Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, I rise to speak on the University of Tasmania Protection of Land Bill 2024. I will start by saying that this bill, through the amendments proposed, has gone from being a unique but effective check and balance on the disposal of surplus land, in essence public land, that could have helped settle significant public disquiet and provide a pathway to resolution of legitimate community concerns over the liquidation of the UTAS Sandy Bay site, to an escalation of anger over university decisions via a perversion of the planning process, with no community consultation, no social and environmental assessment and clearly no community consensus. That is a shame.
The Liberals, via a complete about-face on the policy intent of their election campaign announcement, have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and condemned the university to another era of mistrust, community concern and lost social licence. It did not need to be this way. It is my real fear that UTAS cannot sustain it. Just 28 days ago when UTAS announced a very welcome plan for a future direction that included STEM at Sandy Bay, it was clear. They said:
To achieve this plan, the next major steps of the university are to secure funding from the Tasmanian and Australian governments to develop new STEM facilities at Sandy Bay.
What was the response to the request for funding, minister? I take it, given where we are today, that nothing was forthcoming from your government. On summing up, can you confirm if the Tasmanian government is making a financial commitment to this UTAS STEM investment?
The same day UTAS announced its reset, the public response from the government in a statement from minister Ogilvie was:
We intend to strongly advocate to the Commonwealth to invest in Tasmania’s STEM-led future. What message does it send to Tasmanians if the Commonwealth is unwilling to invest in this vital sector?
Minister, what message does it said send to Tasmanians if your government is unwilling to invest in this vital sector?
The federal government is the lifeline for a UTAS STEM redevelopment, but as is normal, it would require a co-contribution from the state, but this state government will not stump up a red cent and, seemingly, not even offer a guarantee.
While the Liberal government can find hundreds of millions of dollars to plan a stadium that Tasmanians neither need or want, spend $37 million a year on the racing industry, fork out $15 million for a ship loader for woodchip exports at Bell Bay, and pork-barrel election promises like $12 million for the world’s tallest chocolate fountain, they will shirk responsibility to make a contribution to build cutting-edge STEM facilities that will invest in our children’s education and underpin our state’s future while saving the core of the Sandy Bay campus as promised.
Through this debate today and the amendments forthcoming, the Liberal government demonstrates it is more willing to breach trust with Tasmanian voters, tear up its election commitment and pervert proper planning process to support a land sell-off than it is to find public funding to underpin infrastructure for tertiary public education. In the absence of leadership and investment from the state government, the solution for the university is to seek fast-tracked rezoning of land to increase its value and enable an institutional pledge of co‑contribution with the federal government, a pledge to go with the prayers and pleas that the feds will actually come to the party.
To be clear, process is perverted, communities sidelined and UTAS is pushed into a fire sale situation because the Liberals cannot or will not invest in tertiary education infrastructure. Government priorities are skewed. Stadium, wood chippers, greyhounds and a chocolate fountain amongst other things all before STEM facilities at Sandy Bay, which gets nothing. This, it seems, is how we have got here.
I acknowledge the community, staff, ex-staff and student campaign that over years has raised the issue of the campus sale and redevelopment and forced a situation where in an election context the government of the day felt compelled to act, as has UTAS. This is no small feat. It takes coordination, compulsion and commitment to take on an institution and the power and privilege that comes with incumbency and access to all the levers of money, decision-making and autonomy.
I acknowledge Save UTAS and the plethora of independent expert voices adding their opinion. Some with vested political and other interests, including people in this place, will malign the motivation, analysis or strategy of these people and seek to drag them down with pejorative names and insults. In reality, that language demeans you, not them. While each individual may have a myriad of motivating factors, collectively they have been pushing for greater transparency and accountability in UTAS decision-making and a rethink of the move into the city, planned to be funded by the intensive redevelopment of virtually the entire Sandy Bay campus, the lower sports fields being the exception.
Today those people will feel profoundly let down by the political process and the reversal of an election position that would have offered a vehicle to mitigate the disenfranchisement that comes with unilateral institutional decision making, to a now likely outcome where the normal planning process is sidestepped and the institution gets what it wants after all, with no direct public engagement in the decision and no community recourse to do anything about it.
They should at least feel satisfied that in the face of the power imbalance and a UTAS decision made more than a decade ago, the full liquidation of the Sandy Bay campus has been stopped and a commitment extracted from UTAS to remain on a campus that, I am quite sure, the equivalent of which any other university in the country would love to call home. This commitment is welcome, and those voices calling for UTAS to anchor back to the Sandy Bay campus should be congratulated.
Despite the disappointment of this debate, the amendments that will pass, and the sidelining of genuine community concerns about issues that will affect their lives for decades to come, those who campaigned to preserve the campus in Sandy Bay should feel some satisfaction in the fact that they have helped turn the ship around and extracted an announcement that at least some UTAS faculties will remain at Sandy Bay. It is likely cold comfort and today will only serve to deepen distrust and stoke scepticism, but take what positives you can and commit to continue to call for transparency, common sense and a guarantee to consult with the community within which one operates.
With over 74 per cent of respondents in the 2022 electoral poll opposing the move into the city, that move was untenable. While the university is statewide and students come from further afield, the view of people in whose community you operate and seek to continue to operate can only be ignored at your peril.
As Tasmania’s only university, we simply cannot afford UTAS to fail. In the many conversations I have had with stakeholders across the spectrum on the issue of the campus and the effect of this bill, I have been keen to stress two things. One: put aside how we got here, the baggage of the past, and the processes and decisions that have set this train in motion and headed it well off the tracks. Do not dwell on the mistrust but look for the positives, and back in a new direction as a way to lock it in and give it the best chance of coming to fruition.
Two: ignore the wider reforms still ahead. The work of the Legislative Council inquiry into the UTAS Act will report and recommend actions that relate to the constitution, functions and powers of the university, its council and academic senate. The inquiry is investigating the accountability of executive, fiscal and academic decision-making, and how the act protects and promotes academic freedom, independence and autonomy. These are big deliberations fundamental to an institution – the sole institution setting the standards for tertiary education in the state.
No one can deny the landscape in which universities have operated has profoundly changed over recent decades. Students with ever-growing HECS debts, the digital revolution, the international student bonanza, COVID, migration policy, and the consistent underfunding of the sector have created challenges few other businesses have had to navigate. Universities have been forced to act as businesses, not just educational institutions, and that is a shame.
Many of us will disagree on this bill, but all of us will agree that Tasmania cannot afford to have its only university distracted and distrusted. We need the university to get back to the business of academic excellence – of research, teaching, and graduating students equipped for the future and ready to make a contribution to Tasmania and to the world.
We look forward to the work of the Legislative Council and understanding its view on the reforms needed to guide improvements in accountability, decision-making, and the university’s core business of tertiary education. When it comes, we Greens will work to do our bit to deliver the reforms needed to rebuild trust and the institution’s place in our community and the world. Until then, we are dealing with the land, the campus, this bill and the Liberals’ amendments.
We acknowledge that the entire UTAS Sandy Bay landholding has land surplus to the university’s needs. However, jumping from this recognition to the conclusion that the parliament can today carve up the site and apply unilateral rezoning, with no social or environmental assessment, no sense of the sewage, road and other infrastructure capacity, and no community process, is a travesty of a proper process and treats local community with contempt. The Liberals are making a habit out of abandoning longstanding process to deliver special planning favours, aided and abetted by Labor.
Last week, we had the parliamentary approval – contrary to the finding of the Planning Commission – of a private commercial development at Devonport. Responding to a newspaper advertisement, the Liberals suspended Standing Orders to ram through development approval, with the support of Labor. Soon followed the development assessment panels, rejected in consultation, unanimously opposed by local government, and promoted only with shallow rhetoric and name-calling of anyone who raised legitimate concerns. The crossbench stood united against the bill.
In its latest discussion paper and engagement report, published in April this year, the Hobart City Council and its Mount Nelson and Sandy Bay neighbourhood planning process has explicitly responded to the UTAS campus issue, stating:
In developing the draft plan, council will review the feedback received from community and consider a scenarios-based planning response which will contribute to the sustainable growth and development of the city. This role involves balancing a range of social, economic and environmental objectives. The Hobart City Council has been doing this replanning work. The council will review the feedback.
There is still work to be done to land an approach that considers a holistic suite of interests and concerns, and comes to a well thought-through landing that can meet the needs of all. That is why we have neighbourhood planning and well-established statutory rezoning process.
Minister, a question for you in summing up is: what scenarios-based planning response have you undertaken, and how do you address the need for planning decisions like rezoning to balance the wide range of social, economic and environmental objectives, as was underway with the neighbourhood planning process? What analysis underpins the boundaries selected for the rezoning to inner residential? As the campus is bounded on the Mount Nelson side by low density residential, how was the decision made to apply the inner residential zone – the highest density of all the residential zoning categories? What analysis of social, economic and environmental objectives has been undertaken?
Yesterday, I received correspondence from UTAS that purports to pass off the zoning elements of this bill and the university council’s decision to pursue it, as ‘supported by the City of Hobart’s planning directions’. I do not think this quite stacks up. The City of Hobart is partway through a statutory process to plan for the neighbourhood and recommend the planning changes needed to deliver on that plan. More work is to be done, more consultation is needed and it is fair to say that the issue of the campus redevelopment has attracted the greatest level of interest and the greatest level of concern. This mirrors the elector poll and it cannot be ignored.
While the parliamentary rezone might seem like a victory for UTAS, turning adversity into opportunity and converting a government’s commitment to constrain into a lifting of the lid to allow development down to 200 square metres, I fear it is a pyrrhic victory. No one ‑ university, government or developer – can successfully operate in an environment where community is sidelined and real concerns remain. This rezone is overreach.
Of course we support housing, particularly innovative housing design options that are planned well. We always have and we always will. But no matter where housing is proposed, be it in Sandy Bay, in Bridgewater, in Campbell Town or in Smithton, it must be done right. It must be well planned, it has to be assessed, services must be able to cope, and community must be involved.
This development is not 2000 homes as Labor waxes on about. Earlier UTAS planning using the maximum density limits proposed just over 1000 units and townhouses on the sites proposed. We will not be lectured on housing by Labor. When you step up and deliver on your commitments to rein in short stay, you can have a crack. When you move to control rents and no‑cause evictions and push for minimum standards, I will take your criticisms. Until then, they cast no shade.
No matter how you put it, there is no justification for a fast‑track rezone process that cuts out the community and delivers for everything a developer has been looking for. Commitments to deliver a UTAS deed of undertaking, capturing pledges to provide all proceeds for STEM, ensuring key worker accommodation and possibly – it seems, depending on Homes Tasmania ‑ social and affordable housing and supported living sounds good in theory, but we do not have that deed before us.
While I accept at face value the UTAS intention to deliver a deed, it is surrounded by uncertainty. When will it be finalised? Perhaps the minister can indicate the proposed approach of Homes Tasmania to the forthcoming development opportunities and how she thinks they would be reflected in a deed. What are you pushing for in that space, minister?
Concerns have been raised with me about the important STEM facilities located above Churchill Avenue to the south‑east of College Road. Here stand the Life Sciences Building, the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture glasshouses, the seismic vault and several buildings currently occupied by third parties with no intention or ability to move.
It is my understanding that CSIRO and teammate Herbarium were deliberately co‑located with UTAS to allow research interactions to be fostered in the state. While I note this week’s correspondence from Professor Black that said that the CSIRO and TMAG tenancies would be retained, I struggle to see how they coexist within an inner residential, as opposed to a scientific and educational, landscape.
While I can accept at face value a UTAS commitment to ensure no facility is abandoned until suitable replacements are made, I question several things. What of the equipment that cannot or should not be moved, and the recent investments in facilities like the biological sciences glasshouses and the molecular biology facilities? What if, in the decades to come, UTAS realises a need to expand its STEM capacity? Having its own cleared land ready to go gives options unavailable if sold off now. Lastly, what of the third‑party facilities? What are the implications of having research and other facilities now located in an inner residential zone?
I can assume they will be approved as an existing non-compliant use, but what if they need to intensify their operations? What flexibility is there in the inner residential zone to accommodate a building expansion or other change deemed an intensification of use in the CSIRO or TMAG buildings. These are all questions that I am sure there are no clear answers for today. If there are, I invite the minister to articulate them in summing up.
This sentiment is echoed by the National Tertiary Education Union who, amongst other things, raised strategic concerns about the potential loss of STEM facilities, the loss of integral educational facilities and a ‘hollowed out’ Sandy Bay site. In correspondence received two days ago, division secretary Dr Ruth Barton wrote:
To express our deep concerns regarding the proposed rezoning of the land above Churchill Avenue without proper public consultation.
In addition to strategic concerns, Dr Barton also raises a list of issues including:
- Broken election promise and democratic process;
- UTAS educational mission being compromised;
- UTAS’s poor record of planning;
- Housing market context; and
- Consultation and transparency issue
She concludes by stating:
We strongly urge that the rezoning process be conducted through proper planning channels with genuine community consultation, not dealt with solely by way of legislative change. The educational importance of the site and the government’s pre‑election commitments must be honoured to ensure transparency, accountability and the best outcomes for our staff, students and community. [TBC]
We Greens support this sentiment.
I am determined to give credit where credit is due, irrespective of our overall view on this bill when amended and the fact that we will vote against it because of the embedded injustice of the parliamentary rezoning. As I have said publicly and will put on the record here, the commitment of UTAS to retain the central campus for STEM facilities is welcome. I acknowledge that changing institutional direction and remaking longstanding decisions can be difficult and takes the effort of individuals working both internally and externally. I acknowledge that effort. We believe the decision to anchor back to Sandy Bay for STEM is the right and only tenable decision for UTAS. I know, through conversations with TUSA, that students are excited and embrace the opportunity to have a genuine involvement in the co‑design of the facilities to be proposed. I call on UTAS to ensure this excitement is harnessed and students are involved in the early stages of co‑design.
In his correspondence to us as members received this week, UTAS Vice Chancellor Rufus Black reiterated the public commitment to STEM facilities at Sandy Bay, including the complete retrofit of some existing buildings and the construction of some new facilities. We strongly support this decision and will get behind the university and its pitch for federal funding. I acknowledge and understand the scepticism of some in the community. Trust is long broken, but I will bank the UTAS commitment as a significant step and going forward, outside of this amended bill, I will commit to doing everything I can to make it happen.
I flag here my own amendment to the bill as tabled. Setting a 99-year threshold for parliamentary scrutiny of any leasing arrangements is inadequate. Ninety‑nine years is longer than life. In anyone’s language, 99 years may as well be a sale and in commercial terms it is one. Community are underwhelmed by the 99-year loophole and afraid for the central campus, given part of the past funding model for UTAS for the original redevelopment was via a very long‑term lease for redevelopment.
To adopt more normal commercial terms when it comes to a leasehold threshold, 30 years is more appropriate. This gives ample flexibility for commercial arrangements for the kind of third-party leaseholds a university campus would usually entertain, including hospitality and other staff or student services, and business and research partnerships. Should it be necessary, a viable, well-costed and articulated leasehold of over 30 years could be presented to the parliament for approval. If well articulated, one would expect it to be positively received.
Also welcome is the university’s commitment to land justice. The university is located on the unceded lands of the muwinina, a nation who did not survive colonisation and whose rights, hopes and aspirations live on through today’s palawa community. I take this opportunity to acknowledge elders past and the Aboriginal community of today. Five years ago next week, UTAS took the profound and very welcome step of apologising for its role in wrongdoings towards Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Delivered in English and palawa kani, the language of the Aboriginal people, the University of Tasmania’s apology acknowledged the deep wrongs committed against the palawa people in its name and unreservedly apologised for them. It recognised that the university had been built on the proceeds of war and dispossession.
Words can be hollow and we have seen in this place a shameful political promise to make things better while actively making it worse: promising a reset in the relationship with Aboriginal people while bulldozing on with four‑wheel drive tracks on remote cultural landscape, tabling a review report acknowledging Aboriginal heritage protection laws do not work, then letting three and a half years pass with no legislative action to fix them. Meanwhile, major developments on cultural landscapes are supported along the way. The kunanyi cable car and Robbins Island development are cases in point.
In his correspondence to us this week, Professor Black stated the intention to return land to its rightful owners and take tangible action to give real meaning to the sentiment of its apology. I quote:
In addition, we have commenced discussions with the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania about a handback of the bushland above the parcels identified for rezoning in this legislation, which has always been intended for protection given its environmental values, in recognition that this land was never ceded.
We are committed to working with the ALCT towards a memorandum of understanding to govern the work required to facilitate this handback.
This is ground‑breaking action that gives me some hope that the uni will lead other institutions and the Tasmanian Government to return land to Aboriginal ownership. It has been 20 years since public land was returned to Aboriginal people. This government has ignored opportunities to deliver. It has rejected formal land claims from Land Council, the statutory body established to receive returned public land on behalf of palawa people.
While private landowners like Jane and Tom Teniswood at Little Swanport, and the Tasmanian Land Conservancy have stepped up where government will not, it is so refreshing to see a public institution respond to the formal claim for the return of land. First put as a formal land claim in 2021, the Aboriginal Land Council has patiently waited for a positive response from UTAS. To see it reflected in the formal correspondence to members of this parliament is welcome indeed.
Land justice on this site not only presents opportunities for Aboriginal people to engage in land management interpretation, it gives the chance for local people to engage with Aboriginal land, and for the logical, educational, and cultural cross‑pollination with the work of the university. I look forward to the MOU and to adding the Greens’ support to the consultation process articulated by Professor Black.
I also welcome the retention of the sports fields at Olinda Grove for ongoing community use. These were originally proposed for redevelopment, including for tourism. While bushfire and other issues seem to have scotched the development plans, the fact that these facilities will remain available for community use is a positive development.
To recap, while I pull out some positives to finish up on, the Greens will not support the amendments of the bill. The proposed amendments will serve to reinforce distrust in politics and the frustration so many in our community feel when the electoral commitments of their representatives do not play out. Parliamentary rezoning sets another terrible precedent where parliament overreaches into the planning system to profoundly change the rules with no assessment, no credible analysis, and no community consultation.
This is a desperate last‑ditch effort driven by past failures and a government missing in action, spending available funds on perverse priorities. They are more prepared to ride roughshod over community in their own election commitment than stump up the funding requested by UTAS. The government demonstrates just how cooked it is. It is broke, acquiescent, and profoundly dishonest. The community have been blindsided by this announcement. They expected a bill that would mean parliament had to approve any land sales from the Sandy Bay campus. Instead, they got approval.
To be clear for those watching or reading this, we Greens will vote to support this bill through the second reading because, as drafted and tabled in this House, the bill does the job it was created to do. It offers parliamentary oversight for the disposal of public land gifted to the university 70 years ago for the purposes of higher education. We will oppose the foreshadowed amendments from the government. As with the Stony Rise development approvals, we will not support a parliamentary rezone. It is dodgy. It is self‑defeating. It is uninformed. It is unfair. If the amendments get up, we will vote against the bill.
We all want UTAS to succeed. We all want it to be as good as it possibly can be – to enjoy the support of the community, to offer quality courses, and to engage in cutting‑edge research. No one can deny recent years have been expensive and damaging for UTAS and for us a community. Few would disagree that there is significant reform needed to address the failures in the act. One thing is clear in our minds – ramming through special approval for a significant rezoning of public land, with no substantiation, no public consultation, and no recourse is no way to create the platform needed for the university to claw back the credibility, trust and collaboration needed to succeed for this state.
