Below we feature some of the public questions which were submitted for the last council meeting. As per usual, residents received ‘responses’ rather than ‘answers’.
QUESTION: Council recently abandoned the Bentleigh and Carnegie structure plan due to the lack of a housing strategy and yet on tonight’s meeting agenda is the Glen Huntly structure plan (item 8.4). Should not Council wait to vote on Glen Huntly structure plan until after the completion of the housing strategy?
RESPONSE: The development of a Housing Strategy before the adoption of this structure plan is not necessary for this centre. While Glen Huntly will provide for additional housing, the structure plan is primarily focussed on the commercial core. This is quite different to Council’s other structure plans in Bentleigh, Carnegie and Elsternwick which also include large residential areas.
As a Major Activity Centre, there is an expectation that this centre will change in alignment with State Government Policy. The structure plan seeks to get on the front foot and manage the height and form of buildings that we expect following the removal of the level crossings
The preparation of the draft Housing Strategy will give appropriate consideration to the role of Glen Huntly as part of its development.
COMMENT(S) –
The response given is literally baffling for several reasons:
- When buildings of 5, 6, and 8 storeys are proposed, then upper floors will inevitably consist of apartments. To therefore argue that this structure plan is only concentrating on the commercial sector and hence a housing strategy is unnecessary flies in the face of all common sense. How many apartments these sites can contain is surely an essential consideration in meeting the forecast population growth and the accompanying housing needs for Glen Huntly. Remember, the population growth according to council’s own published data is a mere 1000 over a 15 year period from 2021 to 2036. That’s the role of a housing strategy. To determine need for each activity centre, and the entire municipality, and then to apportion this requisite growth across the entire municipality. To pre-empt such analysis is not planning. It is simply assigning huge sectors of Glen Eira to unsustainable overdevelopment.
QUESTION 2
QUESTION: Following extensive resident feedback and inaction from Council, in 2015 the Minister for Planning compelled Council to undertake a Planning Scheme Review with a focus on controls for activity centres. In 2019 as part of the Planning Scheme Amendment C184, Council Officers belatedly highlighted the need for a Housing Strategy advising that the C184 amendment was not underpinned by an adopted municipal-wide plan. While Council failed to progress a Housing Strategy in 2019, it subsequently aborted Amendment C184 in 2021 in the absence of a clear strategic justification including a Housing Strategy. Based on advice from Officer’s, the Structure Plan controls for Bentleigh is now scheduled to be completed in 2024, some nine years after the Minister’s direction which is appalling.
Given this long history, why then have Council Officers recommended the adoption of a Structure Plan for Glen Huntly without a Housing Strategy?
Given that the response to this question consists primarily of a verbatim repetition to the first question, we have only included the opening two paragraphs of the response.
RESPONSE: It is noted that there are some inaccuracies and selective representation of facts in your opening preamble. Despite this, the answer to your question regarding the adoption for a Structure Plan in advance of the completion of the Housing Strategy is as follows :
Council began preparation of the Glen Huntly Structure Plan in mid 2019 in response to the announcement of the Government’s intention to progress level crossing removals in the area. The level crossing removals are expected to bring about a renewed focus and opportunity for change in Glen Huntly once complete. The preparation of a structure plan would assist guiding the height and form of future development, recognising its role as a Major Activity Centre, as designated by the State Government.
COMMENT: If council does not agree with the comments made by the resident, then why not provide a full rebuff of those comments? How about explaining, itemising, and justifying the claim that there are ‘inaccuracies’ contained in the question? As far as we know, the resident was 100% correct in his claims!
More importantly, we now have to consider the entire argument as to why a housing strategy is not required prior to the adoption of the structure plan because, it is claimed, the focus is primarily on the commercial areas. Then why, did the council officer state in his report of the 16th March, 2021 (when Amendment C184 was abandoned/rejected) the following:
A housing strategy would also enable Council to introduce more tailored built form controls for its commercial and mixed use zones within activity centres, based on a better understanding of where and how growth will occur across the rest of the municipality
The housing strategy would provide Council with a municipal-wide framework for density,
based on demographic and character analysis and inform all of Council’s strategic planning
activities. (Page 116 of the agenda)
Doesn’t the above contradict what Council is currently stating? And doesn’t it illustrate perfectly the role of a housing strategy that needs to be completed before the adoption of structure planning? Council can’t have it both ways. Consistency, and dare we say, complete transparency, has never been this council’s strong point!
September 28, 2021 at 5:23 PM
I don’t buy council’s excuses for one second. Removal of the railway crossing in Glen Huntly is no different to its removal in Bentleigh. Both are prime targets for major developments.
September 28, 2021 at 8:03 PM
The second question provides a good outline of what’s gone wrong and what hasn’t happened. Council has adopted policy after policy which is suspect and inadequate for the job they were meant to do. City Plan, the Quality Design Guidelines, and heritage amendments are on the nose by Vcat and government. At best these are only reference documents in the planning scheme and if they aren’t in the planning scheme they carry zero weight at Vcat. What must then be asked is why these policies are found to be deficient and why they were put up for endorsement in the first place?
September 29, 2021 at 12:00 PM
Six years and nothing completed. No other council would be as inefficient and incompetent I’d bet.
September 29, 2021 at 3:08 PM
As the author of the second question listed here, I intend to follow up with the CEO for a justification of the inaccuracies comment made. There is no clarification as to why this comment has been made by the CEO but rather an empty void of communication to a resident. I also intend to follow up on inconsistencies regarding the importance of a housing strategy for the Glen Huntly structure plan. In addition to this, I have also recently experienced a question being amended/reduced by the CEO as part of the so-called consultation on the Council Plan. This amendment impacted the materiality of my question by not acknowledging the long and extensive history of poor planning in GE. The response provided was another generic, motherhood type statement. This is from the CEO of an organisation where involving the community in decision making and planning for the future are rated in the lowest-performing service areas of Glen Eira. It’s pretty clear why!
September 29, 2021 at 3:47 PM
Council is duplicitous. Nobody outside of Council has visibility of what discussions have taken place between two unelected, unaccountable bodies aligned with the development industry: council staff and the Department. The “structure plan” might have been demanded by DELWP but we haven’t seen the evidence. The Minister in his letter of 2019-11-04 criticizing Council’s planning processes said “the council needs to outline how adequate residential land supply and greater housing diversity will be achieved in the municipality” and “the amendment [C184] is not underpinned by an adopted municipal-wide housing strategy”.
As a reminder of how corrupt the process is, the Minister also said “Mandatory heights will only be supported if there is sufficient development potential in and around the activity centres to meet future housing and commercial development needs.”. The unmistakeable message is that amenity is to be compromised in order to give the development industry a return on their investment in donating to the Labor Party. While the Minister talks about “protecting local amenity”, everything he has done has undermined it.
We desperately need more prescriptive amenity standards to curb the worst excesses of Council, VCAT, DELWP and the Minister. That should be a prerequisite for a Housing Strategy, as we need that to know what housing yields are possible for various degrees of compromise of amenity. What is clear is that councillors have no idea what fairness means, and while claiming to oppose “inappropriate development”, have utterly failed to articulate what that term means to them.
September 29, 2021 at 6:04 PM
In the crooked halls the bureaucrats inhabit, there is never any value in telling the truth, never.
Lies will always serve you better, mistruth can always be disclaimed, changed, passed off as errors or misunderstandings. So why ever revert to the truth. Truth just locks you into a position.
Thousand of years of bureaucracies have hammered home this lessons.
Truth is dangerous, lies are flexible and therefore desirable. Truth is so highly valued among bureaucrats they never part with it.