics that is actually driving the difficulties with housing, and a big part of that is the tax layers that the government has imposed. A big part of it is the failure to bring forward additional supply that the government could have done itself now but chose not to do. A big part of it is also the actual economics of how some of the inner-city and middle-suburbs economics stack up. It is true that if you want to build a two-bedroom unit in a large tower in a middle suburb, it is probably going to be in the order of approaching $1 million. That is the truth of the matter in many respects. In many of the suburbs that the government likes to point to and attack, that is the sort of number that is being talked about. There are hundreds, in most municipalities, in some cases thousands, of planning permits that have been issued by the council but have never, ever been acted upon. They have not been acted upon because the market is not there at the cost structure that is actually in the arrangements there.

I want to put on record the assistance from Michael Buxton and a number of others, and I want to note some of the people in Boroondara who have particularly supported some of the examinations that I and others have done – Jane Oldham and others. I am not going to name them all, and I am inevitably going to be in trouble for not naming everyone, but I am conscious of the small period of time that I have remaining tonight.

I just want to quickly return to some of the key issues. The timeframes for consultation and feedback are bizarrely short. The planning scheme amendments will not follow the normal tabling, scrutiny and disallowance procedures. Only a government-controlled SARC motion can be taken to Parliament to overturn a planning decision. Local councils and communities will be swept aside and not given a say in the future of arrangements in their local area. The timelines of the promised reporting and annual performance monitoring and the planning scheme amendment process, including compliance, lack details. The traditional owner arrangements I think will prove to be a cumbersome rigidity in the system that will slow down the outcomes in contravention of what the bill says it is seeking to achieve. And there are the additional development contributions the government has now been talking about in the last few days – thousands of dollars being imposed on every property as a new charge, a new tax. How on earth do you expect to bring more properties to market if your solution is to put a new tax on that? If you make it more expensive, it gets harder to bring a property onto market, not easier.

I want to conclude by saying – and I feel I could have talked for several hours on this bill without any difficulty at all because there is enormous spread in the bill and what the government is seeking to do – that it is at its heart a bad bill and a bill that will not achieve its objective of more homes. It will ruin the suburbs that we – (Time expired)

 Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (22:33): I rise to speak on the Planning Amendment (Better Decisions Made Faster) Bill 2025. I want to say at the outset that the Greens support the idea that our planning laws need updating. This is long overdue and something that there have been widespread calls for. Not only is there a need for greater clarity, certainty and efficiency, the current laws fail to adequately account for contemporary challenges like climate change and housing affordability. So when we heard this bill was on its way we had high expectations of what it would do with respect to these issues, and while this bill does attempt at least to deal with issues of certainty and efficiency, it was disappointing to see that it really misses the opportunity to create planning tools to deliver more affordable and social housing. It reduces important environmental considerations in planning decisions and removes the power of the Parliament to revoke planning scheme amendments, including for new coal and gas projects.

I want to sincerely acknowledge at the outset the constructive engagement from the Minister for Planning’s office regarding our concerns about this bill, and while there were and remain many differences of opinion between us about this bill, I appreciate their willingness to engage in robust discussion and respond to our questions. However, it would be remiss of me not to recognise that key parts of the sector, particularly local government, who bear the overwhelming majority of the responsibility for implementing these laws, have told us repeatedly that they were not meaningfully engaged in developing this bill. In making this comment I cite the excellent work and advocacy of the Municipal Association of Victoria, the Victorian Local Government Association, councils from right across the state and various planning experts, who have reached out to us in various ways to share their concerns. Not only does failing to engage local government remove valuable technical expertise, it also removes an important voice of our communities.

It has become the habit of this Labor state government to treat local government as an inconvenience or, as it sometimes may be, a convenient scapegoat on a whole range of issues. When it comes to planning in particular, this dismissive approach simply does not make sense. If the state government has any hope of implementing its planning agenda successfully, it needs local government on board. Yet instead of looking at how different levels of government and the system can work together to tackle the housing crisis, this government and many others around the country in fact are falsely painting local government and planning as the cause of our housing crisis.

Now, first things first: planning is not the problem. Planning is really important. It is complex, it is layered and it often takes a long time, but for good reason. Fundamentally it is about keeping people safe – safe from natural and iatrogenic environmental hazards, safe from building hazards and safe from detrimental health impacts of poorly designed places. We have had countless royal commissions and inquiries into various disasters that recognise the central role of planning in preventing or limiting harm to people and the environment. In short, planning saves lives. It also helps to ensure orderly development, consideration of current and future needs, the balances of the rights of different interests and the appropriate use of resources. Further, to blame planning for the housing affordability crisis ignores the fact that this is a crisis that is being experienced right across Australia and indeed across much of the world. All of these jurisdictions have vastly different planning systems, and yet their citizens are also increasingly struggling to be able to afford to buy a house.

Secondly, blaming councils for the housing affordability crisis is also without foundation. Councils approve the overwhelming majority of planning applications. As my colleague in the other place the member for Richmond explained, we only have to look at the number of approvals that are currently sitting there with not a speck of soil turned. In Melbourne there are a hundred active development permits that have not been acted on – 118 residential buildings and almost 22,000 apartments where work has not commenced. In my home town of Geelong there are numerous apartment buildings in the CBD that have been approved that are waiting to proceed. The hold-up is not the councils; it is not the planning laws. It is the fact that developers cannot make enough of a profit yet, so they wait. But there is a current, trendy school of thought emerging around the country from those who I suspect might be keeping a copy of Abundance under their pillows, that if you deregulate the planning system and let the market take control, this will magically unlock all of this unicorn affordable housing. This assumes that housing markets operate on a neat Marshallian supply-and-demand curve in a perfectly competitive market with no externalities. It is underpinned by the idea of what I have heard referred to as ‘moving chains’ but I prefer to call this idea ‘trickle-down housing’, where rich people buy up new, expensive housing and then in moving out of their big old mansions they somehow free up cheaper housing for those on lower incomes. I am certainly no expert – and I do not claim to be – in housing economics, but I do have a reasonable foundation in health economics, and that deals with some pretty complex markets, and I know enough to say that the real world does not work like this. There are many problems with this philosophy, including the lack of decent evidence about this in the Australian context, as was highlighted in an excellent paper about the economics of housing supply by the New South Wales parliamentary research service. I recommend this to anyone who is curious about evidence in the Australian context about this issue.

Fundamentally the issue when it comes to our housing affordability crisis and the problem with framing it as just a case of simple supply and demand is that it overlooks that the need for individuals to have housing is not discretionary, it is absolute. This is not some sort of luxury consumable, it is a fundamental right. It is something that people absolutely need, and their ability to exercise choice is extremely constrained. For other essential things, like water, energy and health care, we have loads of regulation and government intervention to ensure that people have access. We do not just simply leave it purely to the markets. I accept that there are massive cost barriers that people experience with all of these different areas, and on many fronts that is getting worse, and we need further government intervention to support and protect people from the financial costs that are becoming crippling. But they are nothing like the barriers we are seeing when it comes to the cost of housing.

Right now housing is only getting more unaffordable. Many young people face the prospect of never being able to own their own home. In fact many, many young people are struggling just to even pay the rent. Increasing numbers of Victorians are finding themselves homeless, and this is only projected to get worse. What we are witnessing is mass market failure and the miserable human cost of the failure of governments to stop it. The sole trick the government is pulling out of their hat to address the housing crisis is to make some tweaks to the planning system that mean developers can now fill out some simpler forms, and we are supposed to believe that this will somehow magically lead to the proliferation of housing, so much so that prices will drop to affordable levels.

We are essentially trying to get the market to solve the crisis that it created. It is never going to work. The government has really missed a huge opportunity before them in reviewing the Planning and Environment Act 1987 to use the planning system to help to do something real about the lack of affordable, public and community housing by creating a legal framework for planning authorities to implement inclusionary zoning policies. This is something that has long been called for by housing and homelessness support services, planners and local governments. Indeed recommendation 24 of the government’s own inquiry into regional housing that was tabled in the last sitting week calls on the government to implement mandatory inclusionary zoning of affordable and social housing as part of new residential developments. That was a government-led, government-chaired inquiry. That was one of the key recommendations.

Yet planning authorities, including the state and local governments, currently lack the legislative power to be able to require developers to provide a proportion of affordable or social housing in any new development. That recommendation currently cannot be properly implemented. Without these provisions in our planning laws, the state government’s current drive to infill inner-suburban Melbourne through the activity centre program, for example, is a huge missed opportunity to deliver genuinely affordable and public housing we need right now. That is why the Greens will be moving an amendment that seeks to create heads of power within the act that would enable councils and the state government, when creating a planning scheme amendment, to require a specific proportion of land or dwellings to be affordable or social housing. I request that those amendments be circulated now.

While the effective delivery of this will require state and local governments to set ambitious policies and targets and commit to them, this is a fundamental step in unlocking this power. We know such ambitious policies are possible. For example, our neighbours over in South Australia, their government has committed to a respectable 15 per cent affordable or social housing in all new developments over 200 dwellings. We think we should have more ambitious targets than that, but at least they have gone ahead and done that. Tens of thousands of dwellings are projected to be delivered under the government’s activity centre program, which, it should be noted, will power ahead with or without this bill. The activity centre program, which I know that there is a lot of community concern about, does not need this bill for its rollout. Currently there is no requirement or intention for any of this new development in these activity centres to deliver affordable, public or community housing. We think our amendment will unlock the potential to require a decent chunk of the housing in activity centres to be genuinely affordable and social housing, because unlike other provisions in this bill, this will come into effect, under our amendment, immediately upon royal assent. If our amendment passes, we think this will be a significant improvement to this bill.

Many of the changes in this bill before us also concerningly change language that is well understood by planners and provides fundamental protections for people and the environment. We will be seeking to reinstate a key term, ‘ecological processes’, in the objectives of the act. While the government has argued that its removal and replacement with ‘ecological and genetic diversity’ does not change the meaning of the objectives, based on feedback from planners we beg to differ. ‘Ecological processes’ captures key concepts like the natural flow of water across the land. This is a critical consideration in planning decisions, particularly given increasing hazards like flooding related to climate change. We will also be interrogating other changes to the language in the objectives during the committee stage of this bill, including terms like ‘safety’ and ‘fairness’, to ensure that fundamental ideas that previous terminology covered have not been lost.

Many of the concerns being expressed in the community and from key planning stakeholders relate to the unknowns of this bill, because so much of what is about to happen is going to be left to regulations that are yet to be developed. This includes things such as the timeframes for permit assessments and approval in the three different pathways, something that I know is of significant concern to local government, especially small rural councils that might only have one planner, for example. The concerns also relate to planning changes that are already occurring and are continuing to occur, as I said, with or without this bill passing, because they too rely on planning scheme amendments and regulations that exist outside of this legislation. As mentioned earlier, things like the activity centre program do not actually need this bill.

Another key example is the townhouse code VC267, which was the subject of significant criticism in a select committee inquiry report earlier this year. Key concerns involved the switching off of consideration of key provisions in the Planning and Environment Act, such as the risk of flooding or landslip where an overlay is not yet in place but the risk is known, or the risk of building on contaminated land where overlays simply do not exist. It also highlighted concerns like the lowering of environmentally sustainable development standards and loss of tree canopy and vegetation. We are still waiting on a response from the government to the recommendations of that report. While they indicated, following the inquiry in some of the debate that occurred, that they are willing to make adjustments to these planning schemes if needed, if they realise that something is not quite working, I am genuinely concerned by what we are hearing from local government about the lack of willingness of the state government to take on their feedback.

We also understand that the Victoria Planning Provisions are under review at the moment. It would probably have made sense to start with this and then sort out the act, and then look at some planning scheme amendments, rather than doing it the way it is being done. But I have a feeling that trying to make sense of this is not going to be very good for my wellbeing, so we will park that. But it is critical that this VPP review involves local government and planners so that the system actually works, and it has to centre safety and wellbeing of current and future generations. We need assurances that local government and planning experts will have a seat at the table – and not just a token seat amongst a sea of industry interests, or a seat that is just a tick-a-box exercise or is just dismissed. They will have proper representation and be able to provide key technical advice to the minister on development and implementation of new regulations and timeframes; changes to the VPP, including permit types; development of ministerial guidelines and directions; review and reworking where required of existing regulations and codes; and oversight of implementation of the overall planning program. Such input and oversight has long been called for by local government, was twice recommended by the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office and was a key recommendation of the planning select committee inquiry earlier this year.

For this sort of arrangement to be constructive it requires that, as I said, it is not just a tick-a-box exercise. The state government and planning department must genuinely engage and listen to planning experts. Unfortunately there is no tool available – there is no way we can legislate good engagement. You cannot legislate good engagement, but surely given what is at stake here the government should recognise that it is in their own best interests to get this right. This is especially the case when it comes to avoiding development that puts people’s health and lives at risk, such as in high-risk flood zones. Not only would I hope that this is something everyone would agree is just the right thing to do, but it is a government’s primary duty to protect people.

Additionally, the Ombudsman’s report into the Kensington Banks flood issue should highlight that in addition to considering people’s health and wellbeing and lives, which should be the primary consideration, the other consideration for governments is the potential cost in liabilities arising from sloppy planning, so this should also be something that is front of mind for this government. If we move to section 6 of this bill, which apparently attempts to implement the recommendations of IBAC’s Operation Sandon, we think this whole section is a bit of a mess, to put it mildly. The provisions in the bill do not really reflect what Sandon recommended, they are convoluted and I think they are only going to add to confusion and further inconsistency, which are really the perfect circumstances for corruption to occur in. The mess appears to be the result of what I can only conclude has been the inability of different departments to collaborate on this work. A fulsome response to Sandon on these matters quite obviously requires amendments to at least two, if not three, acts, including the Local Government Act 2020, the Planning and Environment Act 1987 and possibly the Electoral Act 2002. It also requires a shared understanding across local government and planning departments to ensure that it makes sense and that it does what it is intended to do, which is to prevent corruption in planning matters. I strongly suspect we will be revisiting this issue soon, in one way or another, when it becomes clear that what has been proposed in this part of the bill – it is probably well-intentioned, but it just has not been executed properly – becomes apparent. We are going to be interrogating this a bit more in the committee stage of the bill, but as I said, I suspect this is part of the bill that just will not work well in practice.

Finally, this bill – quite astoundingly – seeks to make amendments to planning schemes related to oil and gas, and I quote from the bill, ‘to facilitate exploration and extraction’. Once again Labor shows its true colours on climate: talking a big game but quietly helping the fossil fuel industry to expand. This is an extension of the similarly outrageous provisions in this bill that remove the Parliament’s ability to disallow planning scheme amendments, including for residential and commercial developments. We absolutely cannot support a bill that removes this power regardless of anything else that it does. Disallowance of a planning scheme amendment or regulation is a power that is very rarely used by this Parliament, but taking it away is a dangerous concept and an erosion of respect for democracy. It is also an important safeguard, this power, for communities who are increasingly being cut out of planning decisions through the various planning schemes and codes that are being rolled out by this government. Therefore, we will be seeking to amend the bill to restore these critical powers to the Parliament. I would hope – and I really expect – this is something that has widespread support across this chamber.

Overall, can I conclude by saying that while we think that there are some things that this bill does that are reasonable, there are many aspects that we are disappointed with. However, we have put forward a range of amendments that we think make significant improvements. I would really encourage members to look at those amendments and to please consider supporting those. We will be asking a lot more questions and looking further into this bill during the committee stage.

 Sheena WATT (Northern Metropolitan) (22:54): Thank you so very much for the opportunity to rise and make a contribution to the debate on the Planning Amendment (Better Decisions Made Faster) Bill 2025. This bill delivers some of the most significant reforms to the Planning and Environment Act 1987 in decades. It responds directly to the commitments the government made in the housing statement and reflects the scale of change required to prepare Victoria for extraordinary growth over the next 25 years.

The bill before us has three main objectives: first, it seeks to significantly reduce the time, cost and complexities associated with making planning scheme amendments by establishing new approval pathways that are proportionate to the risk and complexity of each amendment. Second, it aims to dramatically reduce the time and cost of obtaining planning permits by creating assessment pathways that better reflect the level of risk, impact and complexity of the development application before the responsible authority. Third, it makes a wide range of reforms to improve efficiency and increase transparency, providing greater certainty and ensuring that the act is fit for purpose to deliver on our housing statement commitments. These reforms sit within a very clear context through the Plan for Victoria. The government has undertaken some of the most comprehensive engagement processes in our state’s history, working systematically with communities, traditional owners, councils, peak bodies and industries to plan for the future.

Housing targets have been set for every local government area, and they have already been incorporated into all planning schemes. These targets make clear the task ahead and the scale of the task ahead. Over the next 10 years alone we will need planning scheme amendments to enable land supply for around 180,000 new homes in greenfield areas, and we will need many more amendments and permits to facilitate the 720,000 additional homes that must be delivered in our established suburbs. To deliver this it is essential that decision-making processes remain robust economically, socially and environmentally, but also proportionate, agile and efficient. Processes that take two years or more to complete simply cannot meet the demands of a growing population or the expectations of existing and future communities. These changes reinforce the principles that panels are not courts and hearings should not be adversarial battlegrounds dominated by legal representatives. They exist to provide independent expert review.

The bill also introduces a suite of complementary reforms to further reduce delays and increase certainty. Councils will be able to recover costs when progressing proponent-initiated amendments, giving them capacity to support applications without bearing the financial burden. The minister will have a prescribed timeframe to make authorisation decisions following a request for further information, addressing one of the key bottlenecks in the current system. The bill also empowers the minister to grant exemptions from notice and exhibition where equivalent consultation has already occurred, preventing duplication and delay. The bill also strengthens compliance and enforcement by providing new tools and updating penalties and sanctions to reflect modern regulatory practice. It reduces ambiguity and lowers the risk of compensation claims against the state. It simplifies administrative requirements under the distinctive areas and landscapes scheme and acquits outstanding recommendations from IBAC’s Operation Sandon and the Legislative Council Environment and Planning Committee.

This bill recognises that a planning system designed 40 years ago cannot meet the needs of a rapidly growing Victoria. It modernises that system so we can deliver the homes, infrastructure and services our current and future communities need. I commend the bill to the house.

 Gaelle BROAD (Northern Victoria) (22:58): I am pleased to be able to speak on the Planning Amendment (Better Decisions Made Faster) Bill 2025, but I think all of us in this chamber know – or most of us do, perhaps – that it is going to be the ‘worse decisions made faster’ bill. It is clear that there is an issue. We do need more houses across the state – there is no doubt about that – but it seems clear to me that this government has completely missed the target and is completely off track.

This bill has been rushed in many ways, because you can see that there has been no consultation with the people that I consider to be key stakeholders in this. Local councils – I have heard from a number of them – have said they have not been consulted, and I have heard that some early consultation had been done with non-disclosure agreements as well, which I think is quite extraordinary, because there should be transparent discussion on this to get the best outcomes.

Business interrupted pursuant to standing orders.

Ingrid STITT: Pursuant to standing order 4.08, I declare the sitting be extended by up to 1 further hour.

Gaelle BROAD: I think it is quite extraordinary, in a way, that this legislation is coming before us in a rush, because I go back to one of my early speeches when I was first elected. It was about the fast-track pilot program that had been held. There had been a pilot program that had been held two years prior, so this was back in 2023. I raised the issue in March, asking the government what had happened, because the department had done this pilot program with councils like the City of Greater Bendigo, yet the councils had heard nothing from the government. At the time we were looking at the Commonwealth Games and the need for a lot more homes, and I guess of concern to me, as it was in the community, was where everyone was going to stay. It was just interesting that it took the government some months to respond. That was in July. They came back with a response saying, ‘Yes, we’re looking into this fast-tracking pilot program.’ And then lo and behold in December 2023 they introduced that program. To think that they took over two years, had not done anything on it and it had just been sitting on the shelf with no action taken – it took them a very long time to actually implement that.

Here we have rushed legislation. This is a significant overhaul of Victoria’s planning system, handing broad new powers to the Minister for Planning while diminishing the role of councils and local communities. These proposed changes have been made without meaningful consultation and risk eroding transparency, accountability and local representation, which is particularly important in regional areas, because you cannot have communities that are hundreds of kilometres away from Melbourne having no engagement in what is going on in those communities and the decisions being made in Melbourne, which is what we will see under this bill. Despite the scale of these reforms, the government is seeking to rush them through before Christmas, allowing very little time for proper scrutiny or community input. On this side of the chamber we are very supportive of it going to a parliamentary inquiry through this Council chamber because that will enable a thorough examination of this bill and ensure that councils, community groups and planning experts can provide evidence. I remember the WorkCover issues and being involved in that inquiry, which was actually over the Christmas break some time ago now, but it was just short, succinct and was able to really look into the issues at the time.

I know I have spoken previously as a member of the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee. We review all the legislation coming before Parliament and certainly raised concerns about this bill in a minority report, which is on page 77 of Alert Digest No. 15, if anyone wants to go and do some bedtime reading, because I think it flags quite a few concerns I have spoken to previously.

Just to give some insights into the concerns that we want to raise, as I said, this is a major review of the planning scheme and not due for implementation before October 2027. Key stakeholders such as councils and key industry lobby groups have been given a very short time to review the entirety of the bill. The planning scheme amendments will not follow the normal tabling, scrutiny and disallowance procedures, and parliamentary oversight will be significantly diminished or removed. Local councils and communities will be largely cut out of deciding the opportunities for growth in their communities. Next-door neighbours in many cases will not be notified of development plans, while traditional owners will. Another key concern that has been raised is growth area infrastructure contribution, the GAIC, and development contributions can now be used for purposes outside the area where the funds are raised. There is a significant lack of trust in the government’s spending of developer funds and certainly a concern that this process will be abused. Another key concern is that there is a requirement to notify traditional owners, which has the potential to increase time and cost pressures. Referral authorities can charge fees, and these fees are not identified and schedules are not known. There are no requirements for the minister to make decisions in a timely manner. I know it has been referred to as the minister’s ‘scary cupboard’, which is exempt from change, and yes, there certainly could be a lot of things in that bottom drawer.

I have received correspondence from numerous councils, and I just want to highlight some of the concerns that have been raised with me, because I think it is important for this chamber and for the government to actually be aware of what is being shared. City of Whittlesea, in their correspondence, pointed out:

Most details are left to the regulations without any guarantee of consultation …

The Bill provides over 100 instances where matters are to be prescribed in the regulations.

And I know Dr Mansfield in her contribution also referred to that significant reliance on the regulations.

Murrindindi Shire Council has pointed out, in their correspondence:

As a small rural Shire with a small planning team, we do not have the capacity to reasonably work within the proposed timelines authentically. The Bill appears to have been designed for middle Melbourne in mind, without regard for the resourcing constraints of rural councils.

And Nillumbik shire, in their correspondence, pointed out the:

•   Lack of genuine consultation: Local government, which will bear significant responsibility for implementing these reforms, has not been meaningfully engaged in the Bill’s development.

Another aspect, which I think is worth raising in the chamber, is that put forward by the Yarra Ranges council. I grew up in the Yarra Ranges area, so I am certainly aware of the issues they have raised here. To quote from their correspondence, the bill:

Compromises environmental and public safety by removing the objective of ensuring safe and healthy living and working environments from the Planning and Environment Act 1987, and by enabling fast-tracked approvals that may bypass critical assessments related to environmental and hazard risks.

Yarra Ranges is highly vulnerable to bushfire, flooding, and landslip hazards …

It goes on to talk about the overlays and also erosion. It says the bill is:

Streamlining planning processes to fast-track housing in some areas, ignoring recommendations of Bushfire Royal Commissions …

And it goes on. I just think that these are all very important things to consider.

I also met with Mitchell Shire Council, and they talked about that GAIC funding. As I said, this bill opens the door for that money not to be allocated to that community but to be taken elsewhere. And that does set off alarm bells for me, because I think of what we have heard in this chamber about the Suburban Rail Loop. We know they are looking to raise funds because they do not have any idea of how they are going to fund it. They are certainly leaning on the Commonwealth government, and the Commonwealth are saying, ‘Well, we’ll let you know come May.’ But Mitchell shire have got a rapidly growing population. It is growing by about 6 per cent each year – that is their average annual change, and it is quite extraordinary. There are a thousand additional lots a year, and with that, they need a lot of amenities and community infrastructure. It is not industrial development, a lot of it is residential development, and that requires the community facilities and the infrastructure.

We have already had under this government the Growing Suburbs Fund completely disappear. That was $50 million; it was cut down to $5 million and now zip, zero, nothing. So it is not looking after the regions or growing suburbs of Melbourne, but certainly this government seems to love the inner-city seats of Melbourne where public transport and infrastructure are readily available. But for the growing suburbs and certainly out in our region and in Mitchell shire, this is a significant concern. When you consider the cost of infrastructure has increased by about 30 per cent, it is quite extraordinary, and there is a real risk in that in this bill.

I think it is important to reference the local council sustainability inquiry that I was part of. Mrs McArthur, you were involved with that as well. It was clear that this government is putting a lot of pressure on councils. I remember talking about the need to have a seat at the table, and certainly with this bill, they have not had a seat at the table. I think, in conclusion, it is worth highlighting as well that whilst this government talk about trying to build more houses and make things, we have got over 65,000 people on our public housing waitlist, so we know there is a huge need for additional housing. I was talking to a dad in Bendigo with his son, who tried to do a development, to subdivide a small block of land, and they were looking at $140,000 in costs involved in that. Then we have heard the government also introduce just recently, or talk about introducing, an $11,000 tax on every new home built in 58 activity centres across Melbourne. They think, ‘We’ll put that on to the developers.’ Well, guess what, that will flow through to the cost of the homes and make it harder for people to find a home in this state. We certainly need more houses, but this bill completely misses the target. We oppose the bill, and we will certainly be supporting the move to an inquiry to examine the detail and engage the stakeholders that will help this development and planning in future be better, rather than what we see under this bill, which is worse decisions being made faster.

 Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (23:11): I rise to speak on the Planning Amendment (Better Decisions Made Faster) Bill 2025. This bill will amend the Planning and Environment Act of 1987, with the main objective being to speed up approval times for planning permits and planning scheme changes. The government claims that these amendments are necessary because there is a housing crisis and the housing crisis is being caused by delays in planning stages of residential developments. But in reality the housing crisis is being caused by failed Labor policies that have massively driven up the cost to build.

Analysis shows that nearly half of the cost of building a home is taken up by fees, charges and red tape. With this bill, the government wants to force councils to approve permits faster and stop local communities from having input into planning decisions in the belief that this will lead to houses being built more quickly and more affordably. But the bill will not achieve those objectives. What it will do is make the planning system more expensive for councils, it will make property development more chaotic, it will undermine the democratic principle of community control over their neighbourhoods and it will reduce public trust in the planning system. This is why the Liberals are opposing this bill.

Victoria desperately needs reforms in the housing sector to make homes more affordable, but this bill is not the solution. I have been contacted by many local government authorities in my electorate who will struggle to implement the changes brought about by this bill. On Tuesday this week I tabled a petition signed by over 2400 residents and ratepayers of the Mansfield Shire Council calling on the Legislative Council to refer this bill to an inquiry so that proper consultation with rural councils and communities can occur before any changes to the planning system are passed. Along with the Mansfield Shire Council, I have heard from the City of Whittlesea, Moorabool Shire Council, Nillumbik Shire Council, Murrindindi Shire Council, Yarra Ranges and the Mitchell shire as well. Mrs Broad has just outlined all of their concerns, so I will not go over each of those letters again and outline those concerns because they have been very eloquently put by Mrs Broad. But every single council in the state is opposed to this bill because it will create too many new problems in its single-minded attempt to speed up the approvals process.

The main effect of this bill is to divide planning permit applications into three pathways, for low-, medium- and high-risk projects. Stream 1 is for low-risk projects such as alterations to single dwellings. Stream 2 is for medium-risk projects such as townhouses or low-rise developments. Stream 3 is for high-risk projects that are taller and higher in density.

We have many concerns with this bill, one being the lack of notification to neighbours. It is highly concerning that for type 1 and type 2 applications there is no requirement for neighbours to be notified and no avenue for them to object to the proposal. You could wake up one morning and be totally surprised by the builders working next door to add a new room to a house that impedes your privacy or restricts your amenity, but there is no requirement to notify you that that is going to happen, and you have no avenue to object. But there is a requirement to notify the traditional owners, and if they do not respond by the deadline that cannot be taken as consent. So planning applications can still be held up because the traditional owners have not replied and have not given their consent.

Another concern is that the developer selects the pathway. Instead of council planners assessing an application and deciding which pathway it belongs to, developers get to decide their own pathway, which could lead to frequent unintentional errors or even a developer intentionally choosing the wrong pathway to access an easier assessment process. This is a real concern, because there is only a tiny five-day window for council planning staff to assess applications and change the pathway if there is an error. If those five days pass without change, it cannot be changed later on. Higher risk planning permit applications may be locked into a low-risk pathway and risk automatic approval.

The bill also removes Parliament’s power to disallow planning scheme changes, meaning parliamentary oversight will be significantly diminished or removed. This bill destroys all important democratic checks and balances. The bill will create a significant regulatory burden on local government. Local governments will have to change all of their IT systems – they will all need to be reconfigured. Many councils already do not have enough statutory planning staff, and this bill will create more work that needs to be done in very short timelines, so that will be very difficult for councils. And it is not like the councils can just say, ‘We’ll just hire more planning staff’, which would increase their cost burden – there are no planning staff in many areas, and it is very difficult for councils to attract them. These short timelines will put additional pressure on planners and cause errors. As I said, many of our local councils have written to us to object to these changes.

I would also like to point out that, while the government is blaming local councils and saying they have to approve things in shorter timelines, the Macedon Ranges council has actually sent three letters to the Minister for Planning asking her to prepare planning scheme amendments and to commence a process for implementing the changes, but all that the minister has done is send a letter in September 2024 acknowledging receipt of the plans and council’s decision to adopt them. Since then the minister has been silent. The plans have been sitting on the minister’s desk for over 12 months, and nothing has been done to move the process forward. This government expects councils to fast-track planning decisions but cannot even approve changes to the planning scheme that would assist this council to actually grow the number of houses in the Macedon Ranges. If the state Labor government wants more housing, why is it holding up the process to amend the planning schemes for these towns and allow them to build more housing?

This bill has so many problems because the Labor government, in its arrogance, totally failed to consult with local planning authorities who will actually have to implement these changes. It is no surprise that in developing this bill, which is designed to shortcut the consultation process for planning permits, Labor also took shortcuts when it came to consulting with councils about the bill itself. Of major concern is that this bill will allow growth areas infrastructure contribution funding to be used for new purposes outside of the GAIC area. The GAIC tax is usually paid by developers, but the cost is ultimately passed on to homebuyers through the price of land. It is money that has come from every block of land bought in places like Donnybrook in the City of Whittlesea to cover the cost of roads and other infrastructure like community spaces, kindergartens et cetera in that local community. This proposal allows the government to take that money away. The City of Whittlesea already say that they have not had their GAIC money returned to them, that they are being short-changed on GAIC, but this bill will actually make it worse and it will make it easier for the government to redirect that money. This change could result in GAIC funding directly funding unrelated mega projects, including the Suburban Rail Loop or any one of Labor’s black holes. As we know, Labor is good at juggling the money around and creating smoke and mirrors. We read about this in the Age this morning, where Labor are requiring health services to transfer money to the department – money meant for employee entitlements. But what does Labor say? It says, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll give you a letter of comfort.’ It is smoke and mirrors. It is robbing Peter to pay Paul to appear as if they have a balanced budget, when they know they have a significant problem with their budget.

A summary of the opposition’s concerns with this bill includes: a lack of time for consultation and feedback, local councils and communities being largely cut out of deciding on opportunities for growth in their communities, affordability being deprioritised within the objectives and climate change and traditional owner concerns being prioritised over affordability of housing in the planning objectives. The growth areas infrastructure contribution, as I have just said, and development contributions can now be used for purposes outside the area where the funds are raised, and there is a risk of inconsistency without clear and objective guidance to councils to ensure consistent interpretation and application of reforms.

Revocation of critical parliamentary oversight mechanisms is a real concern. That is something that has existed in this state for well over 100 years – that ability for the Parliament to have oversight. Traditional owner requirements are onerous and detail is missing in the legislation. You could wake up one day and find your neighbour has a significant redevelopment going on next door to you, and you will have had no ability to have any input or say to protect the amenity of your property. This is a bad bill, and it should be opposed.

John BERGER (Southern Metropolitan) incorporated the following:

President, I rise to make a contribution on the Planning Amendment (Better Decisions Made Faster) Bill 2025.

This bill is the most significant overhaul of Victoria’s planning laws in a generation.

The Premier has set out her vision as one where as many Victorians can get into their first homes as possible, as the crunch of affordability starts to bite prospective first home buyers.

And this bill is a major change to our current planning regime in this state, unlocking opportunities and boosting housing supply across the state, so that we can build more homes where Victorians need them most.

Before I get into the substance of this lengthy and comprehensive bill, I would like to first thank my friend the Minister for Planning in the other place, Minister Kilkenny, for putting together this once-in-a-generation reform package.

The dream of home ownership is a long-held Australian dream which motivates tens of thousands of Australians each year to buy their first home.

But as anyone with a mortgage or living as a tenant will know, the housing market is tough these days.

While this Labor government over the past 10 years has enacted some of the most progressive reforms around renters rights in Australia, it remains true that fortnightly rents have risen considerably.

Likewise, when it comes to first home buyers, not only has the price of housing skyrocketed over the past couple of decades but mortgage and interest payments have gone up too.

We are a fast-growing state, with a population expected to pass London’s present population within the next 25 years.

What has become increasingly evident over the past few years is that as our population booms and our economy continues to grow, we need to be building more homes.

The pressures of housing affordability are almost directly correlated with relatively lower growth in the number of homes available on the market.

In basic economic terms, the demand for housing will only be rising as Victoria and Australia continue to grow, yet our supply of housing is low.

It’s made homes more and more expensive, pushed rents higher, and is slowly pushing first home buyers and tenants away from the city and away from where they grew up.

It’s forcing new families to move further out from the city, away from their jobs and their schools.

So what we have here, President, is a comprehensive set of reforms aimed at reforming the state’s planning system in order to speed up the number of approvals, helping to get more homes built faster and helping to boost the supply of housing.

In other words, we are getting better decisions made faster.

President, when then Premier Daniel Andrews released the housing statement shortly before his retirement, he set out the vision of a bigger Victoria.

It set out a plan to deliver 800,000 new homes over the next decade.

And by 2051, it was hoping to build upwards of 2.24 million.

It’s an enormous task, and it requires the cooperation of both state urban planning authorities and our local councils.

But we do not have time to waste.

Unfortunately, there is currently a large backlog of approvals sitting in the system, slowly being reviewed and scrutinised endlessly.

Currently, for a planning permit to get approved, it takes upwards of 140 days on average to pass.

And that’s if there is no objection from local residents about one thing or another.

If objections are raised, the wait time for an approved permit blows out to more than 300 days on average.

That’s nearly a whole year that first home buyers, renters, and builders are left waiting to get started.

That’s valuable time they shouldn’t have to waste.

And it’s not just for detached single-family homes either.

This approvals process was the same for all projects, whether big or small.

That means building a single-family home in an outer suburb could take the same amount of time to approve as an apartment complex in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, despite the latter housing many more people and being much more complex.

This bill will set out a pathway to change this.

Instead of one singular process to deal with all the planning changes in the state, we will now have three main streams for approvals to undergo.

The three streams are broken down by the size and complexity of the project.

The first stream is for standalone homes, detached single-family homes, and duplexes.

In this category, approvals are set to take just 10 days, which is a major cut in wait times for permits compared to 140 days.

Instead of waiting four to five months, families will now just have to wait less than two weeks.

The second stream is for townhouses and low-rise housing developments.

Low-rise developments refer to projects of upwards of three storeys.

This category can expect approvals for permits to be granted in around 30 days.

And the third category is for the most complex projects for housing, such as apartment complexes and buildings, which will come in at around 60 days.

This is a major cutback from the existing 140- to 300-day timeline for these projects and will see more shovels in the ground and building projects take off.

It gives certainty to Victorian families, and to builders, who now can get to work quicker instead of having to wait upwards of a year to build a simple standalone house.

President, another major change in this bill is around the appeals process.

Currently, Victoria has some of the broadest third-party appeal rights in the country.

These rules were written decades ago, when Melbourne’s population was just 2 to 3 million.

Our urban sprawl was nowhere near as spread out as it is now, though it was still quite spread out even then.

But these rules meant that anyone could object to a planning permit, even if they didn’t live anywhere near the development.

This has meant for years that a lot of developments could be held up for months, if not years, because of the objections of residents who might not even live in close vicinity to the site.

And if we want to lift the pace at which we get these approvals done, it means we have to dispense with the idea that anyone can object to someone building a new home, especially if that new site isn’t even near the objector.

This bill is moving to change this.

The first two streams, those being the standalone homes, duplexes, townhouses, and three storey low-rise developments, will no longer require notice and will no longer have third-party appeals.

It’s a commonsense reform that will get projects moving again, instead of being held up by distant third parties.

First home buyers should not be held back by NIMBYs who live several suburbs away.

The third-party appeal process will remain in place for apartment complexes and similarly dense projects, but it will only be for those directly impacted by the development.

That means just the neighbours in the area will be given notice and have the right of appeal, but it will not extend to those far and distant from the site.

While I anticipate there will be some protest about this particular change, it is important to understand a few key points.

The current scope and rights Victorians enjoy for appealing new developments are the most broad based in Australia.

Nowhere else in this country can absolutely anyone raise objections to projects that might not even be around the corner from them but several suburbs over.

And for too long, it has held back Victoria from building the number of homes we need.

It may have been reasonable and fair when Melbourne’s population was growing at around 20,000 to 30,000 a year, as it was doing in the 1970s and 80s.

But we are far past that era.

Each year, we are growing by over 100,000.

Melbourne is no longer a city of 2 to 3 million Victorians living in sparse suburbs but a city of 5 million that is expected to pass over 8 million in just three decades.

Compare that to three decades ago, when Melbourne had 3.2 million residents.

Our population is growing faster and faster, and we need to move even faster with boosting housing supply so that we can stop pricing young Victorians and new families out of homes.

And to boost that supply and bring it back up to an acceptable level, it means a major overhaul in how we approve these projects and minimising the number of unnecessary interruptions.

Our current system has led to a large backlog of projects not getting approved, and it’s about time we get moving and let builders and Victorian families get on with it.

President, another big reform in this bill is the changes this government is making around the ability to update local planning rules or planning scheme amendments.

Right now, whether it’s the state government or a local government, there is a procedure in place when it comes to changing planning rules.

Every local council has a planning scheme which outlines what can be built and where.

That is complemented by a statewide arrangement which broadly sets out what can be built where.

These rules are important.

It’d be ridiculous, for example, to allow for the construction of homes on a wet marshland which developers know will sink away in the coming years.

And it’d be silly to build homes next to a garbage disposal which might be polluting the local air or water.

It’s these commonsense regulations and rules which are embedded in these planning frameworks.

Unfortunately, even making small changes, fixes, or updates to these rules is a slow process.

It is complicated and takes more time than it really needs to.

This reform introduces a smarter way to assess those changes.

Simple updates, like fixing a zoning boundary here or there or adjusting a local policy, will be easier under these new changes, because it should not be an administrative task and a half to get a simple fix sorted.

More complex changes that require a lot of consideration – for example, rezoning whole plots of land for a new purpose – will still require a more detailed and thorough process.

But it’s about making the system work better and quicker so that we aren’t wasting time, money, and resources just to get one small fix sorted.

A more dynamic and efficient system for fixing these problems means more projects can get off the ground and both state governments and local councils can stop wasting endless resources on minor changes to their planning books.

President, Victoria leads the nation when it comes to building and approving homes.

We get projects off the ground faster than any other state, and we’re getting them done before them too.

In the latest ABS report, we can see just how much Victoria is not just pulling its weight but punching up.

Over 29 per cent of all the private homes approved in Australia were right here in Victoria.

And we are still approving more than any other state.

In the latest figures, Victoria has issued 2654 building approvals for private homes.

That beats out New South Wales, which failed to even hit 1800.

In second place was Queensland, with just over 2000.

Victoria is leading the charge on getting more homes built.

But it is still not enough.

Our housing market is not up to scratch.

Even with our world-class protections for renters, it is still difficult to find a rental property, because for too long housing supply has not been keeping up with demand.

For almost a decade, while demand for housing boomed, Victorians had a federal government obsessed with keeping interest rates low for families who had already bought a home.

The Allan Labor government takes a different view.

We want to make the housing market work for everyone, not just those who manage to get onto the ladder.

The market has changed considerably from what it was just a couple of decades ago.

Twenty years ago, the median home was valued at just north of four times the median income.

Now it is around 8.6 times as much as the median income.

For those who are yet to buy their first home and are instead paying rent, the share of their income devoted to serving that rent has also shot up.

Twenty years ago, it was closer to around a quarter of a renter’s income that would go towards paying their fortnightly rent.

Now, on average, it’s about a third of their income.

And unless we act quickly to get more homes out of the planning stage, this trend will only continue.

Population growth will not be slowing down, and it’s the job of this place to make sure we plan and prepare for the future.

We cannot stick our heads in the sand and turn a blind eye to the housing affordability crisis.

The Allan Labor government understands this, and that’s why housing is a top priority for us.

We need to get more houses built quicker.

And reforming our complex and outdated planning laws is a core element of enacting that plan.

Our state’s planning laws were written decades ago, when Victoria and Melbourne were much smaller places with fewer people and much more land to go around.

Now we’re bringing these laws into the 21st century, where we see the necessity of not just building more homes but building them quicker.

And in order to do that, we need to take the legislative steps that allow for better decisions to be made faster.

This bill is fixing a planning system that’s been slowing things down for too long.

It is creating clearer rules, faster decisions, and fewer delays for people trying to build a home.

And it gives certainty to builders, families, and first home buyers.

Neighbours will, of course, keep their right to their say about a high-density development.

But new homes shouldn’t be delayed by people who don’t live anywhere near a proposed project.

It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not fair on Victorian families.

And that’s why we’re making the necessary changes to cut back these delays and get homes built.

President, I am proud of the reforms this Allan Labor government has enacted over the past few years.

It is the most ambitious and progressive housing policy agenda in the nation, and the numbers speak for themselves on its success thus far.

And these new amendments to planning legislation are just the next step in tackling the issue of housing affordability by getting more homes built quicker and getting better decisions made faster.

And for that, I commend the bill to the chamber.

Jacinta ERMACORA (Western Victoria) incorporated the following:

The Planning Amendment (Better Decisions Made Faster) Bill 2025 amends the Planning and Environment Act 1987 to modernise Victoria’s planning system.

At its core, the bill is about preparing Victoria for our future. It will alleviate a lot of the pressures of today as well as future planning for the next decade and the next generation.

Our state is growing. Victoria’s population is projected to increase from 7.2 million in 2025 to 10.3 million by 2050.

That growth brings opportunity and responsibility. We must ensure that Victorians have access to safe, affordable and well-located homes.

That is why this government has established clear housing targets for every local government area as part of Plan for Victoria.

These targets are not arbitrary. They are based on evidence, infrastructure capacity and future demand.

Importantly, they are now embedded within every planning scheme across the state through amendments to the Victoria Planning Provisions.

This ensures consistency, certainty and a coordinated approach to housing delivery.

The bill provides the essential legislative tools needed to implement that plan.

Targets alone do not build homes. Timely decisions are needed, and right now too many good decisions are taking far too long.

Therefore, the overall objectives of the bill will:

1.   significantly reduce the time, cost and complexity of making planning scheme amendments that will be needed to support Victoria’s projected population growth by establishing approval pathways that are proportionate to the risk and complexity of the amendment;

2.   significantly reduce the time and cost of obtaining planning permits by establishing approval pathways that are proportionate to risk and complexity of the development application;

3.   make a range of other reforms to improve regulatory efficiency and effectiveness, provide for greater transparency, increase certainty and ensure that the act is fit for purpose – to acquit the commitment made by the government in its housing statement.

This bill makes changes to land use planning policies and schemes that have not been updated for many decades. This bill cuts red tape whilst retaining the safeguards that ensure good planning.

We can be reassured by looking at our own history of planning by taking historical Melbourne as an example.

Were the terrace homes for Fitzroy and Collingwood a result of compliance with a good planning scheme or the result of no planning scheme at all?

The first subdivisions of the land around the Fitzroy and Collingwood area occurred in 1838–39.

Eighty-eight plots were sold, and while some major roads were already planned, others such as Gertrude Street came about due to subdivision of these plots – a happy accident, you might say.

The authors of the book Fitzroy: Melbourne’s First Suburb wrote: ‘the subdivision of land down to residential allotment size was entirely at the discretion of the owner and there were no prescribed minima for the sizes of the sites or the widths of streets’.

It wasn’t until 1849 that the act for regulating buildings and party walls, and for preventing mischiefs by fire, in the City of Melbourne came about to prevent fire spreading through the city.

This legislation did have an impact on the materials used to build new dwellings.

The Heritage Council has written that: ‘By 1891, only 51% of Collingwood’s houses were brick or stone (outside of the Act) while in Fitzroy, the figure had risen to 83% as a direct outcome of the legislation’ (p. 2–‍3).

The City of Collingwood adopted its first building regulations in 1874, which were described in the book The Inner Suburbs as ‘perfunctory and inadequate’ in part, as there was no minimum size of rooms.

Interestingly, despite possible anomalies in the enforcement of the Melbourne building act and the likelihood that some Fitzroy buildings were constructed in contravention of its provisions, the introduction of the act still had a marked impact on the building industry.

It considerably slowed the rate at which new houses could be built, with the result that supply fell far short of demand.

As a result, these developments served to encourage the construction of smaller and less permanent houses into areas beyond the control of the act, such as Collingwood, North Melbourne and Richmond, where a range of small wooden buildings were constructed in the early 1850s.

But it turns out today, on the whole, the size of the land in Collingwood and Fitzroy is not itself an oppressive phenomenon.

Today, those same houses are now highly coveted, with many homes gentrifying and adding clever high-quality modern extensions.

So, we know that adding in some simple planning laws as early as the late 1800s in Melbourne reduced fire risk but also caused delays and a disorderly development pattern. We know that the absence of planning laws led to poor quality houses. We also know that perfectly acceptable terrace houses, which are now in high demand, were constructed in the absence of land use planning laws. If history tells us anything, there are multiple contradictory outcomes as a result of the presence or absence of land use planning.

Land use planning has most definitely changed since the 1800s.

There are now 82 planning schemes in Victoria.

Each of the 82 planning schemes establishes a unique blend of state, regional and local planning policies and applies a unique mix of zones and overlays that give an indication of the development that may be permitted to occur on land in each municipal district.

Over the last five years it has taken 433 business days on average for a planning scheme amendment to be progressed through the current regulatory process from authorisation through to approval.

If you add the time it takes for a proponent to initiate an amendment through the local council, then it takes over two years on average to make a planning scheme amendment from start to finish. There’s no doubt that too much red tape clogs up our housing construction pipeline.

To do this efficiently and effectively, our regulatory processes need to be more agile and responsive.

We can take some lessons from history and appreciate that land use planning can have unintended consequences; however, we also know that stringent planning legislation does not always lead to great outcomes.

The bill before us offers flexibility and a commonsense approach towards timely outcomes.

Making planning simpler and quicker does not necessarily equate to lesser quality buildings or neighbourhoods.

Better decisions made faster will allow us to plan with certainty for the future and most importantly for future generations.

 Lee TARLAMIS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (23:23): I move:

That debate on this bill be adjourned until the next day of meeting.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned until next day of meeting.