Tuesday, 31 March 2026

 David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (18:06): (2448) My matter is for the Minister for Planning, and it relates to the so-called community reference groups, specifically one that met on a recent weekend, the Riversdale, Willison, Ashburton so-called high-rise, high-density zones and the activity centre group as it were. The community reference group met on the weekend of 21 and 22 March. This was coordinated by MosaicLab, which has been given a $713,660 payment for all of these reference groups. But I have had now three people come to me in some detail, who have been members of these community reference groups, and they believe they are a sham.

It is for that reason that I am calling on the minister to go back to the start and to redo these consultation sessions, which do appear to be a complete and utter sham. For example, the work of Mr James Sattler and his detailed summary of the process suggests that it is not consistent with the public engagement framework that the government says it adheres to, the six principles. These were not adhered to. He makes a point that he is a first-time participant in public consultation via this community reference group.

Understand what is going on here: Willison, Riversdale and Ashburton, three of these high-rise, high-density centres, are each quite different. They are not one and the same. They should not have been thrown in together in the first instance. Ashburton is going to have a very high-rise at eight storeys through a lot of it and then a four-storey height limit beyond that. The Willison and Riversdale ones are not the same. There is no obvious heart, in the case of Willison, for the high-rise, high-density development to go in there. But it is also clear from the screenshots taken by a number of the participants. For example, ‘How comfortable do you feel with the boundary catchment in Ashburton?’ Thirty-eight per cent loathe it, 38 per cent lament it, 8 per cent would live with it, only 15 per cent like it, and yet these strong views that are being expressed in the reference groups are not being represented by the group that is running this process.

The minister is going to have to go back to basics and redo the consultation because she has botched it. They even tried to use ChatGPT to write the report, and the community pushed back very hard at that. They said no. (Time expired)