The Victorian Government is ensuring Victoria has the sand, stone and gravel it needs build to build our homes, roads, rail lines, schools and hospitals.
In a joint statement released 16 August 2018, Victorian Minister for Resources Tim Pallas and Victorian Minister for Planning Richard Wynne mapped out a better approach to securing supply for affordable housing and lower-cost infrastructure.
In the year to March 2018, the value of Victoria’s engineering construction activity was $14.7 billion – up 48.7 per cent from 2017 to the highest value on record – driven by the Victorian Government’s record infrastructure pipeline.
To support this building boom, the Victorian Government released the Extractive Resources Strategy Helping Victoria Grow in June 2018, which sets out a new approach to secure access to critical materials.
The Joint Statement provides clear lines of authority through the planning process and identifies a ‘hot list’ of sites for priority planning consideration to address pressing supply constraints for the construction industry. The hot list is expected to halve current approval times from 18 to nine months.
The eleven quarries on the initial list are expected to supply around 160 million tonnes of materials over their lifetime. Victoria’s annual demand for materials is expected to grow from around 60 million tonnes to more than 100 million tonnes by 2050.
To help meet the growing demand of Greater Melbourne and the western Gippsland region, the Victorian Government is prioritising geoscience and land inventory work to support the protection of a strategic sand resources in South Gippsland Shire.
An ‘agent of change’ principle will be applied to existing quarries to avoid encroachment on buffer space and planning rules will be amended to provide greater flexibility for quarries to quickly respond to market conditions.
The Joint Statement strengthens local input to the lifecycle of quarries before, during and after they operate, including the rehabilitation of former quarries into lasting community assets like the Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne, Newport Lakes Reserve in Newport and Valley Lake in Niddrie – which are on former quarry land.
Source: Victorian Government