Adjournment - Stop Inappropriate Development

ADJOURNMENT.

Stop Inappropriate Development.

Thursday, 10 December 2020.

Mr NEWBURY (Brighton) (17:33):

My Adjournment is to the Minister for Planning, and the action I seek is for the State Labor Government to stop encouraging inappropriate development and to start protecting the amenity of our unique community.

Our home is our castle, and our suburbs are our villages. We should have the right to a quiet street, yet in our leafy suburbs our once-quiet streets are construction sites.

Before the sun rises, trucks run idle, waiting for construction to begin, and as the sun goes down after the day’s work is done, neighbouring walls are higher than they were the day before. Apartment blocks are springing up in places they have never been before, and for the streets at the edges of the business activity centre residential homes are toppling like dominoes. My community has had enough.

I recently joined the residents of Adamson, Black, Halifax and Well streets at a community meeting in Brighton. In their streets, home after home has been demolished and replaced by misshapen concrete eyesores. In many cases in these streets, overdevelopment has led to a doubling or a tripling of the street’s occupancy in a few short years.

There are similar concerns around Bleazby Avenue and Boxshall, Male and Rooding streets.

Liveability should underpin our planning scheme. It does not. The driving force for Labor’s approach to planning is densification. Densification is another word for crowding, and that crowding is coming at the expense of our amenity.

The reality of the current planning scheme is that when one apartment block is approved it is the sign of further development. It encourages further development. The planning scheme does not give weight to how fast an area is being developed or how full a street has become, nor does it give any regard to the adequacy of infrastructure.

In the case of my community Labor has actively shut off infrastructure investment yet has encouraged developers to target our streets.

Another deep flaw in the planning scheme is that it provides little protection for heritage. We are seeing that in Service Street, Hampton, where developers are targeting a quiet, leafy street filled with heritage homes because the current planning overlay is inadequate, and the Minister has turned his back on the street.

Our community has had a gutful. We are sick and tired of this Labor Government pouring people into our community, encouraging inappropriate development and starving us of our fair share of infrastructure funding.

Enough is enough.