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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-06-27 Daily Xml
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Anzac Highway, Glandore

Ms STINSON (Badcoe) (15:23): I rise to update the house on a long-running issue, the matter of maximum heights along Anzac Highway, particularly from South Road to Beckman Street, which is effectively the length of Glandore. I will also take the opportunity later in this address to recognise and also thank a particular local resident who has been incredibly vital to this fight. He has led this fight from the residents' perspective, and he has been instrumental in the progress to date, which I seek to update you on.

Glandore people fought really hard about 10 years ago for the establishment of the Glandore character zone. For those who are not familiar, please do come along and have a little drive around Glandore, because what you will see is a feast of Art Deco homes and beautiful streetscapes. They are absolutely worthy of preservation, and certainly the people who live there thought so and fought incredibly hard to establish a character zone some years ago. Unfortunately, during the last term of parliament, they spent pretty much every waking hour defending that character zone from infringement by the former government.

It is worth mentioning that in the lead-up to the new PDI Code, the Planning and Design Code, residents including me were told as part of the consultation process—which was quite extensive for the code, with many public sessions and feedback forms—an anomaly had seen eight properties along Anzac Highway have their heights at eight storeys, rather than the three storeys it was meant to be along that stretch, and that it would be addressed through the code, that there was no need for a separate code amendment because the extensive consultation that the former government was conducting would bring that height back down to three storeys.

Indeed, the materials that were presented to the public presented it at three storeys. So, of course, people did not put in submissions objecting to this because it was exactly what they wanted. The plan said this area in the new code would be three storeys and everyone agreed with that. The code was issued on 19 March 2021 and that three-storey limit was there for all blocks that abutted the character zone, and that is exactly what the community wanted.

But then—surprise surprise—1 July rolled around, and those of us who are assiduously reading the Gazette would have seen that it was suddenly changed, with a stroke of the minister's pen, back up to eight storeys for those eight blocks. There was no consultation. It came as a complete surprise to my community—in fact, they were quite shocked—and hundreds turned out to a community meeting that I and Kevin and others called to talk about this issue, and thus began quite a long campaign that continues now to try to get this fixed.

We all thought that this was a mistake, but of course we forgot that the planning minister at the time, Vickie Chapman, does not make mistakes. She never makes mistakes. In her entire time in parliament, she never made a mistake—and you just ask her about that because she does not make mistakes. So, on 27 July 2021, she finally publicly defended this decision and on ABC radio gave what could only be described as an amazingly creative but wholly nonsensical argument, saying that this was not a mistake of hers whatsoever and she was correcting someone else's error, which made absolutely no sense to anyone involved in this matter.

I am pleased to report that since that minister's departure and the arrival of a new government, we now have a government that listens to the community, to residents, to the council, to the local MP. We have had a community consultation period and the results have now been made public. There were 235 submissions and 221 of those, a stunning number, said that they want this at three storeys and it was what they had always understood to be the case. The decision is now with the minister and I respect that he will look at that feedback and make the right decision for our community.

In the remaining time, I want to pay tribute to Kevin Kitto, a long-time Glandore resident; some 20 or 30 years he has lived in the area. He first came to me about protecting the character zone way back in 2017 and we talked incredibly frequently about it. I was really sad the other day to call Irene, his wife, to learn that Kevin unfortunately had a sudden illness and had passed away. I want to thank Kevin greatly for the hours and hours, months and years that he dedicated to defending something that he believed in for our local community. God rest his soul, and thank goodness we have people like Kevin Kitto in our community to defend the things we believe in.

Time expired.

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