Minister bungles rezoning of five school sites in Monash and then attempts to cover it up

Victorian Planning Minister Matthew Guy earlier this month announced he had rezoned five sensitive former school sites in Monash – paving the way for their development.

As the full implications of his decision become clearer, it is also becoming clear that the Minister has made several errors and he either doesn’t understand what he is doing or he is deliberately misleading the Monash community.

The five sites are:

• the former Brandon Park Secondary College at 6-30 Brandon Park Drive, Wheelers Hill;
• the former Monash Special Development School at 1 Renver Road, Clayton;
• the former Clayton Primary School at 29 Browns Road, Clayton;
• the former Clayton West Primary School at 10 Alvina Street, Oakleigh South; and
• the former Oakleigh South Primary School at 1 Beryl Avenue, Oakleigh South.

Thousands of Monash residents live within close proximity of these sites and will be affected by the Minister’s decision.  Unfortunately, most are currently still unaware of the Minister’s actions.

Unexpectedly and in defiance of Monash Council’s detailed submissions, the Minister has chosen to put in place a Development Plan Overlay (DPO) over each of the sites.  This is a special planning mechanism designed to assist developers with short-cutting the planning process in order to develop large sites and without needing to worry about resident objections.

Under a DPO, a developer prepares a Development Plan and then submits it to the Council for approval which is restricted in what it can influence or change.  Once a Development Plan is in place, a developer has almost unrestricted ability to develop within the site and the Council is reduced to a mere ‘tick-and-flick’ role.

Most seriously though, residents cannot appeal specific applications to VCAT.  This means that residents surrounding these sites have had their basic legal rights significantly eroded when compared to what applies to almost every other resident living in Monash and Victoria.

Monash Council and those local residents who are aware of these issues, are strongly opposed to the Minister siding with developers.  A DPO has some relevant uses in the Victorian planning system, however this does not include a situation like these five former school sites which the community has been used to being public open space for decades.  If there is ever a situation where land should not be fast-tracked to development, it is in these circumstances where residents surrounding these sites should be able to fully participate, object and seek judicial review in respect of the radical changes which will take place on the sites.

It is also a significant conflict of interest for the Minister to strip planning appeal rights from local residents in order to favour big developers while at the same time the Government owns the very sites in question and is hoping to realise millions of dollars from their sale to these developers.

It is little wonder that at Tuesday night’s Monash Council meeting, the newly preselected Liberal candidate for Mulgrave, Cr Robert Davies, several times said it was ‘disappointing’ that the Minister had taken away planning appeal rights.  However the rookie candidate, who will be competing against Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews in November, was quickly pulled into line by the Liberal Party machine and by the next day he was bizarrely denying he had even said that.

The Minister’s reign of error

As well as the concerning decision to strip appeal rights from local residents, the rezoning has also exposed a number of repeated errors on the part of the Minister in exercising his role as the responsible planning authority for this decision.

Error  #1

In the letter the Minister wrote to me on 4 February advising Council of his decision to rezone the five sites, he clearly says that he had made a decision to rezone the five sites to a General Residential Zone.  We took him at his word.

However only last week when our council officers were going through the finer detail of his decision and checking the planning instrument he had used to enact it, we discovered that his letter is simply wrong.

The Monash Special Development School site has in fact been zoned Residential Growth Zone.  The Residential Growth Zone is a far more aggressive zoning than the General Residential Zone and is a planning tool to be used where higher density development and maximum change is desired to be achieved in a residential area.  It is starkly different to a General Residential Zone and will send chills down the spines of residents surrounding that particular site.

It is staggering that an experienced Planning Minister in official correspondence to a local Council which will be in charge of administering his decision would make such a mistake. At the very least, this is remarkable sloppiness and a lack of care on the Minister’s part.

Error #2

When I Issued a media release on 14 February to inform the community of the Minister’s decision (given he had not done so), the Minister took to twitter to claim that my statement that appeal rights have been taken away from residents was ‘absolute rubbish’.

In response to a direct question tweeted by a concerned resident ‘Why block appeals and VCAT’, the Minister tweeted in reply ‘No one had blocked appeal rights’.

These statements are wrong and the Minister has lied to concerned residents.  This is very clear on the face of a DPO, however, and in order to remove any doubt at all, it has also been confirmed by legal advice provided by Maddocks.

The Minister has misled twitter.  Not just once but in several tweets.

If twitter was Parliament he would by now be handing in his resignation in to the Premier, however he should accept that a similar standard of ministerial integrity applies to his public statements made outside the Parliament and he should at least acknowledge his misleading statements and correct them.

Error #3

In comments made to the Waverley Leader yesterday, the Minister stated that:

“So council should be absolutely in charge of setting the DPO and making sure residents have all the objection rights they want, through a DPO process.”          

Again, this assertion is just 100% not true.  Moreover, it is a ridiculous claim for a responsible Minister to make.  He needs to better understand his own planning framework which he oversees.

It is utterly wrong to state that Council can add objection rights into a DPO.  We can’t.

Indeed, the very purpose of a DPO is to exempt planning applications from third party appeal rights.  How is Council possibly in a position to ignore the requirements that have been introduced by the Minister and are now law?  A developer would easily be able to legally challenge Council for not abiding by these laws.

Next steps

At its meeting on Tuesday night, Monash Council voted overwhelmingly to fight the Minister’s disregard for the planning rights of Monash residents.

We will be writing to the thousands of Monash residents who live within a one kilometre radius of the sites to inform them of the Minister’s decision, his misleading and muddled statements and his lack of care.

Two of these sites are in marginal state electorates – Oakleigh and Mulgrave.  As a Council we will be aiming to highlight these matters in the lead up to the November state election to try to overturn the Minister’s decision.

In the meantime, it is time for Matthew Guy to apologise for misleading the Monash community, for being loose with the truth and for being so sloppy in his administration of the important powers he possesses as Victoria’s highest planning authority.