The current ‘Community Plan Forums’ have consistently highlighted serious resident dissatisfaction with Council’s overall planning, traffic management and consultation practices. ‘Listening’ to the community is only part of Council’s task. Their job now is to implement radical change and to connect the dots between all three major issues.

It is a fallacy to see the above and other ‘problems’ such as flooding, parking, and ‘neighbourhood character’ as separate components or entirely State, Federal or Utility responsibility. There is much council can do via its planning scheme. All these problems are connected and solutions need to recognise this and provide answers that are not piece meal, ad hoc, and ineffectual. Amendments (such as C87) remain limited in scope and vision and in no way provide a remedy for the ills which currently beset the entire municipality. Yet, this has been council’s approach for the past decade – a little reactive and superficial tinkering here and there instead of a complete overhaul of its current housing strategy and activity centres policy.

Nowhere is this made more obvious that in the failed C49 Amendment where an independent Panel rejected Council’s meagre attempts at ‘control’ of the environment because the amendment lacked ‘strategic justification’. In other words, no grand integrated vision, and the lack of necessary homework. This is still true today. Many of the current policies that form the basis of the current Planning Scheme are not only outdated, but archaic. Housing dates back to 1996; open space to the same era; activity centres to 1999. This is not the way to plan for a community. Nor is the Glen Eira approach of continually tinkering with the edges such as the so called ‘transition zone’ amendment of last year that laughably is not a ‘zone’ at all. Now we have the C87 – again, an amendment that basically attempts to look after only 1000 or so properties.

We have in the past compared Glen Eira’s track record in planning with other councils – especially in relation to structure plans, height limits, parking precinct plans, public realm, etc. Glen Eira has none of these! Worse, residents have never been provided with any sound justification for the failure to include any of the above in the Planning Scheme.

We are not arguing that structure plans are a universal panacea that will solve all problems of overdevelopment. What we are arguing is that by refusing to go down this path, this administration and its councillors are not fulfilling their mandate to represent constituents and to ensure that development is planned, cohesive and embraces the principles of social, environmental and economic benefit to the community. We have to again ask why each of the following councils sees fit to have structure plans and either interim or permanent height controls, and why Glen Eira is again, and again, the odd man out? The list of these councils, and we’re sure there are plenty more, includes:

  • Bayside
  • Boroondara
  • Casey
  • Darebin
  • Frankston
  • Geelong
  • Hobson’s Bay
  • Hume
  • Kingston
  • Manningham
  • Moonee Valley
  • Port Phillip
  • Stonnington
  • Yarra City

Residents should start asking their councillors why this is so and demanding full and comprehensive answers.