Greater Bendigo faces VCAT review over 72-lot Kangaroo Flat estate
Councillors were due to set the council's position on 19 October 2026, after officers found no planning reason to oppose the six-hectare, 72-lot proposal.
Greater Bendigo’s nine councillors were due to set the council’s formal position on Monday, 19 October 2026, on a Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal application for review, lodged after the council did not decide a permit application for a 72-lot housing estate within the legislated timeframe. The site, at 16 and Lot 1 Lee Street, Kangaroo Flat, spans six hectares and sits near the Lansell Square shopping precinct and Big Hill Primary School.
No applicant or developer is named in the reporting on the application, and council officers found no planning reason to oppose the proposal under the planning scheme, according to the Bendigo Advertiser. Twenty four people have lodged objections to the plans.
Why it matters
Under Victoria’s planning system, a council that does not decide a permit application within the statutory timeframe leaves the applicant free to apply directly to VCAT for a review, treating the silence as a refusal. That is the position Greater Bendigo now faces over the Lee Street proposal, the Advertiser reported. VCAT, not the council, will make the final call on whether the estate proceeds.
The dispute sits inside a wider growth push. Greater Bendigo and the Victorian Government are targeting 37,000 new homes across the municipality by 2051, to accommodate a population the state expects to grow by more than 80,000, according to the same report. Villawood has separately renewed its own push to open Ravenswood land south of the city for about 3,000 homes, underscoring how much of that target still depends on sites yet to clear council or tribunal review. A threatened species, the brown toadlet, has been recorded close to the Lee Street site, and nearby resident David Wallis told the paper a creek has flooded roads and paddocks near an aged care centre in heavy rain.
Objector Graeme Reynolds, one of the 24 people opposing the plans, told the Advertiser the land functions as “a habitat between significant habitats.”
The numbers
The proposal covers six hectares at 16 and Lot 1 Lee Street and would create 72 lots, averaging 455 square metres each, with individual lots ranging from 307 to 882 square metres, the Advertiser reported. Lots in the surrounding area average between 1,030 and 10,000 square metres, by the same reporting, according to the Advertiser.
Twenty four objections have been lodged against the application, the Advertiser reported. No applicant, developer or cost figure is named in the reporting, and none is estimated here.
What’s next
Greater Bendigo’s councillors were due to resolve the council’s position at Monday’s meeting, a position VCAT will weigh alongside the planning scheme and the council officer report, which the Advertiser said found no planning reason to oppose the development. The tribunal, not the council, now holds the decision on whether the 72-lot estate proceeds, and no hearing date has been reported. Under Victoria’s planning system, if the council’s resolved position opposes the proposal, that stance becomes part of the case VCAT weighs rather than a binding refusal, since the application is already before the tribunal.
Objectors including Reynolds and Wallis have raised the site’s ecological value and local flooding history. The Lee Street matter tests how a deemed refusal, in a municipality targeting 37,000 new homes by 2051, plays out once a tribunal takes over the decision.