State Fiction vs. Local Facts
The Shoalhaven is often described as place of great beauty. Everyone, from locals and visitors through to government and real estate agents, whether born here or moved from somewhere else, shares a love of that inherent natural beauty.
There’s beauty too in our built heritage. The old villages of Berry and Milton, and our biggest town of Nowra all have a low-key charm exemplified by weatherboard cottages or more stately homes with English style gardens.
However, that natural and built heritage is now threatened by NSW Government planning 'reforms'.
by Colin Hesse
Shoalhaven's major towns have issues. Planning decisions of years gone by have left Nowra’s central business district with perhaps a dozen buildings of any significant heritage. Ulladulla is even more barren.
Worse still, bad planning decisions have dispersed shopping across too wide an area, focusing on sterile, car-based developments like Nowra Centre Plaza which, once inside, offer nothing of local value or ownership.
Beautiful natural areas too are under immense pressure from developers wanting to build more low-rise housing estates at Callala and Manyana, for example, clearing forest or wetland considered to be of high environmental value.
There are, so we are told, developers hungrily lining up to build new homes, hotels and business areas in the Shoalhaven.
But who has a say in how this happens?
According to the new planning Bill it’s certainly not local communities, and perhaps not even Council, as considerations like environment and heritage are de-valued, or even removed, from the proposed new assessment process.
The NSW Labor Government argues that its new Environmental Planning and Assessment Bill (Planning System Reforms Bill 2025) will create a planning system that is faster, fairer, more modern and capable of delivering homes, jobs, productivity, investment and infrastructure for NSW.
But will it?
This Bill phases out the relatively new Regional Planning Panels and returns some decisions to local Council, so questions should be asked about the level of technical knowledge on planning and environment laws at Shoalhaven Council following the departure of the CEO and the entire executive staff since the current council was elected a year ago.
Also concerning is the controversial appointment this month of ex-Liberal politician, Andrew Constance, to the crucial position of CEO, despite Constance having no local government management experience or qualifications on his resume to balance out public connections to developers.
Up for debate tomorrow in Shoalhaven Council, is new Councillor Debbie Killian's inaugural motion calling for direct liaison with the Planning Department over how these reforms will practically impact the passage of development applications through Council and the risk of legal challenges over disagreements.
Community environment and planning advocacy groups such as Manyana Matters and Callala Matters last week met with South Coast MP Liza Butler who has been bombarded with emails from concerned constituents and is consulting with the NSW Minister for Environment, Penny Sharpe, as well as the Minister for Planning, Paul Scully.
Shoalhaven people know well the dangers of bushfires and floods, but protections around these two crucial issues are undermined in this Bill.
In our warming environment we need new housing stock that is better able to manage the extremes of heat, and yet national building standards are frozen at a level that means new housing will not provide the homes we need in the future.
Planning lawyers and environmentalists have come out swinging against the overhaul of planning laws whose implications, they fear, reach well beyond streamlining housing approvals and into large construction projects such as mines and power lines.
Meanwhile, the Coalition seem keen to avoid arguing about housing and have been working behind closed doors with the Labor Government on this Bill.
During my recent interview with the NSW Greens Parliamentary spokesperson for planning and the environment Sue Higginson, she revealed she had sought advice from the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) on corruption risks in the Bill.
"When I read the bill I literally fell off my chair - it was astounding - I was seeing things in that bill that, as a planning lawyer of decades, I never thought I would live the day to see," Higginson said.
Higginson drew attention to the stark difference between a targeted pathway's "technocratic" strategic decisions and public interest considerations such as biodiversity, climate change resilience and pollution that are skipped to fast-track developments.
"If we haven't dealt with these things ...we're going to make fundamentally wrong decisions and those decisions will ultimately be influenced by the proponent and those gunning for the development.
"The entire system relies on frank and fearless advice that comes from independence and autonomy, and, when that is gone, it will have a long-term chilling effect.
"The public will lose trust and faith very fast - and so they should."
On Triple U FM, Col Hesse talks to Sue Higginson, NSW Greens Parliamentary spokesperson for planning and the environment, about concerns over the NSW Government's Environmental Planning And Assessment (Planning Systems Reforms) Bill 2025.
An oft-heard cry from governments, oppositions and particularly developers is that ‘red tape is holding up much needed housing'.
That criticism reached a crescendo in recent years as the crisis in housing became critical during, but especially following, Covid 19.
In such contempt is planning now held by the NSW Labor Government, and of course property developers, one may almost ask why we have planning at all?
The system that preceded the original Environmental Planning And Assessment Act of 1979 was arbitrary, top down, behind closed doors and quite frankly corrupt.
Few social or environmental concerns were addressed, and there was no community consultation that could affect development proposals, big or small.
In 1979 developers lost that blank cheque and they've been complaining long and loud ever since.
In my first term as a local government Councillor (2004 to 2008), less than 5% of development applications (DA) were assessed by elected Councillors, the rest by the paid planning staff.
Invariably the only development applications heard by Councillors were those deemed by Council staff as contentious – significant because of adverse written objections or big enough for Councillor input.
The NSW Government rules required a 90-day turnaround of a DA by local government, either approval, rejection or deferral and the vast majority of DAs went through within 90 days.
The key delay was that in larger DAs developers would almost invariably ask for more than was allowed under the zoning, usually an increase in floor space ratio or height or most often both.
But, if they had submitted a compliant development and neighbours were happy, then invariably the DA would have sailed through the process.
One of the strengths of that system was community consultation, where those living in or using adjoining property could raise concerns about a development proposal, usually overlooking or overshadowing issues.
While there were certainly rules around these issues, the key positive I observed was that neighbours arguing over what are called cottage developments such as adding an extra story, building a deck or pool, where a dispute couldn’t be resolved by planners, were bought together by Councillors.
Almost every time, Councillors with very different political views would vote together, essentially as a community jury, to certify an amended development that at the very least ensured everyone was heard, and that often lead to a development compromise.
This system, which worked at its best for small development, has by and large disappeared when the last NSW Labor Government introduced ‘exempt and complying development.’
An application for renovations and additions was approved not by Council, but by an ‘independent certifier’ paid for by the proponent.
This system has created concerns about the failure to consult with affected neighbours, the construction of buildings not allowed for that zoning, and of a lowering of the standard of building and construction, sometimes catastrophically.
The last NSW Labor Government also introduced the much dis-credited 'Part 3A' of the planning act, the effect of which was to remove planning approval from developments of over $15 million from local government.
A developer could request the NSW Minister for Planning declare such a development ‘state significant’, and thus decided by the NSW Department of Planning.
One effect of Part 3A was that developers would propose larger plans for any given site with the aim of avoiding local scrutiny of their plans.
The NSW Greens “Democracy For Sale” website tracked developer ‘donations’ to the Labor Party during this time, and in a number of cases matched the payment of ‘donations’ by developers to the ALP with each step on the ladder of the planning process.
The stench around the corruption of the planning system was so bad that then NSW Labor Premier Nathan Rees took the extraordinary step of banning developer donations to State and Local election campaigns.
But the damage was done, and Labor was devastated at the 2011 NSW election.
Here we are, 14 years on, and NSW Labor are again seeking massive changes to the planning system which in many crucial ways mimic Part 3A.
While it would be quite unfair to assert that the current NSW Labor Government is involved in the corruption of the planning system exposed under its previous term, there are almost no Labor Members of Parliament from that time still in office.
Developers sound like Oliver Twist, always wanting more.
But unlike Dickensian half-starved wastrels, developers are rich and influential organisations accustomed to getting their way with the government of the day, and incentivised never to give up.
Of the many claims by developers for a new planning system, the key one currently is the need for more housing.
While developers won’t say it, and neither does NSW Minister for Planning, Paul Scully, in his first reading speech of the Bill, the clear inference is the trickle-down economic argument that more housing means cheaper housing.
The key question for any developer, big or small, is not whether most people can afford to buy or rent, but how much can they sell a house or unit for.
And here’s the clincher, while there is no reliable tracker of the number of DAs approved in NSW but not yet under construction, it’s generally understood to be in the many thousands, with the potential to house over 70,000 people.
If those already approved developments were built, surely that would ease the current housing crisis?
The planning system is not as big a ‘problem’ as the economics of our housing.
Developers are not charities. If there's no profit, they won’t build.
High demand and low availability suits developers, maximising their profits.
The relatively high interest rates of the post-Covid period exacerbated this issue, with developers unwilling to borrow money when the cost of money is high.
This creates further upward pressure on the price of housing. Developers have no interest in seeing the price of housing decline, and will only build where there is profit.
That's why these changes to planning laws are important to developers: they further reduce their costs and improve the profit margin.
A good society cares about more than just the profits of the richest and most powerful companies.
The planning reforms neither provide more truly affordable housing nor support concerns of people about the community and environment in which they live.
If the NSW (and Federal) Government were really serious about lowering the costs of housing they would do what the Chifley Labor Government, the Menzies Coalition Government, and their state contemporaries of the immediate post-war era did: build bucket loads of public housing.
As then University of Sydney housing researcher Cameron Murray argued in his book, The Great Housing Hijack: The Hoaxes and Myths Keeping Prices High for Renters and Buyers in Australia, the effect of massive amounts of public housing in the 30 years after WW2 was that demand for private rental fell, lowering of rents and increasing improvement in rental dwellings.
The cost of buying a home remained low because large numbers of people from manual labourers to tradespeople, teachers and other key workers had secure and flexible housing at a relatively low cost.
Many public housing renters were able to buy the houses they lived in. Arguably this public housing policy was the backbone of the stable society Australia became after World War 2.
Spark Shoalhaven
That system ended under the Hawke Labor Government 40 years ago, and slowly but surely we’ve seen the cost of housing increase many times over such that now the future for young people looks uncertain, unless the bank of Mum and Dad can provide.
No one disagrees about the connection between housing and planning.
But no economists believe that these planning laws will make housing more affordable.
What these new centralised planning laws will do, if enacted, is eliminate your say about what gets built in your community and remove transparency in the decision making.
Even worse, environmental protections and reviews will be stripped of expert input or entirely pushed away.
The argument from the so called YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yard) is that democratic and environmental and heritage concerns should be subservient to the needs of housing.
But the kind of housing we build and the location of new housing has never been more important.
Colin Hesse presents Friday Breakfast on Shoalhaven's community radio station, Triple U FM. Colin was a Greens Councillor on Marrickville and then Inner West Councils The views expressed are entirely his own.
