What Amendment C178mona approves at the former Talbot Quarry and Landfill
Monash City Council has publicly restated its objections after Victorian Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny approved Monash Planning Scheme Amendment C178mona. The amendment opens the way for Talbot Village, a staged masterplan of about 1,100 homes on the 18.8 hectare former Talbot Quarry and Landfill at 1221-1249 Centre Road, Oakleigh South. In a statement issued on 9 October 2026, Council said the State approved rezoning and staged master planning before resolving long-term arrangements for managing contamination, landfill gas and ground conditions. Council’s view is that these matters should have been settled before the land was rezoned.
The State Government intervened to unlock housing supply in an established middle-ring suburb. Council’s position is that the planning sequence has been inverted. The land use has been changed first, and the technical questions that determine whether that use is safe and sustainable over decades have been left to later approvals. Council noted that those unresolved geotechnical and contamination issues remain subject to future approvals by the Minister for Planning, not Council.
The dispute matters to Australian environmental professionals and their clients for reasons beyond this one site. Former quarries backfilled with waste are common across metropolitan Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide. As state governments push infill housing targets, more of these sites will be put forward for residential use. Talbot Village shows how planning approvals, environmental audit requirements, staging decisions and long-term governance can pull against each other. Developers, financiers, conveyancing and property lawyers, and council planners all carry part of the resulting risk.
Unresolved landfill gas, contamination and staging risks at Talbot Village
Amendment C178mona was approved by the Minister for Planning following review by ministerial advisory committees. According to Council, those committees found a lack of detail or certainty for residential development on the site. The amendment applies to the former Talbot Quarry and Landfill, an 18.8 hectare parcel that was quarried and later used for waste disposal. The proposal is a staged urban infill masterplan of approximately 1,100 dwellings, which means parts of the site could be occupied while other parts are still being remediated or built.
This is not the first attempt to rezone the land. Council pointed out that an independent planning panel considering an earlier proposal, Amendment C129, in 2017 to 2018, did not support rezoning the site. The recommendation of that panel and the more recent advisory committee findings are central to Council’s argument that the technical case for residential use has not yet been established to the standard normally expected before a planning scheme change.
Council’s statement identifies three specific areas of concern:
- Unresolved technical risks. Long-term arrangements for contamination, landfill gas and ground conditions were not addressed in the amendment. Council says these should have been resolved before rezoning rather than deferred to subsequent ministerial approvals.
- Staging and remediation complexity. Council noted concerns from experts and from EPA Victoria that staging the development could increase the complexity and risks of remediation.
- Long-term responsibility and cost. Council said it was uncertain who would be responsible for ongoing monitoring, maintenance and costs of the site’s environmental issues, and whether an owners’ corporation could manage them.
The staging concern has a clear technical basis. On a former landfill, excavation, waste relocation, regrading or capping works in one stage can change the pressure regime and preferential pathways in the waste mass and surrounding ground. This can shift lateral migration of methane and carbon dioxide towards areas that are already built and occupied. A conceptual site model (CSM) prepared only for the final landform, or only for the first stage, will not capture these interim conditions. Each construction phase effectively creates a new CSM that needs its own assessment of sources, pathways and receptors, including the residents of earlier stages.
How landfill gas and contaminated land are regulated in Victoria
Landfill gas is assessed differently from petroleum vapour in Australian practice. The National Environment Protection (Assessment of Site Contamination) Measure 1999, as amended in 2013 (ASC NEPM), provides the national framework for site investigation and human health risk assessment. Its health screening levels (HSLs) apply to petroleum hydrocarbon vapour intrusion (TPH and BTEXN) and do not set screening criteria for methane or carbon dioxide. In Victoria, landfill gas is assessed with reference to EPA Victoria guidance, including Publication 1684, Landfill gas fugitive emissions monitoring guideline (February 2018), Publication 1950 on landfill buffers, and the Landfill Best Practice Environmental Management guidance (Publication 788) for rehabilitated landfills. Because there is no Australian Standard for ground gas protection of buildings, designers commonly rely on UK methods, particularly CIRIA C665 and BS 8485, to classify gas regimes and specify protection measures.
Statutory duties under the Environment Protection Act 2017 (Vic) apply throughout the life of a project like this. The general environmental duty in section 25 applies to any person engaging in an activity that may give rise to risks of harm to human health or the environment from pollution or waste. The duty to manage contaminated land in section 39 sits with the person in management or control of the land.
The Act does not automatically require an environmental audit for every former landfill. In practice, an audit before a sensitive use such as housing is triggered through the planning system, via Ministerial Direction No. 1 (Potentially Contaminated Land), clause 13.04-1S of the planning scheme and, where applied, an Environmental Audit Overlay. These controls draw on the audit framework set out in the Act. For a site with this history, an audit before residential use commences is the expected pathway. The audit concludes with an environmental audit statement setting out whether the land is suitable for the proposed use and any conditions that must be met, such as gas protection measures in buildings, ongoing monitoring or restrictions on groundwater use. On a staged development, audits may be completed stage by stage, which ties back to Council’s concern about interim conditions while construction continues nearby.
Audit conditions also bear directly on Council’s third concern. Where a statement requires long-term gas monitoring or maintenance of protection systems, someone has to carry out that work and pay for it for as long as the waste keeps generating gas. If that responsibility passes to an owners’ corporation, residents may end up holding obligations they did not fully understand when they bought.
What the Talbot Village decision means for developers, lenders and councils
For developers working on former quarries and landfills, the Talbot Village approval shows that rezoning can now come ahead of a settled technical case, at least where the State is pushing for housing supply. That does not remove the technical work. It moves it later, into ministerial approvals and the audit process, where gaps in investigation can still delay or reshape a project. Budgets and programs should allow for gas assessment and CSM updates at each stage, not just at the start and end.
Financiers, conveyancers and property lawyers should read any environmental audit statement and its conditions closely, and confirm who is bound to meet them over the long term. Conditions that sit with an owners’ corporation can affect levies, insurance and resale.
For council planners, the case is a reminder that a council may not have the final say on how contamination and ground conditions are managed when the State takes the lead. Monash City Council has made clear that those decisions now rest with the Minister for Planning, and the later approvals for Talbot Village will show whether its concerns are addressed.
References and related sources
- Primary source: www.monash.vic.gov.au
- premier.vic.gov.au
- quarrymagazine.com
- rulesmate.com.au
- engage.vic.gov.au
- NEPM Assessment of Site Contamination
- EPA Victoria
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This is an iEnvi Machete news summary. Prepared by iEnvi to summarise the source article for contaminated land, groundwater, remediation, approvals and site risk professionals.
Published: 13 Oct 2026
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