Council’s recent release of documents related to its ‘structure planning’ must, in our view, be treated with a huge grain of salt. This is the first in a series of posts analysing what has been placed in front of residents and how valid, accurate, and transparent these documents really are. Are we again being taken for a ride via data that are highly questionable and manipulated to present already determined decisions?
The first document is called ‘Activity Centres Snapshot: February 2017’. It purports to be ‘based on similar studies carried out by Melbourne City Council’ in its Places for People and Local Liveability 2015 Study. (uploaded HERE). The aim is to ‘provide a more comprehensive understanding of how the city performs for everyday people’. Yet, when both of these documents are compared, the Glen Eira version is anything but ‘comprehensive’. For starters we are told that:
- All data used in this document is current (February 2017) except for residential and employment population data, which is taken from the Census carried out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2011. How much credence should then be placed on this ‘snapshot’, especially given the rate of development since 2011?
- The land uses were determined using Council’s internal database and does not include residential land within the study areas. How on earth any study can ignore ‘residential’ is simply mind boggling! Or is this simply more confirmation of the fact that council is focusing exclusively on the single street shopping strips themselves and not the zones that have blighted countless people’s lives?
- Then of course, there is this wonderful ‘escape clause’ – Disclaimer: this document is provided for information purposes and does not claim to be complete. Although due diligence has been applied to ensure that all information contained in this document is accurate, it cannot be guaranteed that this document is without errors or omissions. Why publish anything if its accuracy and integrity cannot be assured?
We’ve drawn up a table below which illustrates just some of the differences between the Glen Eira version of good planning and what the Melbourne City Council included in their study. To therefore claim that this piece of paper represents a ‘snapshot’ of what is happening in Glen Eira, and is the basis upon which to plan for the future, is not only ludicrous, but deliberately misleading and invalid.
Compounding all of the above, we then have neat little maps of the various areas under consideration – with no explanation, no criteria, and again, lines drawn on a map. The City of Melbourne’s study clearly defined how its various neighbourhood borders were selected –
March 19, 2017 at 10:22 PM
Is there more recent data available than the 2011 they are using?, and if there is, why isn’t that being used?
March 19, 2017 at 10:28 PM
Yes, there is post 2011 data – profile.id who claim that their ‘profiles’ on this municipality have been ‘commissioned’ by Glen Eira. Melbourne in some of its older documents also uses data circa 2013. Besides, council should have plenty of housing data available on its computers.
March 20, 2017 at 9:12 AM
Fair comment here. If this is about structure planning for activity centres then the focus should be on the activity centre itself and include information about all sorts of things apart from the number of bus stops. How people get there is okay but that shouldn’t dilute the analysis of the centre itself.
March 20, 2017 at 1:49 PM
Been reading some of the proposals. Plenty things wrong with them. The obvious stuff is that the concepts don’t mirror what people said in about 85% of cases. There will never be a tram running down Koornang Road. How can they even entertain the idea of getting rid of the Bentleigh library after they’ve spent millions in the last five years getting it up to scratch. I don’t like any of the proposals for car parking. They will flog off carparks for development and then build one eyesore that’s supposed to be enough. A huge waste of money.
March 20, 2017 at 3:02 PM
The arguments used by the pro-development lobby at Council in support of high density development (>75 dwellings per hectare) seem to undermine the directions Council wishes to pursue. If Carnegie “activity centre” is well-served by public transport then Council doesn’t need to encourage cars to enter or pass through it. If the local roads are coping with the additional traffic from multi-unit development then long queues wouldn’t form at critical intersections, such as Rosstown/Kokaribb, Rosstown/Koornang, Koornang/Morton.
If on-street and off-street car-parking is adequate Council wouldn’t reconfigure roads in ways that manifestly violate Australian standards and whose danger has led to repeated accidents. Nor would it need to introduce 2-hour parking beyond the activity centres. Carnegie station hasn’t met the demand for carparking it generates for 15 years and that won’t change under Skyrail.
Also lost in the current process is the reason for structure plans. Council asked for interim height limits, Minister claimed there was a lack of strategic justification. Funny how lack of strategic justifications works in only one direction. Amendment C110 lacked strategic justification, which the report of the Managing Residential Development Advisory Committee admitted. The Minister’s response was to further weaken amenity standards so we’re even less able to manage the impact of development. We still have no residential amenity standards for commercial zones, particularly where they abut or are very close to residential areas.
What I have noticed is that every decision-maker goes out of their way to deny responsibility and to avoid accountability for the consequences of their decisions, as if they really deep-down know they’re doing a shit job.
March 20, 2017 at 10:53 PM
It more than doing a “shit job” they are selling over a hundred years of built amenity to a bunch of money hungry sharks that have no interest in community building or providing any future amenity. Our Governments ministers both Libs and Labs have turned into a conga line of traitors, only seeking to claim as much personal wealth and perks as they can, before they are sent packing. Everything is a smoke screen to cover their corruption.