More Transparency: Davis Calls for Critical Planning Documents in Victoria

In a sequel to the Victorian Inquiry into planning Amendments VC257, VC267 and VC274, today 18 June 2025, Dave Davis (Liberal) put a motion requiring the Victorian State Government provide within three weeks very important documents required of it by the Inquiry Committee.[1] These documents would reveal the basis, actors, and rationale behind drastic changes to Victoria's planning system, reshaping lives and environments in ways many view as alarming and authoritarian.  The material described or quoted below comes from https://hansard.parliament.vic.gov.au/images/stories/daily-hansard/Council_2025/Legislative%20Council%202025-06-18.pdf

The ensuing debate seemed to indicate the government thought it might take nearly six months before it had to produce the information. As the opposition pointed out, that would mean that the government would proceed with its radical new planning program before these crucial documents became publicly available. 

Mr Batchelor (Labor) seemed to indicate a reluctance to supply the required information. Batchelor criticized Davis for being involved in establishing the time-limited select committee and then complaining about its duration, and suggested that Davis was not serious about making more affordable housing available for Victorians (and Mr Galea echoed
Batchelor later). Further, Batchelor complained that supplying documents and names would expose those mentioned in them to public scrutiny, as if that would be unfair.

Mr Davis explained that he had had no control over the time-limit in the Inquiry, because there was a deadline imposed by the Planning and Environment Act 1987, s.38 on the opportunity to disallow the Amendments being considered in the Inquiry, (that required the said documents).

Dr Mansfield (Greens) and Richard WELCH (Liberal) indicated that they wanted to see the documents too, and that the government should provide them because the changes they were making to planning in Victoria were so serious that the public needed to be properly informed, and had not been.

The motion passed despite government opposition, potentially granting Victorians and their local, state, and community representatives access to documents to challenge the planning changes the Victorian Government assumes it has succeeded in forcefully imposing on the electorate.

THE DEBATE -

[Note that emboldened emphases has been made by candobetter Editor. For exact copy, see https://hansard.parliament.vic.gov.au/images/stories/daily-hansard/Council_2025/Legislative%20Council%202025-06-18.pdf]

David DAVIS: Notice of motion 968 in my name is a short-form documents motion. It notes the Andrews Labor government published in the VictoriaGovernment Gazette that the Minister for Planning had approved a number of planning schemes, particularly GC252 and VC267, and these planning provisions were gazetted and then tabled. It further notes that the time-limited select committee on Victoria planning provisions, of which I and a number and others who are sitting in the chamber at the moment were members, was –

Ryan Batchelor interjected. 

David DAVIS: No, no, I am not criticising it. I am just noting it was time limited; it is a statement of fact. 

Ryan Batchelor interjected.

David DAVIS: Yes, there were very good reasons for that, but it does not change the facts. It was time limited because there was an actual deadline.

Ryan Batchelor: What was the deadline?

David DAVIS: The deadline was the opportunity to disallow, and that is in the legislative framework, in the Planning and Environment Act 1987, section 38, if you want to go and read it. The second point here directly points to planning scheme amendments VC257, VC267 VC274 and GC252 and seeks the materials relied upon or provided to the Minister for Planning in making those planning scheme amendments. We know from the inquiry that in fact material is presented to the minister and the minister does make a decision. Despite a motion of this chamber already and a request at the select committee, the minister has not released the material upon which she relied. The community is entitled to see that. We seek further documents supporting the declaration of the 50 activity centres and the 10 large pilot activity centres – a total of 60 centres declared by the Minister for Planning.

She must have chosen them somehow. On what basis? Let us see if the minister made a decision. If there is a document or documents provided to her by the department on which she has based these decisions, let us see them. A list of local council representatives who attended consultation with the industry stakeholders and the Department of Transport and Planning in the seven workshops held by the technical reference group – let us know who these representatives were. The extensive housing target –

Ryan Batchelor interjected.

David DAVIS: No, we would like to know who they were, and we might even talk to them. That is a very good point. The extensive housing target modelling for municipalities – we know that dwelling targets have been set.

Ryan Batchelor interjected.

David DAVIS: President, I am confronted by a barrage here.

The PRESIDENT: Please, Mr Davis without any interjections.

David DAVIS: Housing targets have been set by the government for municipalities. They have been imposed on these municipalities, but where is the modelling for those targets? How did the government arrive at these amazing targets? They are very large. In the case of Boroondara or Stonnington in my area, they are about 90 per cent of the current dwelling numbers in the municipality. They are huge. How were they arrived at? Let us see the modelling.

Documents linked with the Minister for Planning’s involvement or not in community engagement activities, including community reference groups which the Department of Transport and Planning led and in which the Victorian Planning Authority was involved. Membership of committees formed by government to provide government advice in relation to development contributions against modelling on housing affordability has been referred to by the VPA. Others who have met with the VPA have had discussions with the VPA about these. These are very sensible requests.     

Did the Minister for Planning choose the chairs and members of community reference groups for the announced activity groups? The modelling of these changes by the VPA, including the heritage material that they have looked at – and we understand they have modelled a 50 per cent loss of heritage sites – is actually one of the points that we would seek to see. 

These are, as I say, very sensible requests. These are documents we know exist from transcripts, and they should be provided. They were requested by the committee, and they were not provided to the committee. I cannot understand why the government cannot have done this. This is all easily obtainable material. The modelling by the VPA was admitted to by the VPA in the hearing. We know people who have met with the VPA and discussed the modelling in detail, so why can’t the Victorian community see that modelling? What is secret about that modelling?

This motion at paragraph (3) requires the Leader of the Government, in accordance with standing order 10.01, to table in the Council within three weeks of the house agreeing to this resolution the briefings and documents presented to or relied upon by the Minister for Planning in the approval of the planning schemes GC252 and VC267, and all documents identified in the select committee’s transcripts from public hearings and listed in paragraph (2). These are very simple requests.

We asked for this material at the select committee. The select committee was not provided with this material, so we are seeking this material through the house’s procedures.
In addition to that, GC252 and VC267 – those planning scheme amendments – the community are entitled to know the basis on which the Minister for Planning made the decision. She must have had documents in front of her – (Time expired)

Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (10:14): I am always pleased to contribute to a debate on planning and Mr Davis’s request for documents with respect to the planning scheme amendments that were the subject of a select committee process which reported not more than a month ago. Included in the recommendations of the select committee was a request for certain material. The government has, under the Parliamentary Committees Act 2003, six months to respond, so I am not sure what the premature moving of this motion is given that some of these matters were in fact dealt with by the committee, considered by the committee that Mr Davis initiated and now criticises for not having enough time.

Mr Davis was involved in moving the select committee’s establishment and now criticises it for not having enough time. I think that is the height of hypocrisy, which I think speaks volumes about the fact that the Liberal Party in this state do not care about whether Victorians have enough housing. All they care about is blocking things and playing political games – that is all they care about. What is more worrying is that the Liberal Party is opposed to building more homes and opposed to letting Victorians have access to homes in the communities that they love, homes in the communities that they grew up in, homes in the communities that are close to their families – that is a concern.

Not only are we concerned about the way that Mr Davis seemingly ignores and criticises the very processes that he set up and the blatant hypocrisy that comes from that kind of conduct, but more worrying was the tenor of what he was saying in his contribution and the chilling effect that he is seeking to have on representatives of local government who participate in consultation processes by asking that they all be named in the Parliament. I would like to know what Mr Davis intends to do with the personal information of the people who participate in government processes, because this government is actively engaging with the Victorian community on our planning changes. If he had listened to the evidence that was given to the parliamentary inquiry, he would know that local governments, for example, affected by the activity centre proposals have been consulted with from the start, engaged with from the start. Every single local government area in this state was invited to participate in consultations on the new townhouse code, but he seems to ignore those relevant facts and instead is pursuing an agenda that is seeking to identify and shame those officials in local government who are legitimately engaged in a process of consultation, doing their jobs to try and generate more housing in this state and better planning. I think that is a disgraceful approach that the opposition, the Liberal Party, are taking, trying to silence the engagement of people with the extensive consultation processes that are underway about the activity centres here in Victoria.         

If the Liberal Party is so opposed to more homes, if the Liberal Party is so opposed to making sure that Victorians have housing where they need it, where they want it and in communities they love, then they should just be open and honest and say it – just come out and say that they do not want to give Victorians access to more housing, that they reject the ability of young Victorians to buy a new home. They should be open and honest instead of perpetuating activities such as this one today.

Obviously the government does not oppose the documents motion. In fact there are recommendations along those lines in the parliamentary committee report.

Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (10:19): I will only make a brief contribution to this motion, but I thank Mr Davis for bringing it before the Parliament. We will be
supporting this documents motion. I was part of the select committee and was one of the members who did ask for some of this information from different government representatives and department representatives and was not satisfied with the responses that we received to those questions. These are really significant planning reforms that the government is undertaking, and we know that there is a lot more to come.

This is a complete transformation of our planning system, and regardless of what you think of that, I think it is absolutely critical that the Parliament and more broadly the public have the opportunity to scrutinise these major changes to our planning system, to understand the basis for them and to be provided with proper rationales for the arguments that are being made about how these changes will improve housing affordability, how they will deliver more housing where people need it and how they will reduce housing affordability pressures either on people who are seeking to buy their first home or on renters. None of that information has been presented.

We have been given some very high level academic papers and reviews about how, in theory, changes to the planning system may lead to an increase in supply. Even some of those that were provided by the department outlined contested ideas about whether that is even the case. There was a very interesting paper from the New South Wales parliamentary research service that did a very thorough examination of the evidence supporting the claims that are made around planning and housing supply and identified that particularly in the Australian context it is not clear that some of the changes that the government are making that they say will increase supply and affordability will have that effect locally.       

So again, I think the government are entitled to have their planning program that they are pushing ahead with, but equally the Victorian public are entitled to understand the basis for that, to understand why the government has gone ahead with this and to understand what options they considered, who they consulted with and what expert advice they relied upon. I think it is a very basic request to have some of this information provided, and it is tiresome that we, week after week, are asking for this sort of information to be provided about major decisions. This is going to completely transform the city that we live in, for better or worse, and we deserve to understand the basis for the decisions that the government has made here.

Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (10:22): I am pleased to rise to speak on Mr Davis’s motion 968, and I just simply concur with everything Dr Mansfield said. It is exactly right. It is too big a project with too broad an impact not to be clear on what the mechanisms were, what the motivations are, what the intentions are, who was consulted, what interests were at the table when they were consulted and how we came to these conclusions, because there is a lot we do not know. And I will tell you, the little that we do know is that the councils were not consulted. They were given selectively short periods of time before caretaker periods to respond. The scale of the changes proposed to them was such that they had a week to respond before caretaker and could not possibly marshal a considered response, and you could only view that as a calculated exercise in limiting communities’ voices on this matter.

The City of Whitehorse, for example, a city of currently 72,000 residences, which had already planned for 40,000 new residences within its boundaries, within the same footprint, was given a top-down mandate that it must deliver 74,000 additional residences within the same footprint. They were not consulted on this. The modelling that supported that that was possible, economically feasible, would deliver affordable housing – none of that was ever discussed. So it basically exists on someone’s spreadsheet where a top-down planning exercise has taken place. No-one in the community was consulted; none of the community stakeholder groups were consulted. None of the considerations of other additional social infrastructure that would need to be provided seem to have been considered in it.

Michael Galea interjected.

Richard WELCH: Well, look, if it did take place, then provide it, because I think the government has conditioned itself to think that any idea of transparency or scrutiny on what its work is is somehow a witch-hunt. Victorians want to know how you came up with these ideas, because they were not consulted on them, the stakeholders were not consulted on them and the local governments were not consulted on them. 
They came top-down.
They came top down with lots of diagrams. Clearly someone had been working on these for some time.

I will take up one point that Mr Batchelor raised: ‘What’s the rush? The committee has got six months to report and provide information.’ Well, what we learned in the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee is that the consultations will start before that information comes along. So yet again we are going to have a situation where the community is being given a so-called consultation period without full knowledge of what they are being consulted on. When it comes to the Blackburn activity centre and they are asked to give their feedback, will this information be available to them as they provide that feedback, or will they be providing feedback on partial information that will be then taken and used and then subsequently further information will come out?

All we are asking for here really is basic transparency and sensible information on what is a massive change. We are not talking about a playground in one community here, we are talking about 60 communities radically changed in character. I commend the motion. The communities deserve the information, and we should have it.

Michael GALEA (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (10:26): I also rise to speak on this motion today. I do note that my time is somewhat limited, as seems to be appropriate, because subsection (2) of this motion talks about the time-limited select committee. I am quite surprised to hear you, Mr Davis, complaining about a time-limited select committee. If only there was someone in this place who could have had some control over that. But it was in fact Mr Davis himself who insisted on a rammed-through, too-short, six-week select committee. In the same week of course that Ms Crozier was telling us in the chamber that six weeks was nowhere near a long enough time to make any decisions of significance, Mr Davis was in here saying that apparently a six-week select committee is fine – the same select committee time period he is now complaining about.

Perhaps if we did have a longer select committee, perhaps if he had listened to our suggestions that six weeks was way too short, this is work that the select committee could have been doing. But this is already part of the recommendation of the report, and it is already forming part of government process. Once again we see Mr Davis trying to cover over his own cock-ups, trying to fix things that he has already done, ignoring the fact that it was actually him that proposed a six-week select committee, not the government, and in fact then trying to fix up the errors that he has already made. So it is another case of, as Mr McIntosh might say, ‘Well, well, well’. Here we are again. This government is going to continue fighting for the housing aspirations, though, of all Victorians, wherever you live. 

Motion agreed to. 

NOTES

[1] 

NOTICES OF MOTION
968* DAVID DAVIS — To move —
(1) notes that the Allan Labor Government published in the Victoria Government Gazette that the Minister for Planning had approved the following planning scheme
amendments —
(a) Amendment GC252 to the Bayside, Boroondara, Darebin, Frankston, Glen Eira, Hume, Kingston, Maroondah, Monash, Moonee Valley, Stonnington and Whittlesea
Planning Schemes on Friday, 11 April 2025 and tabled on Tuesday, 13 May 2025; 
(b) Amendment VC267 to the Victoria Planning Provisions on Thursday, 6 March 2025 and tabled on Tuesday, 18 March 2025;
(2) further notes that the time limited Select Committee on Victoria Planning Provisions amendments VC257, VC267 and VC274 tabled their report on Tuesday, 13 May 2025 and
sought a series of documents from the Government which have not been provided, including —
(a) the materials relied upon or provided to the Minister for Planning in making Planning Scheme amendments VC267, VC257, VC274 and GC252;
(b) documents supporting the declaration of the 50 activity centres plus ten large pilot activity centres, making a total of 60 centres declared by the Minister for Planning;
(c) a list of local council representatives who attended consultation with industry stakeholders and the Department of Transport and Planning (DTP) in the seven
workshops held by the technical reference group;
(d) the “extensive housing target modelling” for municipalities;
(e) documents linked with the Minister for Planning’s involvement, or not, in community engagement activities including the community reference groups which DTP led and
which the Victorian Planning Authority (VPA) was involved;
(f) membership of committees formed to provide Government advice in relation to development contribution schemes;
(g) modelling on housing affordability;
(h) whether the Minister for Planning chose the chairs and members of the community reference groups for the announced activity centres;
(i) modelling by the VPA;
(3) requires the Leader of the Government, in accordance with Standing Order 10.01, to table in the Council within three weeks of the House agreeing to this resolution —
(a) briefings and documents presented to or relied on by the Minister for Planning in the approval of planning scheme amendments GC252 and VC267; and
(b) all documents identified in the Select Committee’s transcripts from public hearings
and listed in paragraph (2).
[Notice given on 17 June 2025 — Listed for 1 day].