Save Our Suburbs Inc. (Vic)

The State Government has announced a 'review' of Melbourne 2030. Submissions are due by Sept 24th, 2007 - See the DSE web site.

The process states that 'all submissions will be treated as public documents and may be placed on the Internet for public access'. Be aware that most of the 'consultation' on M2030 has been to gauge the responses in order to appropriately spin to the concepts, and to hide 'public' submissions... So demand that your submission IS placed on the DSE website for public viewing! .

Read the government press release.

From that press release -

"A two page planning property report can now be generated free of charge by simply going to the Department of Sustainability and Environment’s website at www.dse.vic.gov.au/planning and clicking on “Planning Property Report”.

In a stunning move against residents, Planning Minister Justin Madden has confirmed he is considering removing Council planning powers to make decisions on permits for key development projects.

Read The Age article.

This would be disastrous, although some Councilors would welcome it because they'd no longer be responsible for making decisions on these contentious, unpopular and time-consuming projects.

This approach has been raised before - by the Development Assesment Forum. Read the summary of our 2004 submission to DAF (below).

Without any prior consultation or notice, Planning Minister Justin Madden is about to summarily terminate the State Government's Melbourne 2030 advisory group. The M2030 Implementation Reference Group (IRG) was originally set up to provide feedback on how the new planning guidelines were working in practice. The IRG has been critical of the way the government introduced the policy before much of the necessary council structure plans and upgraded public transport services had been put in place. Residential amenity protection lobby group Save Our Suburbs had two seats on the IRG.

“Melbourne 2030 - Planning for Sustainable Growth” is a 30-year plan to manage change across metropolitan Melbourne, introduced in October 2002 after three years of extensive community consultation (DOI 2002). However, this feedback, along with some of the department's own technical reports, was largely ignored in the final draft. Age columnist Kenneth Davidson savaged the strategy as “simply a restatement of the main elements of the Kennett government's 1995 planning document ( Living Suburbs )… with phoney consultative processes and documents in warm, earthy colours, subliminally evocative of a sustainable environment...” (Mees 2004). No options or alternative futures were ever discussed, identified or evaluated.