Heritage Places (Protection of State Heritage Places) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 6 March 2024.)

Ms O'HANLON (Dunstan) (20:30): I rise to speak on this bill, not just because it covers an issue I am personally passionate about but because I know, more importantly, how passionate many people in the electorate of Dunstan feel about the heritage places not just in our area but right across greater Adelaide. Indeed, I spoke in my very first speech in this place about how I was so deeply affected by the buildings and streetscapes of Norwood and St Peters and Marden and Kensington, and all of the suburbs in between, that I knew then I wanted to make my home amongst them. It did not take long to find that many members of my community share this passion with me.

To this day, when I am out doorknocking in my community I am likely to end up in conversation with someone living in a historic house about a shared admiration of their house or the story of that house's history. These historic State Heritage Places tell the story of our state's history. They are important to people—people in my community who want development to occur alongside the protection of our historic buildings—and we only need to look at other states to see that this is not just entirely possible but it is happening.

That is why I am so pleased this government made a commitment to legislate to better protect State Heritage Places. Currently, the Heritage Places Act 1993 contains stop orders, no-development orders and protection orders, but we have seen that those orders alone are not sufficient to provide positive conservation outcomes for State Heritage Places. There are currently no subsidiary enforcement measures, which means there is nothing to prevent, for example, demolition by neglect.

This bill not only provides an updated enforcement mechanism but also registers enforcement orders to the title of the land, which ensures that if the property is sold the purchaser is aware of the obligations that come with the property and that those obligations are enforceable. But perhaps most importantly, this bill also ensures greater consultation, leading to greater community engagement and procedural fairness.

We know that people are stakeholders in their community, and this government recognises that. I want to thank the many people in my community who continue to raise with me their concern for protecting these beautiful, historic examples of our built environment, and assure them that I am passionate about protecting these parts of our state and our community's story and will continue to be their voice.

I want to acknowledge the tireless advocacy of many people in my community and others—such as the city of Norwood Payneham & St Peters, the Department for Environment and Water, and the Hon. Robert Simms MLC in the other place—for their hard work and commitment to protecting the historic buildings we so love. This is an example of the government working with a range of stakeholder groups to ensure an outcome that is meaningful to people where they live, and means the beautiful buildings that, in many cases, define our suburbs will not just remain standing but will be preserved for us all to enjoy into the future.

Ms HOOD (Adelaide) (20:33): I, too, rise in support of this bill. The heritage and character of our neighbourhood streets is what makes my community of Adelaide so special. In every corner of my community—Prospect, North Adelaide, Walkerville, Gilbertson and, of course, our CBD—you will find heritage properties that enhance the character of our community and provide a physical link to the past and to South Australia's rich history. This bill joins other initiatives just this week that have seen the Malinauskas government move to invest in and protect heritage in my community.

On Monday I had the privilege of joining the environment minister and the Lord Mayor in North Adelaide to announce that the Malinauskas government is investing $250,000 towards helping owners conserve and protect heritage-listed properties in the City of Adelaide, as part of the council's Heritage Incentives Scheme. The funding agreement will expand the council's $1.16 million investment in the scheme with the further commitment of $250,000 from the state government until the end of 2025, with the focus of the new funds on state heritage-listed properties.

Established by the City of Adelaide in 1988, the scheme has provided more than $30 million in financial assistance to the owners of heritage buildings to preserve their properties' heritage values. The scheme allows them to undertake works, including reroofing, facade conservation, paint removal, repointing and structural stability works. Notable properties the City of Adelaide has helped restore through the Heritage Incentives Scheme include the famous Beehive Corner, on the corner of Rundle Mall and King William Street, West's Coffee Palace on Hindley Street and the historic East End Market buildings.

On Monday, the minister, Lord Mayor and I attended a beautiful heritage-listed property in Gover Street in North Adelaide which has benefited from the Heritage Incentives Scheme. Last financial year, the scheme allocated $1.18 million worth of funding across 71 projects in the city and North Adelaide. Given that the City of Adelaide is the custodian of about a quarter of South Australia's State Heritage Places, this funding boost from the Malinauskas government will enable even more property owners to consider conserving their own little piece of our state's history.

Also, just a short time ago the Malinauskas government took another step towards protecting the locally heritage-listed Crown and Anchor, with our bill passing the lower house that secures the future of this iconic East End live music venue. This is a significant win for the heritage and culture of our CBD.

I like to believe good news comes in threes, so I am delighted to be debating this bill this evening that legislates to better protect State Heritage Places. The government has made a commitment to legislate to better protect State Heritage Places, and takes this opportunity to augment the bill introduced in the other place to advance a gradated scheme of enforcement, to increase penalties for noncompliance and otherwise improve processes under the Heritage Places Act 1993. These amendments are part of broad legislation and policy reform to modernise heritage protection in South Australia, and this legislative reform work is already underway and is being conducted by the Department for Environment and Water.

Reforms currently being considered include many aspects of what is proposed in this bill, such as demolition by neglect, compliance, regulation, penalties, incentives and more. In regard to penalties, I was quite surprised to learn that the current penalties are 30 years old and as such do not act as a deterrent against noncompliance, especially for commercial developers. This bill therefore increases penalties to bring South Australian legislation in line with penalties in other Australian jurisdictions.

The bill introduces a gradated scheme of enforcement in regard to noncompliance, with a new system of repair notices, repair orders and restoration orders to help support positive conservation outcomes for state heritage properties. A repair notice advises the owner of the need to repair a State Heritage Place if the place suffers from neglect or disrepair. This preliminary step has the advantage of allowing owners the opportunity to undertake repairs and to discuss the repairs with a heritage architect without exacting a penalty. Only if the owner fails to comply with a repair notice will the secondary enforcement of a repair order be issued.

This measure, as well as providing daily penalties forcing the person to undertake works contemplated by the order in a timely manner, offers these subsidiary measures. This may avoid a repetition of the circumstances that have led to the continued demise, for example, of Bell's Plumber Shop.

I would like to thank the Minister for Environment and her department for their work on this important legislation and commitment to protecting heritage in this state. I thank also the Hon. Robert Simms MLC in the other place for his initiative in introducing legislation to further the protection of State Heritage Places. I commend the bill to the house.

The Hon. D.G. PISONI (Unley) (20:38): I take this opportunity to speak about the long-term interest that I have had in heritage, and how important it is to the electorate of Unley. I can remember in the 2006 election, in a very short period of time, I was preselected nine months prior to that election and I doorknocked 7,000 homes in that period. One constant issue that people raised, regardless of who they voted for, was that they were concerned about the growing lack of insistence on streetscape and how many older homes were being bowled over, and two or three going on the same block without any planning, without any consistency, without any respect, if you like, for the heritage character of Unley.

Unley was a very early suburb of the city of Adelaide. I spoke in this place just this week about St Augustine's church. At the time when the second church, which celebrated its centenary last Sunday, was built next door to the first, smaller church, a population of 31,000 people was living within the City of Unley. You can see it grew very substantially and very quickly once it was established.

Just three kilometres from the GPO, we have homes in Unley that have blocks that are an acre or more with those homes sitting on them, quite an extraordinary situation and very rare in major cities, certainly in capital cities, in Australia or anywhere else in the world. It is not just the heritage of those buildings: it is the heritage of the proportions of the land, the proportions of the gardens, the density of the housing.

In the lead-up to the 2006 election, heritage did become a big election issue. My Labor opponent was the then Mayor of Unley, Michael Keenan. In those days, planning decisions were made by the council, and the people of Unley blamed the mayor for the lack of interest in heritage, the lack of care. Although it was not a very good election for the Liberal Party, I did manage to hold that seat, and it was because I identified and supported improvements to protecting heritage.

I am very pleased that the council itself then started a very detailed piece of work of identifying heritage areas and streetscapes for preservation and identifying places in Unley where there could be development. When I had my business in Unley, there was a pocket of industrial activity that happened off Charles Street, just west of Unley Road and east of King William Road in behind the council depot, which was all rezoned in a higher density than the usual. That has been a very successful addition to the City of Unley because it was designed with a lot of open space, green space, and homes that have garages to park their cars very close to the sought-after strip shopping on both King William Road and Unley Road.

It is not just the built heritage that is important, of course, but it is the heritage of trees, both native trees and introduced trees. We have some extraordinary specimens of introduced trees in Unley, such as very large oak trees. There are some streets in Malvern, for example, that are lined with English oak trees. Those who know oak trees know that they are very slow growing. The forefathers and mothers of Unley, in deciding to put those in, gave a gift to a dozen generations with their decision to do that.

It was the locals' decision, because the street trees are in Unley. The early street trees—the beautiful jacarandas, the oak trees, the white cedars, the plane trees that we see on Victoria Avenue, for example, and in other parts of the city—were all planted by the residents themselves. Street committees were set up to decide what tree they would plant. People would buy those trees, plant them in front of their homes, agree on species. There is no doubt that today's residents of Unley have benefited enormously from that foresight and that community-driven desire to improve the streetscape and bring all that shade into the suburbs.

From my point of view, something that is missing in this particular bill is an emphasis on the heritage of the streetscape through its vegetation. It is very easy for the roads to lose the character they have acquired: the older construction, previously the side roads, the older construction methods, the way that gutters were made from stone, the paving that was used. There are some pockets in Unley and in other suburbs where that has been preserved. It is an expensive process. It is a process that needs dedication, but it does not mean it should not be done because it is very much part of preserving Adelaide's heritage.

When you take a minute and step back from your shopping when you are in Rundle Mall and look above the parapet, above the verandahs, and head east down Rundle Street east, there is that block of Polites shops at the western end of Hindley Street that were done up a number of years ago. They went from Federation buildings that were rendered in the fifties and sixties and painted white, with aluminium windows dropped in, to being restored back to stripped brick with timber window frames and doors, and it has made a big difference to the appearance of that area.

On the importance of retaining that built heritage and the heritage we have in places like the Botanic Gardens, it is a little known fact that the Adelaide Botanic Garden has the oldest planted Australian red cedar tree in the world. It was planted when white settlers came to the eastern seaboard in 1788. There was an abundance of red cedars, from Wollongong right up to the top of Queensland. It was a significant building timber. There is cedar in this particular building here, for example, but it did not grow in South Australia. Of course, the Botanic Gardens are a vault of heritage when it comes to botanical species, particularly species that were introduced to Australia from other parts of the world.

There are also some very spectacular Kauri pine species. Kauri pine grows only on the eastern seaboard, in the northern part of Australia and in New Zealand, but it does not grow anywhere else in the world. It is a massive tree that would take probably as many as six people, holding hands, to wrap themselves around the trunk. It is in the most southerly garden of the Botanic Gardens. It is yet another piece of important heritage that we should cherish and remember.

I am pleased that the parliament is here discussing and debating the importance of heritage. For quite some time, it was not a priority. I was pleased to work with the former minister for transport, Corey Wingard. Rather than demolish the gatehouse at the Waite campus to make way for the road work that was required on the corner of Fullarton Road and Cross Road, I was able to convince minister Wingard and the department that it should be pulled down brick by brick and rebuilt because I had seen that done before. I was very pleased to see it was opened. Unfortunately, I was not invited by the minister even though it is my electorate. Every other surrounding Labor MP was with the minister but, unfortunately, the local member who initiated the rebuilding was not invited to that event, which I really thought was quite mean-spirited, I have to say, considering my interest in heritage is quite well known.

Heritage is an important living factor, it is an important tourism factor and it is an important business factor. We have heard stories about buildings that have been left to neglect. It reminds me of Romilly House on the corner of Hackney Road and North Terrace. For my entire life, every time I have driven past that building it has looked as though nobody lives there, nobody cares about it and it is about to fall down. I was very pleased to see that it has a new owner who has an ambition for it. I have heard that before, but let's hope it can be restored.

I think it is also important that when you are serious about restoring buildings, maybe there are some elements of modern design practices or modern requirements that could be amended in order for the building to be restored and used commercially—which then, again, makes that building valuable. When a building is valuable, it is looked after. When you can get rent for it or income from it, if it is a commercial building, it is looked after. When you can live in it and enjoy it as a comfortable place to live, it will be restored, it will be appreciated and it will continue to be preserved.

It does not do any heritage building any good to be left to rot and deteriorate. It would be much better for those buildings to be brought up to speed and used earlier than later. I think there is a massive waste of heritage space on the second and third levels of so many of the retail places in Rundle Street, Rundle Mall and other streets in the city, and even in our suburban strip shopping areas that have two-storey buildings with a shop below. Often, the top is simply storage space or it is unused.

A lot of that goes back to the fact that the costs of compliance with modern building standards are stopping owners from making those buildings a viable prospect to be turned into a home and rented, turned into an office that could bring in income, or even for the owners to live there themselves and enjoy the lifestyle that they are providing through being part of the strip shopping atmosphere. One of the places where we see a lot of residential living above shopfronts is on Semaphore Road. I think that is a great example of where we see shops and residential use of buildings that have history and historical value.

For historical value, you do not have to go back to Victorian villas or Federation homes. In America, for example, people fall over themselves for a Frank Lloyd Wright built in the 1950s. In Canberra, anything built by Walter Burley Griffin—who was a student, of course, of Frank Lloyd Wright—is very sought after for the heritage and design features.

These are the things that we can learn from when we are looking for inspiration to improve streetscapes and options for living, particularly as we are now desperately looking for more choice and other ways of living in Australia as the cost of housing continually increases. I think the sums in the late eighties when Michelle and I bought our first home were about four times the average salary. The latest estimate now is that the average home is up to 14 times the annual median salary, which is an extraordinary jump. Having children around the age where they are buying homes, it is a big burden.

One way to help alleviate that is to produce more homes and more options for homes so that there are lower price points for entry. Put simply, if you are prepared to live somewhere smaller and have fewer amenities to get started, to get yourself into the property market so that what you have purchased will continue to move as the market increases, when you are ready to buy something larger you will be buying and selling in the same market. Of course, that is the ideal way to upgrade your home when you are ready to do that. I conclude my contribution with those remarks.

Mr COWDREY (Colton) (20:56): I do not wish to take up any more time than is necessary this evening in regard to this bill. I note the significant contributions that have been made already at the second reading from the opposition in regard to our position on the bill. I look forward to exploring some issues in a more fulsome manner through the committee process as the government introduces amendments, as previously flagged with the opposition.

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Minister for Climate, Environment and Water, Minister for Workforce and Population Strategy) (20:57): I thank members for their contributions, and of course I thank again the Hon. Robert Simms from the other place, whose bill this is. We have a reasonably extensive series of amendments, some of which the government had been contemplating in any case, and we have seen that this is a good merger of ideas on strengthening and improving heritage. Therefore, I look forward to being able to move into committee to go through those bills and any questions or further amendments that other members have.

Bill read a second time.