“Staggeringly different”: council advises against proposal for Docklands “utopia”

City of Melbourne councillors say that a new proposal for a Harbour Esplanade site was significantly at variance to the original development plan, and that it failed to meet community needs.

The proposal to re-envision the site at 208-226 Harbour Esplanade was submitted by developer Gurner Group and development consortium City Harbour. 

The planning proposal was referred to the council on behalf of the Minister for Planning at an August 20 Future Melbourne Committee (FMC) meeting.

The proposal includes the construction of three predominantly residential buildings, two public parks, retail spaces, connecting roads and the inclusion of additional land.

This is a significant departure from the plans originally approved for the site in 2021, which involved a single mixed-use office and retail building.

The new plans propose a building height range of 61.1 metres to 99.15 metres, compared to the previously approved maximum height of 83 metres.

Additionally, the new proposal covers 27,000 square metres, whereas an 18,000sqm car park was originally approved for development.

The council’s planning chair Cr Rohan Leppert said that he strongly disagreed with the applicant that the new proposal was generally in line with the approved development plan.

“The use is very substantially different. The building envelopes, especially the heights, are very substantially different, and the entire layout of the precinct is substantially different as well,” Cr Leppert said at the FMC meeting.

The only responsible thing we can do is to just point out how staggeringly different the proposal is compared to what was expected.

Cr Leppert said the development plan either should have been amended so that the proposal could be more fairly assessed against it, or the benefits of the new proposal should have gone above and beyond what was anticipated.

He said that since neither of these conditions had been satisfied, the council should advise the Minister for Planning not to approve the plans in their current state.

Lord Mayor Nick Reece agreed that although the site had “been a dust bowl for too long,” and that he appreciated the proposal’s “generous” allocation of green space, he could not support the application without amendments.

“All up, I do think this report provides a pathway to ‘yes’. And I do hope that the applicant will look closely at the recommendations and the suggested changes that are required here,” he said.

Cr Jamal Hakim expressed his disappointment that the application that it “just frankly doesn’t stand up to the pub test.”

“We need to make sure that we are delivering applications that recognise our community needs, that recognise the controls, that deliver on the basics,” Cr Hakim said.

Council voted unanimously to advise the Department of Transport and Planning that it did not support the plans as they stood due to the issues outlined in the delegate report.

The report’s recommendations include the addition of affordable housing, the redesign of some apartments to correct poor layouts and dimensions, and inclusion of a school.

“We know that Docklands desperately needs more educational facilities,” Cr Reece said.

“The truth is when Docklands was first developed close to 30 years ago, there wasn’t a proper provisioning for things like schools, health services, child and maternal health services, so we’ve had the really difficult job of trying to retrofit these things in over the decades, and it hasn’t been easy.”

This proposal is the first stage of a major $1.7 billion proposal which was announced by Gurner Group founder and executive chairman Tim Gurner in March this year.

In March, Mr Gurner told Docklands News that the project, named “Elysium Fields”, would aim to “completely transform and revitalise the Docklands, re-energising it with public gardens, greenery and an unprecedented connection to health and wellness,” calling it a “utopian community”.

Mr Gurner said that residents would, “access the world’s best reverse ageing and health treatments while breathing in filtered air and drinking filtered water.”

Stage one of the project has an estimated cost of $350 million. •