The Property Council of Australia has today launched Unlocking Growth Corridors - delivering homes, creating jobs, a new policy paper that addresses the land development sector's greatest challenges in delivering new homes and employment hubs.
The report headlines nine key policy recommendations, comprehensively focusing on all areas of the Precinct Structure Plan (PSP) process, the framework currently used to prepare land for development in Victoria.
The Property Council's recommendations include:
- enabling developers to directly deliver more key infrastructure rather than waiting for government-led delivery,
- significantly simplifying the number of technical studies required during a PSP process,
- creating more powers to speed up the delivery of key enabling infrastructure, like retarding basins to manage stormwater effectively; and
- introducing a 'captain's call' when referral authorities are failing to respond or have conflicting views.
Property Council Victorian Deputy Executive Director Andrew Lowcock said reform was desperately needed to better service the housing and employment needs of a growing Victoria.
"Unlocking land in Victoria has become too complex and too costly," Mr Lowcock said.
"Accelerating the delivery of our growth corridors will be essential for keeping new homes affordable, creating high value jobs and preserving Melbourne's hard-won liveability.
"The industry is reporting that the PSP process has become almost impossible to navigate. New requirements continue to be piled on, increasing upfront costs that flow into the price of a new home.
"This also directly impacts the release of new industrial land, where our advanced manufacturing, e-commerce and data centres are built to keep our economy strong.
"The Property Council's nine recommendations go to the heart of simplifying PSPs, so developers can get the permits they need to put a shovel in the ground and deliver.
"This includes addressing how the industry's capacity and innovation can be harnessed to build and open community infrastructure themselves, recognising the current constraints on government to do this at scale.
"We also need to resolve the increasing bottlenecks that occur when agencies and authorities don't play their part. It only takes one link in the chain to break for long delays to be incurred.
"We're pleased that both the Government and Opposition have recognised the need for reform that unlocks land more efficiently. We strongly believe that our recommendations will reduce the current PSP timeframes by more than half," said Mr Lowcock.
The Property Council's Unlocking Growth Corridors paper can be found on our website at https://www.propertycouncil.com.au/submissions/unlocking-growth-corridors-submission.
