Deification of the NSW’s Planning Act inhibited reform

Staff of the Department of Planning should not play a lead role in the current attempts to write new legislation. The Department has seen its core role as administering the Act and it has relied on the current Act in its attempts to exert power over other Departments and local government. Very considerable political investment was put into the Act from its first enactment, resulting in the Department preferring spin to analysis.

Spin has demanded compliance with the Departmental line. Decades of obedience to the departmental line, together with the narrow nature of planning education, have not prepared the staff for fundamental rethinking about the nature of planning and the role of legislation.

Of course, the Department's political investment in the Act has been misplaced.

The faults of today's development assessment system stem from fundamental faults with the legislation when it was passed in 1979 and, since then, the spin-induced inability of the Department to come to terms with those faults.

The Six Fundamental Faults in the Original EP&A Act

The first three fundamental flaws arose from the attempt to have legislatively binding strategic plans. Although the objective failed, it nonetheless infected how planning controls were written. This, in turn, infected both the nature of the urban outcomes and the efficiency of the development assessment system.

Fault One

Confusion between legislation for planning and legislation for development assessment. That is, confusion between outcomes and outputs, between a process for working out what outcomes you want to achieve ("planning") and operating an administrative process for allocating development rights and obligations, the latter being one mechanisms (outputs) by which government can seek to achieve strategic planning outcomes.

Fault Two

Failure to require a single document of controls for each parcel of land (because the Act established what looked like a hierarchical planning system for producing State, regional and local plans, presumably going from the general to the specific)

Fault Three

The fulfillment of a promise by the then State Government that, as the State apparently would be setting the broad planning frameworks with its State and regional plans, only Councils would have the power to initiate amendments to the local level of plans.