Residential Land Subdivisions

Mr MULLIGHAN (Lee) (17:20): I did not have the chance to say this in question time, but congratulations on both your election as the member for Hartley and your elevation to the Speaker. I know that it was a tiring, long and exhausting campaign for nearly all of us. Some of us were more on tenterhooks than others, of course, in the election and some of us have been trying to recuperate as well as get used to our new roles. We are at the end of what has been a relatively long ceremonial day, but we are full of vigour, of course, because, even though we have just had question time, the benefit of not having too many questions is that we do not feel too exhausted. Maybe that will change. I guess we will see how the next four years progress.

I want to take the opportunity to talk about a problem that is of particular importance in my electorate. It is a very local problem, a problem that is a growing one and a problem that both you, Mr Speaker, and I share. I think the suburb in the electorate of Hartley is number one and the suburb in my electorate of Lee, the suburb of Seaton, is number two for suburbs with the greatest number of residential land subdivisions and what are colloquially called two-for-one type developments. In itself this is not necessarily a problem.

In fact, I think most people across the political spectrum would say that if handled sensitively, if newly developed homes are in keeping with streetscapes and if there is sufficient attention paid to local amenity and traffic management, this sort of infill development is not a problem. However, in places like Seaton, and other suburbs in my electorate, such as Grange and West Lakes, and also to a lesser extent, but still an important extent, Royal Park and Semaphore Park, we are seeing more and more infill development. That is causing residents a great deal of woe when it comes to getting into and out of their local streets.

It used to be the case, particularly in well master-planned suburbs—for which West Lakes has been renowned and, to differing degrees, also Semaphore Park and Grange—that when these suburbs were first master planned houses had to be on a fairly large minimum block size and they had to have quite significant setbacks from the road. Indeed, I believe in West Lakes, as part of the Delfin development, the minimum setback was at least nine metres. Many had double-width driveways and of course on top of that they had lock-up garages behind.

What that meant was that over the last 30 years, as people bought into these areas, as they had families, as those families got older and, as is the Australian way—and certainly the South Australian way—adult children also purchased cars and drove themselves around, most of the cars could be accommodated off-street on the property. With many of these new two-for-one developments that is not the case.

We are seeing local streets often only built about 7½ metres wide, which some councils say is enough for a car parked on each side and enough room for a car to pass through the middle. But, given that the maximum width of a vehicle on Australian roads is 2.5 metres, that is probably not the case. Nonetheless, councils are continuing to say that roads are getting clogged with traffic and particularly as residents who have been in the area for 30 or 40 years perhaps feel a little less confident with the driving task struggle to get out of their driveways, they struggle to turn out of their local streets and they struggle to get onto some of the feeder roads and out onto government-controlled arterial roads.

This is a particular problem in some parts of Grange, especially those parts which only have one access point in and out of a network of streets. I am talking specifically about Fort Street, Sylvan Way and Parkview Avenue, where residents and I are making representations to the council to better manage how traffic occurs and frequents these streets. We have local government elections coming up in November and I know that sitting councillors and new candidates will be very keen to try to allay residents' concerns about how local traffic management is being handled by local government and their local council. I look forward to working with residents to make sure that councils, their staff and councillors address these important concerns of residents.

The SPEAKER: Member for Flinders.