Brisbane residents rally to fight development laws

Angry residents from across Brisbane have joined forces for the first time to fight planning laws they say are ruining the city.

Residents rally at Kangaroo Point on Saturday against undemocratic town planning laws. Picture: Ross Hanson

A large crowd of residents fed up with “undemocratic’’ planning laws and the relentless demolition of heritage buildings rallied yesterday for change.

About 200 people from community groups from Tennyson to Mt Gravatt, the CBD, Spring Hill, Kangaroo Point and Toowong joined the rally on Saturday to send a message to Council and the State Government.

They have also set up a Queensland Residents’ Group to share and co-ordinate resources.

Big turnout for rally to fight dodgy development.

Former town planner Phil Heywood told the rally that Council’s “relentless justification for population growth’’ was misguided.

“The overdevelopment being proposed in Kangaroo Point and in more than a dozen inner-city areas stems from a failure of the Council to add up the provisions it’s making in its many neighbourhood plans,’’ Dr Heywood said.

Rally participants look at the "wall of shame'' - controversial projects in recent years across Brisbane.

“It’s not comparing the total growths with the overall projected need.

“It adds up to more than double the state government’s best forecasts of population growth,” he said.

Howard Briggs, a retired planner involved in developing the SEQ 2020 regional plan, said there was a disconnect between neighbourhood plans and the building approval process.

He told the crowd that state planning legislation needed to be reformed to allow more appropriate involvement of the community in decisions that affected them.

“The system is incredibly complex and is designed to manage development rather than to plan for good neighbourhood outcomes,’’ Mr Briggs said.

“If you meet the rules you get a tick and your development can proceed, but it’s often a lot different to what people expect when they look at the neighbourhood plan.

“With every development proposal there are a lot of local and site issues that inter-relate, but it’s so complicated that ordinary residents only get involved when it’s too late to influence the outcome.

Cr Adams addresses the crowd about planning laws. Picture: Peter Hines

Planner of the Year Laurel Johnson said the rally showed that residents just wanted to make their neighbourhoods better and council should change its systems to embrace that.

“Communities have local expertise and local knowledge that needs to be valued in shaping their neighbourhoods and the city, but Brisbane City Council doesn’t have a system that allows an enduring relationship between the residents of this city in formulating the future.”

“The planning act sets out minimum requirements for consultation, not maximum.

“Brisbane could do what it wants and could consult with residents a lot more than it is doing now.

“Communities find it very frustrating because they want to go beyond those minimum requirements and they want to shape their neighbourhoods and their city for a bright future because they love it.”

The crowd shows their feelings about planning legislation and enforcement.

One of the organisers of the rally, Lori Sexton, said she was the size of the crowd — which was bigger than for the controversial Toondah Harbour project in Redlands — demonstrated the level of community concern.

She said it was disappointing Councillor Krista Adams told the gathering that Councils’ hands were tied by State Government planning laws.

One of the triggers for the May 8 rally, at Kangaroo Point, was last month’s deeply unpopular demolition of Tudor-style landmark Linden Lea, built by the founders of the Shingle Inn teahouse chain.

Freya Robertson and other neighbours in Toowong set up a Queensland Residents’ Group to help people across the state fight back.

Freya Robertson and Ann Kingston-Kerr outside Linden Lea just before it was demolished.

“We aim to get large, and when we do that we can’t be ignored,’’ Ms Robertson said.

“The Government is answerable to the people and their community.

“We’re deeply concerned about heritage and preserving what we have left in Brisbane.

“We want to concentrate on improving the planning process.’’

Kangaroo Point’s Lori Sexton, who has been fighting plans for three, 15-storey towers on a pocket of land in Lambert St, said the same frustrations about town planning failures came up over and over.

“We are seeing that what’s promised by neighbourhood plans is not being delivered in the development assessment phase because no-one in Council is looking at the big picture,’’ she said.

“No-one is working out what two or three, or even 10 or 20, really high-density developments in a neighbourhood mean for things like traffic flow or pedestrian safety or for green space.

“We’re not against high-density living, but we do want quality high density that delivers benefit to everyone who lives here (Kangaroo Point).

A three-tower highrise proposal at Lambert St has sparked street rallies and other protests.

East Brisbane resident Pat Moran, who has been fighting a proposal for a 7-Eleven service station in a flood zone on Stanley St, said one of the big issues was too many proposals were considered “code assessable’’ under the current planning scheme.

Residents cannot appeal code assessable developments in the planning court and developers do not even have to notify neighbouring property owners.

“High-impact developments should not be code assessable because that removes all say from residents, who are going to be most affected by things like air and light pollution and traffic safety,” he said.

Council bans units/townhouses in areas zoned for single homes

Mr Moran said the current performance-based assessment system was skewed too heavily in favour of developers.

“We see Council is willing to bend over backwards to accommodate the needs of the developer without considering what the community really needs.’’

Spring Hill resident Melissa Botha said the first she and her neighbours were aware of plans for two 15-storey buildings on a narrow street in their heritage precinct was when she was tipped off by a developer friend.

Paul van Deurfe, former nursery owner of Cottage Garden Nursery which is earmarked for a 7-11 service station. Picture: Jono Searle

And CBD resident Jean Bursle said people from across Brisbane were furious with the State Government about its Roma Street Parkland plans, which she said would allow one-third of the parkland to be developed for highrise.

She said residents could not fight effectively against a Priority Development Area declared over the site because what was proposed for PDAs at other Cross River Rail nodes had changed so much it was unclear what would happen.

Tennyson resident Nancy Liyou said, all too often, builders and developers used legal loopholes and insider knowledge of complex planning legislation to get around the rules.

“We’re meant to be in a two-storey low-density zone, but a builder has built a three-storey house (nearby) and called the third storey a plant room,” she said.

Dr Liyou said there was not enough transparency around decisions, particularly when they went into mediation with the Council through the Planning & Environment Court.

Elizabeth Handley, from Brisbane Residents United, who has been campaigning against poor planning for decades under both Labor and LNP Council administrations, said the problem was Brisbane-wide.

“It’s not just an inner-city problem. Code assessable development means you have no control over what the person next door does,’’ she said.

“When relaxations are granted on development conditions there is no process for giving the neighbours or the wider community any sort of input and you have no legal redress.’’

Ms Handley said planners needed to take lessons from the Covid pandemic.

“The Covid lockdowns have shown us that green space is as necessary a part of infrastructure as roads for the continued health of our population, but this is not being considered as part of the big picture of planning,’’ she said.

“Council is happy to do the high density but they’re not happy to provide the infrastructure that means that it works.”

“People have had enough and Council and the State Government need to sit up and take notice.’’