Box Hill tower working group should be run by Council, not government

Mr Clark (BOX HILL) – I raise for the Minister for Planning the issue of the proposed 38-storey tower in Station Street, Box Hill. I ask the minister to arrange that the working party he announced in his media release of 1 June be a working party convened by and which will report to the City of Whitehorse on behalf of the local community and not one run by his department.

On 8 January this year the minister called in the proposal for this tower, even though it was listed for appeal before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal and the case was expected to be heard within a month. The minister’s media release carried the headline ‘$100 million Box Hill proposal fast-tracked’. The release cited the potential to create hundreds of jobs and said the proposal was ‘consistent with the Whitehorse planning scheme’.

However, far from fast-tracking the proposal, the minister took five months to make up his mind and then announced that the proposal had been rejected because it did not support the policy objectives of Melbourne@5 Million and was ‘not in keeping with the Whitehorse planning scheme’. The minister went on to say:

A working party including council representatives, architects, urban designers, government representatives and the developer will be established to address the outstanding matters related to design, public transport access and community concerns.

At one level the minister’s announcement of 1 June is a vindication of the concerns raised by many in the community about the need to address issues including traffic congestion, parking, overshadowing, overlooking, pedestrian movements, public transport integration, wind effects and the precedent for future building heights.

However, the 8 January announcement clearly signalled that the government was calling in the proposal in order to approve it rather than to reject it, so the 1 June announcement seems to owe as much to the subsequent Windsor Hotel scandal and the exposure of the government’s abuse of call-in powers as it does to good planning. It must not be forgotten that the Box Hill tower was one of the issues listed for future spin doctoring on the infamous Peta Duke media plan.

In light of the government’s record of manipulation and abuse of planning processes, the community is entitled to be very concerned that the minister’s establishment of a working party is simply an attempt to buy time until after the election, and that if the Brumby government is re-elected, this proposal will simply be resurrected and imposed on the community despite all the unresolved issues I have mentioned.

If the minister truly wants to make sure that no proposal is approved for this site unless those issues can be sorted out first, he should not set up yet another behind-closed-doors process, with a working party run by his department that keeps the community in the dark and will not let the issues and the evidence be publicly debated and scrutinised. Instead he should arrange for the working party to be convened by and report to Whitehorse council so that the issues and evidence can be addressed openly and with community input, and so that any subsequent planning applications are handled by the council in accordance with usual planning processes.

The minister should also ensure that the government fully cooperates with such a council-convened working party and in particular makes available officers from the departments of planning and transport so that a proper integration of any development involving the Centro Box Hill shopping complex, the bus terminus and the Box Hill train station can be worked out.