Boral, Dexus, Pelligra fund planning for Melbourne west jobs precincts

Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny announced on 22 October that two new employment precincts, Ravenhall and Warrawee within the Truganina area, in Melbourne’s west, will move into formal planning under an industry funded pilot. Instead of the state carrying the cost of early planning and infrastructure work alone, Boral, Dexus and Pelligra, named by the government as the proponents for the two precincts, will fund it themselves.

The arrangement is a pilot, not a blanket policy change. The release says planning for the two precincts will pilot a new industry-led approach, with the proponents working with government on parts of the planning process. Nothing has been rezoned yet. Planning for Ravenhall and Warrawee is only starting, which places this squarely at the proposal stage rather than a decided outcome.

Why it matters

For developers sitting on broadacre land in Melbourne’s outer west, this is a signal about sequencing, not a grant of new entitlement. The state has typically funded precinct structure plans itself, which means timing sits with Treasury’s budget cycle. A pilot where the landholders pay removes that bottleneck, at the cost of the companies carrying planning risk if the precinct does not ultimately get rezoned the way they expect.

It also tells operators where the government thinks demand is heading. Ravenhall and Warrawee sit in the same broad corridor as Melton East, a new suburb planned for about 12,000 homes, around 36,000 residents and an estimated 1,600 local jobs. A residential corridor that size needs somewhere nearby for its workforce to work, and industrial and logistics land is the usual answer in Melbourne’s west. The pilot reads as the government lining up employment land ahead of rooftops rather than after them.

The numbers

The government points to a recent precedent in the same corridor to make its case for the pilot. More than 72 hectares were rezoned to Industrial through the Development Facilitation Program, a separate fast-track mechanism, and the government credits that rezoning with more than 1,000 jobs. That is the comparison the pilot is being measured against: can an industry-funded planning process match or beat a rezoning that has already happened and already has a jobs number attached to it.

Melton East, the new suburb the government says backs the precincts, adds the demand side: about 12,000 homes and 36,000 residents once built out, with roughly 1,600 jobs planned within the precinct itself. None of these figures describe Ravenhall or Warrawee directly. No hectare count, job estimate or dollar figure for the two precincts under the new pilot has been published yet. Any larger jobs number now circulating in industry commentary about the precincts has not been confirmed by the minister’s office and does not appear in the government’s own release, so it is left out here.

What’s next

The government has not published a timeline for when planning on Ravenhall and Warrawee will produce a precinct structure plan or a rezoning decision, so none is given here. The next verifiable step is the companies lodging the funded planning work with the relevant planning authority, which would be the point at which hectare counts, land uses and a jobs estimate specific to these two precincts become available. Until a structure plan is exhibited, this remains a funding and process announcement, not a development approval, and should not be read as one.

For Boral, Dexus and Pelligra, the near-term exposure is the planning spend itself. None of the three has disclosed how much they are committing to the studies, and the government’s release does not put a figure on it either. Operators watching the corridor should treat the pilot as an early marker of where industrial zoning is likely to land next in Melbourne’s west, not as confirmation that it has. Capital is already moving into the same corridor: HMC Capital paid $49m for Coburns Central in Melton last week.