Heritage Bill 2016

Ms DUNN (Eastern Metropolitan) — I rise today to speak on the Heritage Bill 2016. The Greens welcome the reinvigoration of heritage protection legislation, and there is much in this bill for which credit must be given to the advocacy organisations, community representatives and local governments that spoke up during the consultation period that informed the drafting of the bill. The protection of heritage is critical to our common identity as a community. It provides the backdrop of our narrative of who we are as a state. Our state's rich Indigenous heritage is at the heart of living Indigenous culture. Early settler heritage defines the edifices and grandeur of our city streets and our country towns. Successive waves of migration have left their mark in the form of heritage buildings, places and things throughout our towns and suburbs that create the globally recognised cosmopolitanism of modern Melbourne and Victoria.

My electorate of Eastern Metropolitan Region is particularly rich in heritage icons. An example is Montsalvat in Eltham. Founded in 1935 by Justus Jorgensen, Montsalvat is Australia's oldest artist community and a place where art is made, taught, exhibited, performed and celebrated in the most glorious of buildings, constructed of bluestone — a wonderful example of heritage in our state. Another example in Eastern Metropolitan is Heide, the home of the Heidelberg School, which held amongst its members such greats of Australian painting as Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts.

Yet greed has too frequently got the better of our senses when it comes to heritage. The central business district is a prime example of this. It is now a hotchpotch of heritage remnants, towered over by giant skyscrapers. There is no sense of proportion. Accommodation of light has been a rarity. Heritage-listed churches are dwarfed by towering monuments to high finance, which have been built on the remnants of neighbouring iconic gold rush era buildings.

A recent example of this lack of foresight in development approvals is the Palace Theatre, which could be spied from my office at the front of this building. When operating, the Palace Theatre, previously the Metro Nightclub, at 30 Bourke Street held the distinction of being the largest nightclub in the Southern Hemisphere. I wonder how many members in this place in fact attended the Metro Nightclub. It brings much joy to me to remember times at the Metro, particularly seeing what we would call a classic shoegaze band, the Jesus and Mary Chain. That venue has hosted bands such as Guns N' Roses. Britpop legends Blur played there. Melbourne's own the Cat Empire cut their teeth there. Its club nights were mainstays of the electronic and underground scenes in the 1990s and 2000s. Millennials flocked to see Major Lazer play there as recently as 2014. I know some people in this place could not care less for these musical genres — I am sure you do not all feel that way — or the places in which they are expressed, but they matter to many thousands of people across generations, from boomers to millennials. As such, the loss of the Palace Theatre is mourned by music lovers across Melbourne. A long community campaign continues to try its best to save the Palace from demolition, but in the meantime the iconic internal furnishings have been gutted. All that will remain of the Palace is the ghostly facade, if indeed any development ever takes place, and that appears to be a troubled endeavour.

The tragedy of the Palace is that it could have been saved by the state government if the Minister for Planning intervened, or if the government purchased the estate and conserved it as the cultural icon that it is to thousands in this city. While legislation such as what has been put to us today in this bill provides the necessary framework for heritage conservation, it takes a proactive government to make sure the intent is achieved through the judicious exercise of ministerial discretion.

Unfortunately successive governments from both the old parties have been too deferential to the interests of developers, and the loss of the Palace and other wonderful buildings has been the result. It is worth noting that there is always an inherent tension in that the Minister for Planning has jurisdiction over development, planning and heritage, and when the rubber hits the road and a decision has to be made, which trumps which? I think more often we have seen that heritage falls to the bottom rung of the ladder in those considerations.

There are some positive changes in this bill. It streamlines heritage registration processes. It gives an up or down response to heritage registration applications in a reasonable time frame, with sensible if somewhat restricted appeal rights. It places the Heritage Council of Victoria as the preferred planning authority for developments on heritage-registered places, which removes duplicative planning processes. The removal of the financial hardship clauses takes away a provision that was sometimes abused when heritage places were transferred between owners with varied financial capacities.

Following consultation with heritage advocates and local government planning experts the Greens do have some concerns with the bill. These include the lack of third-party rights of appeal for permit decisions. Currently the permit approvals process is opaque, with only the applicant entitled to appeal a permit decision and little information provided to the public regarding the decision-making process. The reasonable and economic use clause in the act regularly results in permits being issued which detrimentally impact on the significance of places on the register. However, there is currently no mechanism for the public to scrutinise or interrogate the evidence provided by applicants. The display period for permit applications of 14 days is too short. In reality that is 10 business days. It should be increased to be in line with planning application display periods.

I would like to turn now to some comments made by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria), and I thank Felicity Watson, the advocacy manager of the trust, for providing us with some information. In summary the trust notes in relation to the bill that the greatest deficiencies in the current act are the requirement for consideration impact of refusal of a permit on the reasonable or economic use of a place. This is frequently called up by commercial developers to justify otherwise poor heritage outcomes. There is a lack of third-party appeals under the act, the poor relationship in decision-making to local heritage issues and integration into local heritage planning, and the inability for places deemed by the heritage council to be locally significant to be included in an interim heritage overlay control.

I also want to refer to some commentary made by the trust in relation to the referral of nominations to local councils. The trust states:

Under the current provisions, if a place is not found to reach the threshold for state significance, a recommendation can be made to the local council to pursue protection under the planning scheme — but the recommendation is not binding. In recent years, in practice, this has allowed a number of locally significant places to 'fall through the cracks' of this two-tiered planning system, with local councils (particularly at councillor level) often using a refusal from Heritage Victoria as an excuse to abandon the prospect of heritage listing. This confusing distinction between Heritage Victoria and local council processes appears to be poorly understood by the community, the media, councillors, and sometimes even council planners. The National Trust would like to see a provision in the Heritage Act for unsuccessful nominations to the Victorian Heritage Register that clearly demonstrate local significance to trigger interim local heritage controls, with a requirement for councils to investigate permanent protection. With extensive research required for a nomination to Heritage Victoria to be accepted, most of the work has usually already been done. What is missing is a clear trigger for implementation.

I would just like to put a different perspective on that, in that local councils, when they receive advice from Heritage Victoria about what they might consider a property for local protections, are in a bit of a bind, because the reality is that local councils are not awash with money; they cannot for every single nomination necessarily mount an individual planning scheme amendment process. They are very expensive processes for local councils, and often they will collate a number of different heritage amendments for one planning scheme amendment so they can get it all done at one time. Certainly that was the case in my experience on Yarra Ranges council.

Of course the difficulty in relation to that approach is that you have a number of properties that may well be included in a heritage overlay into the future, but in the intervening period, between a suggestion for nomination for local heritage significance and council actually undertaking that planning scheme amendment and going through the proper process, which generally can take in the order of 18 months, the property has no protections at all — no interim planning controls. This is clearly a deficiency when it comes to heritage properties, and certainly a lot of heritage properties do slip through the gap. It is often around resourcing, and that should not be the case.

The Greens will be moving some amendments to ameliorate some of these concerns when the bill proceeds to the committee of the whole. I thank Mr Davis for his commentary in relation to those amendments that have been circulated so far. I certainly will be exploring the intent of those amendments in the committee of the whole when we get to that, and I will also be exploring the concerns expressed by stakeholders when we get to the committee process, but with that the Greens support the bill.