RADIO INTERVIEW: FiveAA Afternoons about Anzac Highway building height limits and the old Le Cornu site

HOST: Angie McBride: There’s a lot of development happening in the inner south – you’ve just wrapped up consultation to reduce the heights of buildings along Anzac Highway, there just seems to be a lot of apartment buildings going up everywhere – is this a pipe dream …

Jayne Stinson MP: Anzac Highway from the city down past Plympton is my electorate and people driving down that stretch of roadway would certainly have observed there’s been a lot of development along there. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because we do want to see those big multi-storey apartment blocks on main stretches of main roads and near public transport so that we’re not destroying some of the heritage and character buildings that are a little further off the main roads and in our suburbs

However, there is a character zone that locals in Glandore fought really, really hard for seven or eight years ago and one of the conditions of that was that the stretch of Anzac Highway in Glandore … from the Gallipoli Underpass down to Beckman Street … that was always meant to be three storeys and the reason for that was to protect the character zone that abuts it … so you couldn’t have for example an eight storey apartment block overlooking into a single storey suburb … that was always meant to be a maximum of three storeys.

Then about two years ago now the then-Planning Minister Vickie Chapman suddenly changed that and allowed a number of blocks along there to go up to eight storeys, there was no community consultation about that and local people were absolutely furious.

Since then there’s been quite a community campaign to bring those heights back down to a consistent three storeys along that stretch to protect the character zone – so recently we finally won the fight for a code amendment which was essentially to look at the review the zoning … a whopping 216 public submissions were put in – that’s people who put pen to paper and said look we want this reduced back down to three storeys.

That’ll now go off to the Minister and it’s up to the Minister to make a decision about whether that three storey zone is restored or whether it stays as it is and I’m sure if it does stay as it is we’ll see a whole heap of applications for eight storey buildings.

McBride: … Le Cornu … is that going to be sitting there vacant for years to come ?

Stinson: I so hope not! Every time I hear Le Cornu and hear about the North Adelaide experience, I just think oh dear me … most of my life that issue has been going on in North Adelaide but … people would know the flagship store for Le Cornu closed down I think it was about seven years ago now at Forestville which is the suburb that I live in. That site has been empty for some time. At one stage it looked like we were going to get a Kaufland … German mega supermarket and then … they left town and sold the land but … Renewal SA, the Government’s land development arm bought the land and for the last probably two years they’ve been looking at what they’re going to do there.

So, at this stage … Chapleys Foodland … many people love the Pasadena Foodland … the group behind that are going to be building quite an artisan … McBride: … green area, supermarket, beautiful space for people …) Having spoken to the Chapleys about it … it’s based on a European piazza … having a real market type feel to it so that’s really exciting.

McBride: … where are we at with that? … the plans are just being finalised, we’ve had some community consultation … the main feedback from people in my area was that they wanted a lot more green space, they wanted a community park as part of it, so that has been incorporated now, but also they don’t want it too high along Leader Street … they want heights that are going to fit in with the existing one and two storey buildings … that’s still a contentious point and something that people are still fighting for at the moment.

McBride: … it’s doable though … I think it’ll look fantastic .

Stinson: One of the best bits about it is that there’s this awesome urban farm and green school … so they’re actually going to be having TAFE qualification school there, teaching kids about sustainability and climate change and this amazing elevated green urban farm that’s actually producing goods that’ll then be sold in our local community … some pretty cool stuff.