Green Wedges Coalition

The Green Wedges Coalition welcomed the Labor Government’s 2018 election pledge to tighten controls to better protect Melbourne’s Green Wedges and peri-urban farmland. It was a popular pledge: every community consultation since the 2002 Melbourne 2030 strategy has found overwhelming support for protecting the Green Wedges for their environment and biodiversity, agriculture, open space and scenic rural landscapes.

We are pleased we now have a Minister in Sonya Kilkenny who wants to fulfil her predecessor’s promise to ‘protect Melbourne’s Green Wedges from urban and inappropriate uses’ and to  ‘permanently tighten controls to better protect Melbourne’s green wedges against over development.’    We welcome the controls the Action Plan plans to tighten and the extension of Green-Wedge-style protections for agricultural land in the peri-urban areas within 100k of the CBD.

But there seem to be no actions in this plan to effectively achieve these reforms.  We are concerned that the Action Plan fails to address the perennial problem of urban uses encroaching into the Green Wedges. 

BATTLING ON:  BROKEN PROMISES AND DASHED HOPES FROM STATE GOVERNMENT;  OPPOSITION PICKS UP THE BATON AND PLEDGES TO SAVE THE CHAIN OF PARKS. 

Last year we were enthusiastically waiting to see how the Planning Minister planned to fulfil his promise to improve Planning for Melbourne’s Green Wedges and Agricultural Land, a project that was supposed to implement the State Government's 2018 election promises.  We had been encouraged by the government's commitments to “tighten controls to better protect Melbourne’s Green Wedges from over-development,” to improve protection for agricultural land, and to “protect the environment, landscape, agriculture, and rural industry of each area, and put a cap on the size of developments.”