GREEN WEDGES COALITION – A vision for Melbourne

A Charter to save the Green Wedges

History and Purpose

The green wedges are a community asset of incalculable value to the people of Greater Melbourne. The Victorian Government has the prime responsibility for protecting them on our behalf.

The 1968-71 Melbourne metropolitan planning process officially established nine green wedges as non-urban zones for open space or parkland between Melbourne’s main transport corridors. It outlined acceptable non-urban uses, including recreation, landscape protection, resource utilization, farming, flora and fauna and conservation.

The green wedges were to be Melbourne’s breathing spaces: for the leisure, recreation and enjoyment of residents of the inner city as well as those who live in bush surroundings; for future as well as present generations. They were designed to separate the urban development along the transport corridors, to protect the catchments of our creeks and rivers and to link the city with the country, and with a more distant green belt of state forests and national parks.

The green wedges include the lands of the Wurundjeri, Bunurung and Wathurong traditional owners. Within their boundaries, substantial areas of environmentally significant indigenous grasslands, forests, remnant vegetation and wildlife habitat corridors have been protected. Within their boundaries, some of the most fertile land in the state has been conserved for agricultural purposes. Close to the city, market gardens are more sustainable, requiring less irrigation and lowering transport costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

This vision for Melbourne, handed down by our parents’ generation, has helped make ours into one of the most livable cities in the world. At a time of unrivalled prosperity, rising community awareness and appreciation of the value of green city spaces to our personal wellbeing, we regard maintaining the green wedges for future generations as a yardstick for our generation’s commitment to developing a sustainable city in a sustainable world.

Yet Melbourne’s green wedges are on the brink of destruction. While development has spread out along the transport corridors, there has been increasing pressure on municipal councils to allow development of the green wedges for urban, residential and industrial uses. At least one green wedge is about to be cut in two by residential subdivision: some are at risk of appropriation as transport corridors. Rates on green wedge farmers and conservationist landholders are becoming prohibitive as market valuations increasingly reflect their development potential and as speculators buy in and close down farms and other non-urban enterprises.

Current Policy

The Bracks Government was elected in 1999 on a pledge to preserve the green wedges, along with the rest of the City’s parks and open spaces. Labor’s Greener Cities policy criticised the Kennett Liberal Government for initiating ``an unprecedented assault on Melbourne’s green spaces that have been protected from subdivision since 1970. Green belts, the Dandenong Ranges and the Mornington Peninsula are all being carved up.’’

With the devolution of planning powers to local government, the erosion of Melbourne’s parks, open spaces and green wedges has continued. Labor promised to give ``local municipalities greater power to protect the heritage and amenity of local communities’’, but some Councils do not exercise this power to protect residents’ wishes and interests in maintaining green wedges. Instead they facilitate developers’ proposals to alienate our green wedges.

Before the election, Labor promised to ``put the protection and enhancement of the natural and urban environment at the forefront of planning decision-making’’ and to control ``the carve up of agricultural land areas near Melbourne.’’ And to ``introduce effective legislation to control the ad hoc subdivision and inappropriate development of Melbourne’s green belts….’’ But with the devolution of planning powers to local government, the erosion of Melbourne’s parks, open spaces and green wedges has continued.

The Government has promised that the long-awaited Metropolitan Strategy will clearly define and reinforce the green wedges, but despite the participation of many environmental and community groups in the 2000-1 consultations, the promised November 2001 release date for the draft strategy has been repeatedly delayed. In the meantime, development applications have continued, subverting Labor’s well-designed election planning and environment policies and undermining the Strategy process.

We are concerned at the number of development and rezoning applications being put to and through our municipal councils during the development of the Metropolitan Strategy. Melbourne’s green wedges and fringe areas of special significance are under more and greater threat than ever before. This threat has brought together environment and community groups from Melbourne’s nine green wedges and from the Mornington Peninsula and Upper Yarra and Dandenong Ranges, some of which have separately taken part in the Metropolitan Strategy consultation process, to draw up this charter for the protection of the green wedges.

We note the need for vision and for policy coordination to protect the green wedges across transport, roads, housing, population policy and local government as well as planning and the environment. Uncoordinated infrastructure and road-building policies put development pressures on the green wedges which are difficult for local governments to resist.

In the light of Labor’s promises to assess the environmental impact of all cabinet submissions, we ask the Government to consider the impact of State and municipal infrastructure projects on the integrity and purpose of the green wedges. We strongly support these policies and we call on the State Government to provide permanent protection for Melbourne’s green wedges and areas of special significance.

We call on our Government to incorporate into the Metropolitan Strategy a broader vision for the people of Melbourne, for a city with green open spaces, so we do not end up with wall-to-wall urban sprawl. And so we call on Government to:

• prepare legislation to protect the non-urban zones in Melbourne’s green wedges and environmentally important fringe areas;
• put a halt to the rezoning of green wedge land until the legislation is adopted;
• define and legislate boundaries to include all of what is left of the Melbourne’s green wedges and to link them with an outer ring or green belt of national parks and rural areas.
• resist further rezoning of non-urban green wedge land for residential or industrial subdivisions or for the reduction of allotment sizes in rural and rural living zones;
• coordinate policy to protect the green wedges across transport, roads, housing, population policy, agriculture and local government portfolios as well as planning and environment;
• reform rural subsidy and rating policies so that green wedge councils receive pro rata rural subsidies to be passed on as rate rebates to protect green wedge landholders from excessive rates and to compensate them for conservation costs.
• review the impact of all State and municipal infrastructure projects on the integrity and purpose of the green wedges, consider alternatives before such projects can proceed and to refrain where impacts would be adverse.
• introduce a new `green wedge – rural’ zoning to protect against accepted rural uses such as service stations and other commercial or industrial enterprises.
• continue the principle of green wedge protection by developing linear parks along watercourses, and preserving and extending adjacent wetlands, all the way to the sea.
• encourage better transport planning based on European models for improving public transport and existing road systems, instead of freeways which attract new residential and industrial development to the green wedges.
• review the performance of current infrastructure and planning authorities.

We believe these actions are the only way to halt the development pressures on the city’s remaining green wedges.

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