Readers will remember that in September last year an officer report recommended the total rejection of a planning application for 6 storeys at 144 Hawthorn Road, Caulfield North. Councillors approved this recommendation. The site was zoned Commercial 1 and abutted properties zoned General Residential Zone (GRZ). Now there is another application in for a property diagonally opposite this rejected site. It is for 5 storeys and 19 apartments. The land is also zoned Commercial 1 and abuts GRZ. The officer report recommends a permit.
Now one may quibble about the difference between a five storey and a six storey development, especially when council’s track record is to lop off a couple of storeys and then to grant a permit. In the first application it did not occur. One application was rejected outright and the other application would seemingly be set to get a permit. We have to wonder why – especially when the officer reports for each application are seen side by side. The most important things to note are:
- At grade car parking is required for the 144 Hawthorn Road application and car stackers are okay for the current application
- The first application made a point of the need for shop car parking. The second waives this obligation.
- Council’s Engineering department saw no problem with drainage. This does not get a mention in the second application.
Below are the comments side by side from the respective officer reports. We can only conclude once again that consistency in applying planning law is at the mercy of sheer whim, or possibly other hidden agendas.
The column on the left applies to last year’s application and the right side column is the current application.
Glen Eira Debates 
February 3, 2015 at 12:41 PM
I personally resent the statement that if you live in a one bedroom place then the lack of natural sunlight is acceptable. Plus if you happen to live within cooee of a commercial centre then you can’t expect to have the same living standards that apply elsewhere.
February 3, 2015 at 1:51 PM
There is constancy within the inconstancy, we have seen how the rules get bent for the mates. All the signs point to (MODERATORS: phrase deleted) and of the system.
If people want change they need to get off their backsides and except nothing less than an open transparent process, clear of interference from higher levels of Government
February 3, 2015 at 3:57 PM
We’re not going to get consistency until there is transparent planning protocols in place and that depends on councillors. You can’t stop “favours” and who knows who but you can make sure that every aspect of every application is responded to and good arguments are provided. It’s not enough to say that something is “reasonable” and leave it at that. Other councils have pages and pages for each application where they put in tables and note compliance with the planning scheme or not. Our well paid planners are happy with some scrappy 3 or 4 pages and that’s it. I accept that length of report isn’t the be all and end all but when you’re making decisions that have a very profound impact on people then they deserve more than a few paragraphs of such generality that they are literally meaningless.
One example from the post irks me no end. If engineering says that something is okay then why is this dismissed? It’s happened plenty of times with other departments saying no and then the overall report says yes. No explanation why these “experts” are ignored and overlooked. Pretty obvious I think that the decision to give a permit or not give a permit is made right from the start and then all the officers report does is try and protect the decision already made.
February 3, 2015 at 5:58 PM
A starting point for improving transparency and consistency is to establish processes, workflow, and especially checklists to assess whether everything that needs to be taken into account or considered has been, and document the extent to which the process has been followed. The fact that important and relevant matters fail to appear in officer reports should be a serious concern to Council.
One area where the officer reports are woeful is in outlining the “decision criteria” and relevant matters that need to be considered by Council when making a decision. Council keeps making decisions that violate PAEA and their Planning Scheme as a result because they simply don’t know what they need to consider.
It is inappropriate to say that poor amenity is acceptable because a dwelling is a 1-bedroom apartment. VCAT does it, true, but it is unrepresentative, undemocratic, and unaccountable. Sadly, the pathetic PAEA that “governs” the process permits decision-makers to do pretty much whatever they want because just about everything is discretionary. “Performance-based” has become a codeword for “open to abuse”.