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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-02-27 Daily Xml
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Urban Infill Development

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (14:40): My question is to the Minister for Planning. Will the minister act to reverse changes to the planning act that allow extreme subdivisions, sometimes as many as six dwellings on one block, which cause increased congestion on suburban roads and the reduction of valuable green space?

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL (Schubert—Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government, Minister for Planning) (14:40): I just wonder whether the Speaker put you up to this, member for Florey. This is a concern that he has been badgering me about for a long period of time. Yes, there is actually work that's currently ongoing. There are some pockets in some council areas across our state and our city that do have really small minimum lot sizes, and I take, and we do take—

The SPEAKER: Like Campbelltown.

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: Like the Campbelltown City Council which has minimum lot sizes of around 150 square metres. I'm not going to do the maths on my feet, but it does mean that we see four, five, six and even seven for one development on an individual lot. There have been a number of concerns raised about how we deal with the associated parking issues that tend to arise as a result of that. For your awareness, member for Florey, I also had a letter from the former minister for planning, raising similar concerns about the Lightsview development which he himself put in place, which I found quite humorous, but there you go.

The Campbelltown City Council wrote to me about this last year in about September. After having a bit of back and forth over a couple of months about how it is best to deal with this from a citywide perspective, we agreed to go forward and return a statement of intent in relation to the Campbelltown City Council doing some work to look at more appropriate minimum lot sizing and then those associated issues in relation to setback, shared driveways, car parking provision and the like.

We want that work to inform things more broadly because we see this as an issue, and it is something that is probably at its worst in Campbelltown City Council, but it would certainly have some relevance to other pockets around our city. But we have to do other things as we look to scale back some of that high-density development.

People are choosing to live within the five to 10-kilometre radius from the CBD. We have seen now that naturally people are gravitating towards these suburbs and, as a planning system, it needs to be able to facilitate that development. Whereas before we were seeing huge amounts of redevelopment on the urban fringe—and certainly under planning minister Holloway there was a whole heap of rezoning out to the north—people are now choosing to live and want to live much closer to the city.

So, to offset potentially losing some density around increasing minimum lot size, there are other things that we need to look at. We are very keen, for instance, to look at more legacy industrial sites, to look at more areas where we can facilitate more high-density developments. As a government, we want to facilitate higher population growth and that means again that our planning system needs to reflect that.

But I certainly take your point in your question, too, around open space. That is something of major concern to me because it seems that open space only goes one way and that's backwards. It's why we took to the election a policy for greener neighbourhoods to provide a fund out of the Planning and Development Fund that the Minister for Environment is going to look after to partner with councils to look at doing something simple like planting more trees, which we know helps to deal with the urban heat effect.

Through some reforms that the Minister for Environment and Water is looking at, there is a whole lot more that we want to do to green our city and to put money into greening our city. Essentially, we want to use the existing process, and potentially new processes as part of the landscape act, to be able to put in more money so that we can actually have a greener city that supports higher density and that does so in a way that communities can still have that amenity so that in this beautiful city in which we live, Adelaide, we have the opportunity to be able to enhance it further.

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