Our plaudits must go to Esakoff, Parasol, Cade and Szmood following last night’s council meeting. These are the four councillors who voted AGAINST the current draft Housing Strategy and highlighted the issues that were unacceptable with what was being proposed. Sadly, the pro-development lobby (aka, Athanasopolous, Magee, Zyngier, Pilling and Zhang) carried the vote 5 to 4.

It’s not simply that the latter voted in favour of putting the housing strategy out for consultation. It is that their arguments in favour of the draft were superficial, misleading, inaccurate, and deliberately avoided mention of the most contentious aspects of the draft. All of this leads us to question whether any of these 5 councillors actually bothered to read the relevant 589 pages. We doubt it!

Cr Zyngier didn’t even utter one single word about the CONTENT of the draft or its recommendations. His focus was improving ‘consultation’ recommendations. All terrific, but how about an analysis of what is being proposed and commenting on those things in order to provide residents with the rationale behind the vote? Magee of course used the old heart strings ploy of ‘where will my children live’ totally ignoring the fact that the consultants provided their estimates of an existing land capacity for 50,000 net new dwellings when our projected housing needs were 13,000 by 2036. Pilling and Zhang merely mumbled their way through the obvious – again without once mentioning the potential negatives.

Athanasopolous was the major culprit. Either he has never bothered to read the Glen Eira planning scheme in order to understand what is currently permitted in NRZ zones, or he follows the strategy of never let the truth interfere and derail the spin. We will provide an indepth commentary on his efforts in our next post. At best, they displayed sheer ignorance. At worst they were deliberate attempts at deception and camouflage.

In contrast, the opposing councillors highlighted the actual detail contained in the draft and the impacts these proposals would have on residents and their amenity in the years to come. They also questioned the underlying assumption and justification for the proposed rezonings and schedule changes  – ie build more and there would magically be housing affordability!

When something as important as this document is up for decision it is incumbent that all councillors consider the full implications. Residents need to hear the reasoning behind the votes. They need to be convinced that something which is going to affect their lives has been given due consideration and is not a vote that follows any state or federal political party agenda. Most importantly, they need to be convinced that councillors have actually read what has been put in front of them and questioned vigorously the data, the conclusions, and the assumptions. This we maintain was not done by the 5 councillors in question.

Watch this space for a detailed analyses of what happened last night.