Wagga housing roundtable tackles planning and approvals with minister

NSW Planning Minister Paul Scully told a forum in Wagga Wagga that the city was at the forefront of efforts to address the current housing crisis across the state.

At a housing roundtable with Member for Wagga Wagga Dr Joe McGirr and local stakeholders, Mr Scully said the NSW Government was well aware of the squeeze in the regions.

“The housing crisis is no longer a Sydney-based challenge. It’s a New South Wales-based challenge,” he said.

“Previously, housing targets had just been set for the Sydney local government areas. Now we’ve extended those targets as we pursue our overall target for NSW.”

He said the government was working with Wagga Wagga City Council (WWCC) to provide infrastructure and to address delays in the planning and approvals process.

“It’s all about making sure that we’re doing and pulling every possible lever at a state government level and working in conjunction with local councils in terms of how we can improve the system generally,” he said.

Wagga was recently awarded $70.8 million through the latest round of the Accelerated Infrastructure Fund to begin three projects to fast-track the delivery of new homes plus a $170,000 grant to trial artificial intelligence as part of the planning system.

“There’s currently some huge investments taking place in Wagga and surrounds which are going to generate the need for additional housing,” Mr Scully said.

“Whether that’s the employment that’s generated out of the Special Activation Precinct, whether that’s the work that’s going to happen in the defence sector, whether that’s the work that happens in energy or whether that’s simply the growth of the health and care economy in and around Wagga.”

Dr Joe McGirr said it was important for the planning minister to hear from local stakeholders at the coalface.

“We are in a phase of fantastic growth in Wagga, but it is putting enormous pressure on housing; general housing and social and affordable housing,” he said.

“As the general manager [Peter Thompson] said this morning – when you’re in a crisis, you can’t just keep going on business as usual. You’ve got to come up with new solutions. You’ve got to think of new ways of doing things.”

Dr McGirr pointed to the streamlined planning process that has been rolled out in Wagga’s industrial Special Activation Precinct as an example of a potential solution.

“When a developer wants to come to a Special Activation Precinct they’ve got a two- to four-week approval process,” he explained.

“Now why shouldn’t we be looking at a similar model with regard to housing so that the environmental constraints, the transport, the electricity is all set up?”

Wagga City Council recently received a federal government grant to explore options for secondary housing and Mr Scully said planning reforms would include more choices in the types of housing available.

Earlier this week, the NSW Government announced a trial of modular social housing in Wollongong and Lake Macquarie and on Wednesday (24 July), Dr McGirr and Mr Scully paid a visit to Wagga’s Prefabulous construction site at Bomen.

The minister said he hoped the regulatory changes the government was trialling could open the door for the delivery of more prefabricated homes.

“We’ve used modern methods of offsite construction for delivery of a range of things from police stations to schools in the past, so it’s something we should be open to in the delivery of houses,” he said.

“We estimate that it can cut up to 20 per cent off the time it takes to deliver a new home,” he said.

“You also open the opportunity to get more people into the production of those panels, or however it might be done.”

Dr McGirr said he was pleased to see the government thinking outside the box and said getting the planning process right was a crucial foundation.

“The housing situation is critical at the end of the day; for our key workers, for our community to grow, for our projects to succeed, we need to have the houses,” he said.

“It’s a fundamental part of our rights as humans to have a safe and secure place in which to live.”