Time to rewrite the NSW Planning Legislation

Governments should do more real strategic planning. They seldom do, despite various token efforts in recent years.

Planners' plans were never strategic. As they were intended to be, the legislated plans are a series of detailed maps showing the boundaries of parcels in different colours to denote the permitted land uses, heights and floor space ratios. They are 'cadastral' control documents, appropriate for a legislative control document.

Even when planners try to write documents supporting their controls, those documents are seldom strategic. They do not clearly identify the strengths and weaknesses and then identify measurable outcomes, strategies and actions that are needed. Usually they are expressed in generalities – feel-good hopes rather then clear analysis and instructions. Little chance of failure being sheeted home to the authors.

So What Planning Should Do Before Changing Controls?

Transparency and effectiveness require governments to justify changes to development controls by publication of wide ranging and comprehensive studies assessing the likely positive and negative impacts of proposed changes to the controls.

The original 1979 planning legislation required this, but it has been watered down over the years. For example, assessments of the massive urban rezonings of the Northwest and South West Corridors in Sydney were only superficial, especially those on the deals done by the Minister after the publication of the draft controls.

This is the most important role for environmental impact assessment. This is where governments should be required to justify the changes, where members of the public should have the right to be heard and to receive honest responses to their concerns.

Of course it would be best if communities were made part of the process of working out new controls, especially if they are for redevelopment. Properly involved from the outset, locals can be very productive in planning the desired future character of their areas, even when governments are seeking significant change.

Trouble is that governments don't trust communities so they try to railroad them. Witness the State government's performance over the Ku-ring-gai rezonings, or the recent regional centre controls.

The consultation process in the legislative process assumes governments prepare detailed changes, put them out for criticism for a couple of months, adjust the plans at the margin and then make them into law.

And then developers feel disappointed when their almost complying developments provoke a storm of reaction from the community.

One of the recurring fantasies of the development industry is the expectation that if the public and the local councilors are involved in the policy making, then they should not be involved in judging the detailed developments.