The changing role of planning

Respected economic commentator Alan Kohler published a video on ABC titled “What’s slowing down housing development?”. The video was essentially a synopsis of YIMBY Melbourne member Jonathan O’Brien’s 2025 paper titled “The Problem with Urban Planning”.

Before I go on, I need to acknowledge that I am a member of the South Australian State Planning Commission, a former President of the UDIA (SA) and former Vice President of UDIA National, but I share this piece as my own opinion. I worked in local government for nine years and have been a consultant for small, medium and large firms for three decades, in addition to working for a large housing company/land developer for a few years. Whilst I am a town planner, I gained tertiary qualifications in urban geography and project management as well as town planning.

Across all these roles, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to make good development easier to achieve. Throughout my career I’ve sought to solve local problems by analysing the available data and drawing on relevant examples from elsewhere.

Both Kohler and O’Brien draw on reliable ABS data to make the point that there are too many planners and they are getting in the way of delivering housing. From my perspective, there is much to agree with in O’Brien’s paper; many of the issues he raises, however, may well be relevant in Melbourne but are not so pertinent in South Australia.

The simpler days of “black and white” policy

When I commenced work as a local government town planning inspector in Adelaide’s inner north in the mid-1980s, the planning system was quite “black and white” in its approach. Though the then-current 1982 Planning Act was less rigid than the preceding 1966 Act, most proposals either met the policies or they did not and the assessment process was not overly complex for the majority of applications. There was not a lot of room to argue a case due to the policy wording and the time it took to assess an application was typically much less than today.

This was due to a few factors:

• there was considerably less policy to assess an application against
• the policy was typically more metric-based and was far less flexible
• the types of applications were more consistent (for example, virtually all dwellings being proposed were detached dwellings on allotments larger than 600 square metres).

Burgeoning timelines lead to burgeoning costs

When working in private consultancy I undertook an assessment of how many hours it would take for me to provide a developer with advice and gain an approval for a one-into-four dwelling application. (Establishing this benchmark helped me to provide prospective clients with accurate quotes for the cost of the service.)

I repeated this review a few times over the following two decades period. Between that first benchmark in 1996 and the third in 2018, the number of hours it took to provide the service more than doubled. I’m not sure if anyone has done something similar on the council or government assessment side of the process, but I can’t imagine it got any quicker over the years. All of this time adds up to increased costs.

Growing flexibility in policy pushes boundaries…

One of the issues with the planning system in the 1980’s was that it largely stifled innovation. To get around this, other mechanisms were sometimes used when innovation was desired. For example, the development of Golden Grove (which ultimately housed more than 30,000 people and introduced several new housing development types to the South Australian market), had its own Indenture Ratification Act (1984) to get around the some of the limitations of the Planning Act.

By the mid-1990s the planning system underwent quite a bit of change, including the introduction of the Development Act in 1993. One of the really good parts of the Development Act and its Regulations was that a proposal only needed to get one approval. Previously, a proponent might require several approvals, meaning that a proposal that received a planning approval but lacked an environmental approval, for instance, could not necessarily be progressed.

Additionally, the structure of policy wording began to change so that there was far more flexibility in its interpretation. If a proponent could put forward a good case for a proposal, even if the type of proposal was not specifically sought in a zone or one or more elements of the proposal did not meet policy, then often there was a reasonable chance the proposal could gain an approval.

These changes led to an increase in the number of proponents seeking to push the boundaries of what might get approved, which meant more private sector planners were needed to craft proposals. In turn, councils (mainly) employed more town planners to assess these increasingly complex applications that didn’t strictly or fully meet the policies.

…but increases red tape

The Environment, Resources and Development Court made some judgements that gave leeway to those applicants looking for development approval without fully meeting all the policies. In my opinion this had two consequences. Firstly, some applicants pushed the boundaries of policy interpretation even further, and secondly, councils and the state government asked policy planners to craft new policies in an attempt to manage or restrict certain outcomes.

The new policies rarely made it easier or less costly or quicker to get a development approved. One of the problems with these ever-changing policies was that different councils had different policy wording to deal with the same issue – meaning that the same proposed development had to be recrafted slightly for each council, which is just inefficient. This issue was not just happening in South Australia but around Australia. The Planning, Development and Infrastructure Act 2016 and the Planning and Design Code are in part the result of the political desire at the state level to remove this varied policy wording across councils.

Changing social sensibilities add complexity to policy

There were societal changes that occurred as well. For instance, in the 1950s side and rear fencing of a standard house block was typically 1.2 to 1.5 metres high and neighbours could, and would, talk to each other over the fence. In the last few decades, the issue of privacy has become more prominent - a standard fence is now 1.8 metres high.

Similarly, tree protection was not really an issue a few decades ago but is a significant (pun intended) issue now. Policies brought in almost 20 years ago lead to a plethora of arborists being required and planners having to prepare (as well as assess) applications for potential tree removal.

As densities of development increased, the potential for negative externalities also increased, leading to the creation of even more policy. I recall writing a supplementary development plan (a previous version of a code amendment) for a northern suburbs council that added clearer, more specific rules (including a diagram) about privacy.

This was in response to more two-storey development being created and the community’s desire to not have overlooking of backyards or of bedroom/living room windows. The metrics ultimately agreed to were more onerous than what existed in Sydney, because the decision-makers thought that Adelaide needed a more conservative outcome. This specific aspect of the policy change was, in my opinion, due to a loud minority voicing their opinion (as is their right) but is an example of the lack of detailed investigation and analysis that O’Brien mentions.

Environmental policies were limited in number and scope in the 1980s, but with legislation such as the Environmental Protection Act 1993 and the Heritage Act 1993, the scope of issues and the processes involved became more complex. Again, this meant there was more work to be done by planners on both sides of the fence.

The community made these issues important, and in response the politicians made laws and council and state planners crafted policies. Private sector planners now spend more time trying to deal with all these issues, and the council planners spend more time in the assessment phase of applications.

Where to from here?

Several issues raised by O’Brien are not overly relevant to South Australia because our planning system has changed considerably over the past decade, after the Expert Panel on Planning Reform report (PDF, 6.5 MB). For instance, South Australia doesn’t have a rule like Victoria’s Detached Home Code that says you can’t balance different planning objectives—and we shouldn’t.

One thing I think we should avoid when drafting town planning policy is trying to meet every disciplines’ ideal outcome, as this can make projects impossibly expensive or difficult to design. While public safety and health are important, these are largely covered by the National Construction Code. Many town planning policies deal with subjective matters, which means people will have different ideas about what works. Wherever there is conflict in policy between disciplines, the assessment and approval process becomes more complex.

Town planning should be about balancing environmental, economic, and social objectives. When one element gets out of balance, like affordability of housing is right now, then rebalancing should be the next step.

What is being done here in South Australia?

SA’s digital planning system and Planning and Design Code has made it much easier for both professional users and, importantly, the community to have access to information about what can happen and what is happening.

And to make this good system even better, the state government agreed to make some improvements to the planning system and its instruments following the Expert Panel for the Planning System Implementation Review, which I chaired in 2022/23.

We are also working toward a more efficient town planning system that has more “accepted” and “deemed to satisfy” assessment pathways (which typically take a few days to assess) for those applications requiring either no planning application or a simple assessment process.

How we can make the approval process more efficient

One of the main ideas behind the planning system is that if a proposed land use or development is allowed in a given zone, it should be easy to get it approved. To support this tenet, when the PDI Act was introduced, third party appeal rights were reduced, making it less risky for many developments to move forward. At the same time, however, many applications can still receive comments from interested parties anywhere, not just nearby neighbours, during the public notification process.

Whilst simple, straightforward applications are handled quickly, more complicated ones take longer to move through the approvals process. To protect and enhance our physical environment and allow for good development, the State Planning Commission will need to keep improving the system and its policies.

One way the State Planning Commission is doing this is by speeding up decision making. The Department for Housing and Urban Development (DHUD) is making good progress on developing innovative AI tools to quickly assess some simple applications. It is expected this new element of the system will come into force in 2026 now the PDI Act has been amended to enable a computer to be a decision maker.

I believe we need even more simple ways for people to get approval for new homes quickly, especially in areas where housing is needed most. Right now, gaining approval to build a detached dwelling in a Master Planned Neighbourhood Zone (aka an “accepted” development) is straightforward, but we should make it just as easy for “missing middle” housing – like townhouses, duplexes, and small apartment buildings - in middle and inner Adelaide.

To do this, we’ll need to work on some design and policy updates and talk with the community, following the Community Engagement Charter, to find out what works best and determine what is an acceptable outcome. This process should focus on what is practical, affordable, and reasonable. When deciding what works best, we need to listen to the people who will actually live in these homes and value their opinions and needs just as much as we do existing owners and occupiers.

I believe this approach is needed if we want to make progress. Doing this will help reduce cost and risk, and it will mean we can build more homes, faster in more areas. We should also be wary of trying to achieve perfection when being really good will be a perfectly sensible outcome.