Markham Estate redevelopment

Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — I am pleased to speak on the motion that Mr Davis has put forward today with regard to the Markham estate, which is a motion in four parts. In essence the motion is about the lack of consultation with regard to the proposed redevelopment by Places Victoria — I presume now by Development Victoria; the privatisation of part of that public estate at this site in Ashburton; and that the City of Boroondara is best placed to be and should be the responsible authority for any planning decisions affecting the development of the Markham estate.

This is an issue that has been in train for quite a long time now, coming up towards almost two years. On 7 September 2015 the Minister for Housing, Disability and Ageing announced that 56 public housing units at Markham Avenue, Ashburton, would be demolished due to their poor condition. The flats were contained in a number of two-storey units, with quite nice grounds that had grown up around the estate, including 60-year-old trees. The minister announced that they would be replaced by 240 dwellings — this was at the time — and that 75 per cent of the development would be for private sale, with public housing to increase from four to 60 dwellings at that time.

The community was, to say the least, shocked at the scale of the proposed development, which is out of character with the surrounding environment, and they were shocked that no consultation had taken place before getting to that stage — that is, the framework design of around 240, now 250, units on this particular site. For six months the minister and his department did not say anything and did not respond to the questions from the community regarding the height of the development, the bulk of the development, whether there had been any background studies into traffic, overviewing impact on the adjoining biodiversity on Gardiners Creek, car parking et cetera — nothing. Residents received a brief form letter from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) four months after the original announcement — in the middle of January, when of course most people are away — which did not attempt to respond to any of the concerns.

That was the first stage of the consultation, and it is a very important part of the motion. If I could go to the very brief contribution that we just heard from Mr Somyurek, where he said that 'thorough consultation' will be undertaken with all stakeholders and that what happened was that a design was undertaken by Places Victoria and then the community was consulted about it, I think therein lies the problem, of course. The community was not consulted. The council was not consulted, because the minister appointed himself as the responsible authority and called the matter in. Of course the community was outraged to find that what had previously been a public housing estate was going to be completely overdeveloped, have 250 units put on it and that the design of these units, the placement of these units and the placement of the public housing units was already pretty well decided before any consultation took place with the community.

Mr Somyurek did say that the minister will continue to consult with stakeholders. That is only after a huge campaign has been run by the council and by the community, led particularly by the Ashburton Residents Action Group, who have run a remarkable campaign and done an awful lot of work in regard to the impacts of the proposed redevelopment of the Markham estate.

I also asked a question in the Parliament in November last year about this site, because it was around that time people were really coming to terms with what was being proposed, which is on a relatively small site of public land, approximately 13 house blocks, adjacent to Gardiners Creek — very close to Gardiners Creek, only a matter of metres away. It is also closely adjacent to remnant grassy woodland which is protected by the council, to a community garden which abuts the Markham estate and to a large amount of public open space. The proposal to replace the 56 demolished public housing units with 190 apartments to be sold on the private market and only 62 new public housing units is a massive overdevelopment on this site.

My question really went to: how is this type of redevelopment of public housing going to assist with making inroads into the 33 000 people who are waiting on the list for public housing, and why is the government putting profits before people and giving over three-quarters of this public land to the private sector instead of taking the opportunity to provide more and better public housing on the Markham estate?

I take the point that was made by Mr Somyurek and by Minister Dalidakis that the previous government did precious little with regard to public housing and did run down the public housing estate, so we are supportive of seeing more public housing, but this development is not going to give us more public housing. While the number of public housing units will increase very slightly from 56 to 62 on the current figures, the fact is that most of the units will be smaller than the ones that are currently there and will in fact house less people than were previously housed at the Markham estate and that three-quarters of the site will be sold off as private housing.

I spoke at the rally that was held on 25 March in High Street, Ashburton, which was organised by the Ashburton Residents Action Group and which attracted a huge number of people from the local community. There was a person there who had a sign up saying there is no privileged housing crisis. That I thought was quite apposite to the argument here that the apartments that will be sold off to the private sector will occupy, let us say, the better part of the site — the site that abuts the community garden, the site that is near the open space, the site that is closest to Gardiners Creek — and the public housing will be closer to the actual street and other housing in Markham Avenue.

I mentioned the location of the Markham estate in Markham Avenue. It is a very small street. It is a quiet street. It has a cycling path through it, and in fact it has been narrowed slightly to allow for that cycling path, so the amount of traffic that would be generated by this site would have quite an impact. The council has complained over time about the lack of any attention to the traffic that would be created by the site, but also in terms of Gardiners Creek we need to make sure that where new developments are proposed they are not going to impact on the adjoining waterways such as Gardiners Creek. If in fact you were to go down to the site you would see the remnant grassy woodland that is there and also a number of older trees and river red gums that are there, and some of these river red gums will be lost in the development.

You would have to say that really if you were looking at this type of development as a benchmark for how public housing developments should be done and how the local amenity of an area should be considered, the development that has been put forward by the government for Markham estate is completely wrong. It will have a huge impact on Gardiners Creek. It will have a huge impact on the remnant grassy woodland between the estate and Gardiners Creek. In this day and age, with diminishing amounts of remnant vegetation and with so many pressures on local creeks and waterways, to plonk such an enormous development on this site really does defy belief that the government would be going ahead with this.

Minister Dalidakis in his defence of the government's position — and I have to say that his defence and the very brief defence offered by Mr Somyurek were pretty weak defences of this calling in by the minister — —

Mr Mulino — That's a bit harsh.

Ms PENNICUIK — It is not harsh; I think it is accurate. I was waiting to hear a more robust defence of the minister's reasons for calling in the development and for the size and overdevelopment that is being proposed for Markham estate, and I heard no real defence of that. There was an awful lot of rhetorical argument put forward by the minister, such as 'hypocritical motions', David Davis trying to divide the community and the government getting on with the job and delivering for local communities. In terms of this local community it is not feeling that it is getting delivered what it wants to see. The community and the council have long said they do want more public housing on that site. The community is not getting more public housing on the site and the development proposal is not delivering for the community at all. Everybody pretty well is in agreement that more public housing is needed there, except that the community and the council — and I agree with them — would like to see even more public housing on that site than is proposed by the government's proposal.

Mr Dalidakis went on to say that this motion is premature and the minister is weighing up the concerns that have been raised. That is great to hear, because it has taken a huge public campaign and the council campaign to bring the minister and the government to the point where it is saying it is considering the points that have been raised by the community and the council, but there has been little evidence of that so far. I mean, all that Mr Dalidakis could tell me with regard to consultation was that he has had a meeting with the CEO and mayor of Boroondara council and indeed the minister has met with the mayor and CEO and perhaps with other officers of the council.

There was a letterbox drop, which I have already mentioned, and he also mentioned the 'engagement program' that was held in October and November. He went on to call them information sessions, which is pretty well what they really were. There was no real engagement by Places Victoria or DHHS at those sessions, one of which I attended, and the actual landmark question, which is about the size of the development, was not up for discussion. People were only allowed to give their feedback as to other aspects but not the actual size of the development or the amount of public housing, so I do not know how that classifies as proper consultation or engagement.

One of the issues that is very apposite with this development is its funding model, and that was certainly put well by the council back in November last year. In a December media release it said:

Council's assessment of the Markham estate redevelopment has revealed that the Victorian government is selling land to itself and using the value of the land to inflate the number of private dwellings to be built to pay for the cost of building public housing.
…

The land is owned by the Victorian government.

It is owned by the Victorian people actually.

The transfer of ownership of the land from a government department to Places Victoria, a government agency, is an 'on paper' transaction that should be excluded from the calculation of the cost of the development …

By including the value of the land in the cost of the development, the government …

is coming to its own conclusion — and these are my words — that more private dwellings on a much larger project are required to recover the cost of the land. But there is no cost to the land because the land is already owned by the people of Victoria and held in trust by the government, so there is no sale of that land actually required. We could provide more public housing on that land by simply funding it from the budget.

To put forward the idea that we need such a massive development to cover the cost of the land is an entirely false construct, and I agree with that.

One of the problems with this development at the Markham estate being essentially one of the first cabs off the rank with this model is that the government is intending and has announced it is intending to roll out this model across Melbourne and in regional Victoria. I know for the moment that the government has indicated that it will be looking at this type of model of providing more private dwellings on public land than public dwellings in places like Ascot Vale; Abbotsford Street, North Melbourne; Heidelberg West; Bills Street, Hawthorn; Gronn Place, Brunswick West; New Street, Brighton; Noone Street, Clifton Hill; and Walker Street, Northcote.

The model that the government is adopting for the redevelopment of the Markham estate on public land is very concerning. Public land should be used for public purposes. In other jurisdictions around the world, when new public housing estates are built on public land the percentage of public housing required to be built on those pieces of public land is quite high — 50 per cent and more in other places. Certainly the community and the council are calling for a much greater percentage of public housing to be built on the Markham estate.

I am concerned and the Greens are concerned about this model of using public land to provide private housing when we have 33 000 people on the public housing waiting list. These places around metropolitan Melbourne — and, as has been foreshadowed, in regional Victoria — are actually on public land set aside for public housing owned by the public and either have now or have had 100 per cent public housing on them in the past. It is difficult to understand the model that the government is putting forward.

In the postwar years, when a lot of these public housing estates were built, they were built using public money. They were not built by flogging off part of the public estate to the private sector. If they could do that in those times, we can certainly do it now. To have so many people waiting for public housing and to provide such a minuscule increase in public housing on this site in Ashburton really is quite unbelievable. As I said, there is a nominal increase in the number of units from 56 to 62 in the current proposal, but there are in fact fewer bedrooms, so fewer people will be accommodated on that site than were before the units were demolished.

The level of consultation has been abysmal. Mr Somyurek and Minister Dalidakis said the minister is continuing to consider issues raised. There are a lot of issues for the minister to consider because a lot of issues have been raised by the community and by the council with regard to the complete inappropriateness of the current proposal at this site. The Boroondara council has done a lot of work on analysing the proposal that has been put forward. It presented a report to the urban planning special committee earlier this year which went through the proposal in great detail and pointed out the problems with it. I commend the council for the work that they have put into analysing the proposal that has been put forward by Places Victoria and highlighting the shortcomings of it. It is important work, and it also shows that the council does have the expertise and the ability to deal with this planning issue.

The idea that redeveloping a public housing estate in a suburb of Melbourne should somehow be called a major project raises questions as to what a major project is. If I could digress a little bit — certainly not as much as previous speakers have on this motion — and just go down the road a little to the Kew Residential Services site in the same municipality, the City of Boroondara, that is a saga that has been going on now for more than 10 years. In a nutshell, public land was set aside for the use of intellectually disabled people, and most of it was flogged off to the private sector.

Some residents are permanently unable to return to the site. Some residents have returned to the site. It is fair to say that some who have returned to the site are quite satisfied. It is not all doom and gloom, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the development of that site that are ongoing. I asked questions only recently in this place about the re-signing of contracts with the developer, Walker Corporation, and the odd timing of the re-signing of those contacts.

I do not want to go too far down that path except to say that it appears that if the government is saying, 'This model is a great model because we'll be able to reinvest money raised by building 75 per cent private housing on public land', Kew is not a very good example because it appears that no money has been made by the government. They have sold off hundreds of houses and/or apartments on that prime real estate in the City of Melbourne and have not made any money. How can that be? It is an absolute scandal, that whole development, and it really does need to be looked at again certainly by the Auditor-General, now that the Auditor-General has the powers to look at public-private partnerships. Perhaps the Ombudsman should look at it again, because there are ongoing issues there with what has happened to the public land and what has happened to any supposed profits that were going to be going back into disability services. That has not happened.

I will just go through some of the issues that have been raised by the council about the proposed development of the Markham estate. In December 2016 the council considered a draft version of the proposal, at which time it resolved to inform the minister that it did not support the proposed redevelopment or the process being followed to facilitate it for a number of reasons which were set out in that report. It set them out in a letter to the minister, copies of which were sent to Places Victoria, the Minister for Public Transport, the Minister for Major Projects, the Minister for Housing, Disability and Ageing and the Secretary of the Department Health and Human Services.

Some of the issues they raised were: the inclusion of amendments to the landscape plans that significantly increase the impact of the development on the existing trees proposed to be retained, jeopardising their health and safety, and the seeking of planning permission for advertising signs that are prohibited by the Boroondara planning scheme. I mentioned that a large number of trees are going to be removed from the site just because of the excessive number of units that are proposed to be put on the site. That is going to significantly reduce the amount of permeable land on the site, which is, as I said, adjacent to remnant woodland and Gardiners Creek.

There is going to be underground parking, and there is going to be a lot of paving. Even though some of it may well be what is called permeable paving, the council's arborists have said that that will still put at risk the trees that will remain. A lot of trees will be lost from this site, and there is no need for that because the government could come up with a development for that site that in fact doubled the number of public housing units there with good design that is energy efficient and that fits in with the amenity of the local community in Markham Avenue, the creek, the community garden next door and the sporting ovals nearby without taking out the very old trees that are there.

In fact — this is my view — the opportunity should be taken to extend and expand the area of remnant vegetation that is between the creek and the proposed development, not encroach upon it and put it at risk, which is what this development will do.

The council, in its report of February 2017, went on to say that it remains opposed to the proposed development and proposed changes to the Boroondara planning scheme for the following reasons:

Council is qualified, capable and experienced … and should be maintained as the responsible authority…

…

The failure to carry out formal public notice to abutting and nearby property owners …

…

The development would cause unreasonable detrimental social effects —

that it would have —

…through the failure to propose a genuine 'tenure-blind' proposal —

because, as I have mentioned, the proposal will be separated into the private dwellings on the better side of the site and the public housing on the less good side of the site.

It goes on to say:

The objective of achieving 'cost neutral' delivery of public housing is not necessary …

So after some consideration of what the council said, Places Victoria reduced the number of private dwellings from 190 to 188. Council said:

… provision of 188 private dwellings in the form proposed will cause an unreasonable detrimental impact on the site, the local area and nearby residents;

The inclusion of the market value of the land in the cost of the development is fundamentally flawed and results in an overdevelopment of the site;

The development is inconsistent with the objectives of the general residential zone …

… fails to comply with council's adopted neighbourhood character policy with regard to the retention of significant trees and space for replacement tree planting and the scale of the buildings around the perimeter of the site

…

The extent and duration of shadows cast over Markham reserve, the Ashburton community garden and Gardiners Creek Reserve …

It also says:

The development fails to comply with the standards and objectives of the ResCode with regard to —

I will not read them all out because there are about 15 particular matters that it is not compliant with. The development also:

… fails to provide sufficient car parking and bicycle facilities …

… fails to incorporate sufficient traffic management strategies to mitigate the amenity impacts that would be caused by … increases in traffic volumes …

As I mentioned, it is a very quiet and narrow street; it is not an arterial road and it is quite a long distance from any arterial road, the closest ones being High Street and Warrigal Road.

The document also says, most importantly:

The development fails to achieve a net increase in public housing within the City of Boroondara, having regard to the net loss of public housing at this site and within Bills Street, Hawthorn, in recent years …

So there are a lot of concerns that are ongoing with the proposal for the redevelopment of the Markham estate. The redraft of the proposal has not satisfied the council; I am going through the very detailed report that has been put together by the council officers who have analysed the proposal.

Part of that report includes looking at the actual design of the apartments. I have been talking about the whole of the proposed redevelopment and its impact on the surrounding area — the environment, the local amenity et cetera — but council officers also looked at the particular proposals for the apartments. They found that the revised development remains non-compliant with a number of new standards. These include the functional layout standard, with inadequately sized main bedrooms in quite a large number of apartments; inadequately sized other bedrooms in even more apartments; inadequately sized living rooms in around half a dozen or so one-bedroom apartments; inadequately sized living rooms in a large number of two-bedroom apartments; problems with insufficient room depth; and a lack of storage.

Energy efficiency is not up to standard. Solar access to communal open space is also impacted. There is very little natural ventilation. A number of dwellings do not meet the requirements for private open space. Finally, the standard for accessibility requires that at least 50 per cent of apartments be designed to be accessible, and this has not been achieved. So quite apart from the impacts of the proposal as a whole, there are a lot of problems with the design of the apartments.

I have spent quite a bit of time on this matter because I am very strongly in agreement with the community and the council that this is a really inappropriate development for this area. We often hear the words 'inappropriate development', but this development is emblematic of what an inappropriate development is. It is a development in the wrong place. Perhaps the type of development being proposed for this site would be fine in another location, but it is not fine in this location.

The funding model that is being applied to this site is — as the council says, and I agree — leading to a false need for so many private dwellings to be built on what is public land that has been set aside for public housing. If this kind of development is going to be rolled out across Melbourne, then that is a concern in terms of making inroads into the number of people who are on the public housing waiting list. This development will make no inroads whatsoever into the public housing waiting list, and that is very concerning. So many opportunities are being lost with this development.

To the great satisfaction of a number of people who are listening to me I will have to wind up as I think my voice is about to go. Before I do, I want to just address the last part of Mr Davis's motion — I am not sure if he is intending to do a right of reply — which calls on the Minister for Planning to absent himself from any decisions relating to the proposed redevelopment of the Markham estate. I assume that this rather vague wording actually refers to paragraph (3) of the motion, which recognises that the City of Boroondara is supposed to be the responsible authority for any planning decisions affecting the redevelopment of the Markham estate.

We agree that the council should be the responsible authority; in fact in any such development this should be the case because the council has their own planning instruments in place for those streets, those areas and, in this case, for some of the environmental assets nearby. They are best placed to understand the needs of the community and to work out what would be an appropriate development on that site. That is the same for any of the other proposed sites across Melbourne.

I would like to also commend the Ashburton Residents Action Group for the huge amount of work they have done in raising this issue and their support of a much better development and more public housing on that site.