The Victorian government has announced the biggest overhaul of the state’s planning laws in a decade, in a bid to slash approval times to just 10 days for stand-alone homes while limiting rights of appeal to neighbours only.
The premier, Jacinta Allan, and the planning minister, Sonya Kilkenny, on Tuesday said amendments to the Planning and Environment Act 1987 would generate more than $900m in construction activity each year.
“Victoria’s planning laws were written decades and decades ago. It was a very different time,” Allan told reporters.
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“We need to not only bring our planning laws into the 21st century, we also need to overhaul them, to take them from being old-fashioned Nimby-type laws into a planning system that says ‘yes’, and gets homes and projects built more quickly.”
Under the proposed changes, three new planning streams would be created to reduce permit approval times 10 days for stand-alone houses and duplexes, 30 for townhouses and low-rise developments, and 60 for larger developments.
Allan said this would replace the existing “one-size-fits-all system”, where almost all projects go through the same planning process, regardless of their complexity.
She said a planning permit currently took an average of 140 days to be approved – and could blow out to more than 300 if there was an objection.
To limit objections, the amendments will scrap third-party appeal rights – which allow anyone to object to a planning permit – for homes, duplexes, townhouses and low-rise apartment streams.
For higher density apartments, only those who are directly affected – such as neighbours – would be able to appeal.
Kilkenny said Victoria currently had the “broadest” third-party appeal rights in the country, with the change to bring it “in line with all other states and territories”.
Allan said it was a “commonsense” change.
“People who live a long way from where the project is being built, the home is being built, shouldn’t have the opportunity to stop those projects,” she said.
The bill would also make it easier for councils and local government to update their planning rules, the government said.
Some changes are similar to those introduced in New South Wales in recent weeks, with the Victorian government also distributing a map detailing the current complicated approvals process.
The Property Council welcomed the Victorian bill, describing its introduction to parliament as an important development after “years of consultation and delay”.
“Streamlining assessment processes and aligning third-party appeal rights with other states will help reduce red tape, improve efficiency, and restore confidence in our planning framework,” the group’s executive director, Cath Evans, said.
“This all helps developers and builders put shovels in the ground more quickly and get Victorians into new homes more easily.”
Jonathan O’Brien from housing advocacy group Yimby Melbourne said the changes would “would rebalance the rights” of current and future residents.
“Historically, Victoria has had the most anti-housing planning act in terms of how much it empowers people who already own land or homes and disempowers those who are not lucky enough to already live in an area,” O’Brien said.
“The changes will make it easier to build homes in Victoria, which is fundamentally a good thing.”
However, the Municipal Association of Victoria, which represents the state’s 79 councils, said it had not been consulted.
“The bill aims for faster decisions and greater certainty, but the closed-shop approach to reform risks inefficiency and mistakes. Ultimately, it risks the erosion of public trust in planning decisions and in government,” the association’s president, Jennifer Anderson, said.
The Victorian bill will be introduced to parliament on Tuesday before going to a vote in the lower house by Thursday.
Allan and Kilkenny urged the Coalition to support the bill, noting their counterparts in NSW were supportive of planning reform.
“We know that there may be the temptation from the Liberal party to fall back to their Nimby-blocking approach,” Allan said. “Let’s cast that aside and support this legislation to get more homes built.”
