My adjournment is for the Minister for Planning, and the action I seek is for the minister to update me on our government’s efforts to reform Victoria’s planning system to make it easier for more homes to be built in the places where people want to live, work and raise their family, reducing growth pressure on outer suburban communities like ours in Melbourne’s west. As the minister knows, suburban communities like Melbourne’s west have for many years shouldered the brunt of housing development and population growth. Our government understands this, which is why many of our policies this term have been designed specifically to focus on growing our middle-ring suburbs. This is really important because we cannot solve the housing crisis by developing greenfield estate after greenfield estate on our suburban fringe in places like Wyndham. People want to live in these middle-ring suburbs in places which are close to public transport, close to trains and trams and closer to where they work – and even where many of their family and friends live too.

It is why we have created 50 activity centres in places that have this capacity: around train stations, around tram lines, particularly in Melbourne’s east, which my community will tell you have the lion’s share of infrastructure and services built up over many, many decades. But just last week the Leader of the Opposition and those opposite unveiled their housing policy. I cannot say I am all that surprised. They want to stop development in our middle-ring suburbs, and they want to scrap our activity centres. Most concerningly, they want to fast-track developments in the outer suburbs, in places like Wyndham. For folks in Wyndham, we know what that means. It means tens of thousands of more homes in communities like ours in Melbourne’s outer west, while their blue-ribbon suburbs block all new homes. It is the most NIMBY policy you could possibly think of. But let us not forget that it was their last planning minister, the member for Bulleen – the king of housing approvals, as he calls himself – who approved 11 greenfield developments in Wyndham at the 11th hour of their term, and he did not even think about the infrastructure we needed to accommodate this.

We know what this housing policy is about. It is no new homes for Kew, for Brighton, for Caulfield, but it is tens of thousands of new homes for Truganina, for Tarneit, for Werribee, for Wyndham Vale, for Point Cook, and it goes on and on. Unlike those opposite, we know that the outer burbs cannot do all the heavy lifting. It is not fair; it is not fair. Our government recognises that our middle-ring and inner suburbs have an equal role to play in the future of our city’s growth. So I welcome an update from the minister on how we are seeking to achieve exactly this.