Don’t let NSW Labor cut communities out of planning decisions

MAKE A SUBMISSION

To the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure

I am writing to make a submission on the draft statewide Community Participation Plan.

I support efforts to make the planning system clearer and easier for the community to understand. A single statewide framework could help people know when and how they can participate in planning decisions.

However, I am concerned that the current draft would reduce community participation, weaken transparency and remove important opportunities for residents to understand and respond to development proposals that may affect their homes, neighbourhoods, environment and local infrastructure.

The housing crisis requires urgent action, but community participation should not be treated as the cause of that crisis. NSW needs more homes, including public, affordable and well-located homes, but that should not come at the cost of transparency, accountability or genuine public input.

I ask that the final Community Participation Plan be amended to:

Require all relevant planning documents, studies and reports to be publicly available before an exhibition period begins.
Ensure that developments with environmental, flooding, heritage, traffic, noise, tree canopy, biodiversity, contamination or other community impacts are publicly notified and exhibited.
Provide clear public guidelines for when exhibition periods can be extended.
Clearly inform community members that they can request an extension of time to make a submission.
Require planning authorities to consider extension requests transparently and in the public interest.
Ensure State Significant Developments are subject to meaningful consultation, with minimum exhibition periods extended where the scale, complexity or public interest of a project requires more time.
Ensure the Community Participation Plan is written in plain English and operates as a real community guide to the planning system.
Preserve the ability of councils and planning authorities to undertake additional engagement where local circumstances require it.

Please do not use the housing crisis as a reason to reduce community rights. The final Community Participation Plan should strengthen meaningful, transparent and accessible participation in planning decisions across NSW.

Don’t let NSW Labor cut communities out of planning decisions

The Minns Labor Government has released a draft statewide Community Participation Plan that will change how communities are notified about, and able to contribute to, planning decisions across NSW.

The Government is using the housing crisis to justify cutting out public oversight of planning decisions. Public exhibition and notification would be removed for a range of residential development applications, including new single and two-storey dwellings, dual occupancies, demolitions, attached dwellings, secondary dwellings, some tree removal and other development types, where those applications comply with planning controls. Low and medium-density apartments and shop top housing would only require seven days notice to adjoining neighbours before work begins.

These changes are offensive to meaningful community participation, and will lock in bad decisions before people even know about them.

The housing crisis was caused by decades of privatisation, underinvestment in public and affordable housing, speculative land markets, infrastructure gaps and a planning system that too often serves developers before communities. Neighbours reading about development applications are not the problem.

The draft plan will build distrust, reduce accountability and make it harder for communities to identify serious local impacts before they become permanent problems.

The Government should be fixing consultation, not abolishing it.

Make a submission now and tell the Government - give communities a real voice in the planning system.

Don’t let NSW Labor cut communities out of planning decisions

MAKE A SUBMISSION

Don’t let NSW Labor cut communities out of planning decisions

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