A landscape worth protecting

Our Green Wedge.
Our breathing space.

The open countryside surrounding Diggers Rest gives our township a rare sense of space, identity and tranquillity. It also performs a vital strategic role by helping protect Melbourne Airport and other major infrastructure from incompatible urban encroachment.

Explore its value Help protect it

Understanding the land

What is the Green Wedge?

Green wedges are the non-urban areas around metropolitan Melbourne that sit outside the Urban Growth Boundary. They separate growing suburbs, protect rural landscapes and support uses such as farming, conservation, recreation, tourism, infrastructure and natural-resource management.

The Green Wedge Zone is one of the principal planning tools used to recognise, protect and conserve this land. Its objectives include protecting agricultural, environmental, historic, landscape, recreational and tourism values, while discouraging urban uses that are better located inside urban areas. Victoria's strategic planning framework also recognises the importance of green wedges in protecting major transport facilities serving the wider Victorian community, including airports, ports and their associated access corridors.

The Green Wedge is not vacant land waiting for development. It is essential strategic infrastructure.
For Diggers Rest, it protects township identity, rural heritage, environmental values and the long-term separation needed between urban communities and major infrastructure.

Why preservation matters

Six values that cannot be replaced

Township identity

The surrounding rural landscape gives Diggers Rest a clear sense of place and helps distinguish it from continuous suburban development.

Landscape and tranquillity

Open views, dark skies and lower development intensity contribute to the calm, spacious character valued by residents.

Separation from urban sprawl

Green wedge land helps maintain physical breaks between settlements and discourages the gradual spread of incompatible urban development.

Environmental resilience

Rural and natural areas can support habitat, waterways, soil health, vegetation, cooling and landscape connectivity.

Agriculture and heritage

The wedge retains productive land and helps conserve the rural history and cultural landscape surrounding the township.

Future generations

Once fragmented, rezoned or heavily developed, open rural land is difficult, often impossible, to restore to its former character.

A strategic relationship

Green space and Melbourne Airport

Diggers Rest lies within the wider area influenced by Melbourne Airport, a major transport facility serving Victoria and operating without a night curfew.

Victoria's strategic planning framework recognises that green wedges help protect major transport facilities, including airports and their access corridors. Around Melbourne Airport, non-urban land provides an important long-term safeguard against urban encroachment and the growth of incompatible, noise-sensitive development.

This is particularly important because aircraft noise, safety considerations and future aviation needs do not stop at municipal boundaries. Allowing continuous residential or intensive urban development to move closer to airport operations can create permanent land-use conflict and increasing pressure for restrictions.

  • Safeguards Melbourne Airport from long-term urban encroachment.
  • Helps protect its continuing role as a 24-hour, curfew-free international gateway.
  • Limits the exposure of additional residential communities to aircraft noise.
  • Supports land uses that are more compatible with major aviation infrastructure.
  • Protects airport access corridors, economic activity and future operational requirements.

The Green Wedge does not eliminate aircraft noise. Its strategic purpose is to preserve appropriate land-use separation, reduce future conflict and help protect both surrounding communities and the long-term operation of Melbourne Airport.

The continuing challenge

Protection requires constant attention

Melbourne's west is experiencing strong population, housing, infrastructure and employment growth. These pressures can generate proposals to move the Urban Growth Boundary, rezone rural land or introduce large-scale uses that may gradually erode the Green Wedge's non-urban character.

Not every development proposal is the same. Good planning requires transparent assessment of cumulative impacts, not simply consideration of one site at a time. Decisions made today may permanently shape the landscape around Diggers Rest.

“The question is not whether Diggers Rest should grow. It is how growth can be managed without sacrificing the open landscape, rural identity and strategic protection that serve both the township and the wider Victorian community.”

Government commitments

Specific protection from new data centres

The Victorian Government's 2024 Planning for Melbourne's Green Wedges and Agricultural Land Action Plan provides a direct and relevant reassurance for communities concerned about large-scale data centre development in protected rural areas.

Under the plan's Setting Tighter Controls theme, Action 15 states that new data centres are to be prohibited in the Green Wedge Zone, Green Wedge A Zone and Rural Conservation Zone. The action is identified as a short-term, statewide reform.

“More housing doesn’t have to come at the expense of our green wedges.” — The Hon. Sonya Kilkenny MP, Minister for Planning, 18 March 2024

What the Action Plan promises

The broader package says green wedges are non-urban areas whose open character, agricultural value, environmental assets and role in supporting critical infrastructure require stronger and more consistent protection.

  • Maintain a permanent Urban Growth Boundary around Melbourne.
  • Emphasise the non-urban purpose, values and character of green wedge land.
  • Strengthen planning controls against over-development and inappropriate urban uses.
  • Review planning application requirements and decision guidelines in green wedge zones.
  • Prohibit new data centres in the Green Wedge, Green Wedge A and Rural Conservation zones.
Important context: These documents record the Victorian Government's policy commitment and implementation program as published in March 2024. Any individual proposal must still be checked against the current zoning, planning scheme controls and approval pathway applying to its site.

Community stewardship

The Green Wedge belongs to the future as much as the present.

Residents can help by staying informed, examining planning proposals, participating in consultations, making submissions and asking decision-makers to demonstrate how the Green Wedge will be protected.

View Melton's Green Wedge information Return to DiggersRest.com

Acknowledgement

Green Wedges Coalition

We acknowledge the longstanding work of the Green Wedges Coalition and its member organisations in advocating for the protection of Melbourne's green wedges for present and future generations.

The Coalition brings together community and environmental groups from across metropolitan Melbourne to promote informed planning, sustainable land use and stronger protection against inappropriate development.

Visit the Green Wedges Coalition

Background sources