Into the swamps of the current system, or a clear view of where to go?

"Wherever you are in the State, someone who wants to provide housing or someone who wants to protect their environment, should be able to press a few buttons and know exactly what was intended for that particular parcel of land and what can or cannot be done with it. An IT friendly system. A user friendly system."

It is concerning that the Issues Paper describes the Minister's performance measure in terms that are considerably less fundamental:

5 Information Technologies and A New Planning System

"The only specific outcome required by the Minister for Planning was that the NSW Planning Systems Review consider and make recommendations relating to the integration of information technology and the planning system.

Two objectives have been identified:

1. Increasing accessibility to data about land (including zoning and flood related development controls) in NSW. This is to be facilitated by a user friendly, single access portal that will collate data currently held by a variety of State agencies.

2. Increasing the use of electronic lodgement and publication of documents in planning processes such as development assessment.

The Issues paper talks of data collection."

The Minister however wants a digital set of certified correct set of controls applying to each block of land and accessible on line - a much more basic reform.

The efficiency, effectiveness and certainty of the current system suffers because of a proliferation of development control documents. No other State has such a system. The Minister is asking for a single, certified, digital document of controls applying to each parcel of land. He was not asking for a data collection of documents that may be relevant.

Meeting the Minister's demand must mean significant change to the current system and its legislation and one would have thought the Reviewers would have embraced his demand, set out the nature of the changes needed and asked us to respond to them.

If there were a certified list of parcel, formatted controls it would be possible to achieve significant increases in efficiency, effectiveness and transparency: