Wednesday, 29 July 2026

 Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:56): (2641) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Transport Infrastructure. It concerns a very large, monolithic car park that is being built adjacent to the North East Link project in Watsonia. I was in Watsonia the other day with Jess Wilson and our fantastic candidate for Bundoora Chris Parr. Chris has actually been advocating very, very hard on behalf of the community about this particular car park, because its design is brutalist and it is going to obscure a view from the shopping strip and from the cafes of the Dandenongs. It is simply going to be this monolith put up in front of them. Jess and Chris have spoken extensively with the local business owners in the area. Their concerns are that this will hurt trade, this will hurt the amenity of the area, it will affect the quality of life and it will cast shadows. It is a completely inappropriate design. Of course, in typical style, it has been done with no consultation with the locals at all and no care for how this will integrate into their community. We know that Watsonia, over the last seven or eight years, has been a continual site of disruption to those businesses because of the North East Link. We call it, locally, the war on Watsonia, and with this car park it seems the war on Watsonia is going to continue – but not if Chris Parr has anything to do with it. As a strong local advocate, he is keen to see a sensible redesign and some other mitigations.

I will mention too that this is being built at a time when the station itself immediately adjacent to it is noncompliant and has been noncompliant for 10 years in terms of disabled access. It has a single high-incline ramp, which is literally dangerous. If you are in a wheelchair or other mechanisms, you cannot get onto the platform. It is physically impossible and physically impossible to get off. Whilst we are neglecting that and not putting any capital into that and we are building this monolithic, ugly, brutalist car park adjacent to it, the money is not going into the community to serve the community the way it should. The action I seek from the minister is to agree to do a sit-down with the community and do a thorough redesign or a review of the design of this car park so that it is actually something that works with the community and is not imposed upon the community, so that we can stop this trend of government being something that happens to you.