FINAL THORNBURY ACTIVITY CENTRE PLANS RELEASED
The Victorian Government has now released the final Activity Centre plans.
These plans will reshape Thornbury and surrounding suburbs for decades to come — setting building heights, density, and planning controls that will be extremely difficult to reverse once development begins.
While the program has been positioned as a solution to the housing crisis, the final plans confirm a very different reality:
Significant upzoning across residential streets and key corridors
Higher building heights with fewer effective design constraints
Reduced protections around overlooking, overshadowing and neighbourhood character
No meaningful requirements for affordable or family-sized housing
No clear commitment to the infrastructure needed to support this level of growth
What is being locked in is not just more housing — it is a specific type of housing, delivered under weaker standards, with no safeguards for existing communities.
Minimal changes to the outer catchment boundary and some reduction in heights for heritage zones (still rezoned as outer catchment). Still 6 storeys across single storey residential streets and 8 to 12 storeys on High Street. And remember, these are not height caps – it could be even higher if it takes the Planning Minister's fancy.
Community ignored. Experts ignored. Evidence ignored. They even ignored their own commentary on the proposed changes to the draft maps. This will do nothing for affordability. It will destroy liveability, push families out of Thornbury, and lock the next generation into poorly built apartment buildings and permanent build-to-rent rental insecurity.
This is a Government desperately scrambling to cover its own failures — budget mismanagement, no credible plan, no vision — by selling out Melbourne. Selling out communities. Selling out public housing land. Selling out the future of this city.
All to serve the profits of developers, investors, speculators, financiers, donors and the Grattan–YIMBY echo chamber that keeps giving cover to this flawed, rushed and out of touch program.
Our council rolled over, reducing itself to a bureaucratic driven response without input from community, and the they even ignored that!
It is very clear that evidence, experts, reason and the Thornbury community mean nothing to them.
What has changed — and what hasn’t
And they even ignored their own description of changes from draft to final...
The mid-rise code: a second layer of change
These plans do not operate in isolation.
They sit alongside the Government’s new mid-rise housing code, which further reduces planning controls across the same areas.
The combined effect is significant:
Higher density is being enabled through the Activity Centre plans
While the standards governing what can actually be built are being lowered through the mid-rise code
In other words:
More can be built — and less is required of it.
This is what it means for activity centres....
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Fair Growth Thornbury acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the unceded lands on which we live and work. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.