As if battling through the gestation of the new Palerang Local Environmental Plan (PLEP) hasn’t been difficult enough, we are also in the throes of major planning reform that will see a significant restructure of NSW and local government planning instruments. We’ll just see the new PLEP take effect and it’ll be all change again.
That’s probably a bit dramatic. It’s not really as bad as it sounds—there is a formal migration path mapped out, and our new Standard Instrument LEP is a necessary precursor to the implementation of the new planning system.
While there are still concerns about some aspects of the new system, the ePlanning component of the reforms are designed to bring planning into the electronic age. The primary goal is to simplify the whole planning approvals process with, amongst other things, the ability to produce what amounts to a tailored LEP excerpt, and simple planning check list for any individual property at the press of a button—or maybe more accurately, the click of a mouse. The idea is that this will eliminate the need to tediously wade through pages of irrelevant legislative instructions, to work out what planning approvals may or may not be required, and what conditions might apply to some project you wish to undertake. You should visit the Electronic Housing Code Project website for more detail on this aspect of the new planning system.
Part of the reason for requiring all councils to migrate to the new Standard Instrument format is that it moves much more towards the visual presentation of information in map overlays. These, of course, can be very nicely integrated with Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to allow an applicant to retrieve any information that can be presented in this format.
You can view versions of the maps provided with the draft PLEP elsewhere on this website. The colours are a little difficult to work with at the moment, but all maps, for all localities in NSW, are produced on a common grid, using the same colours so that together they form a consistent montage of the whole state.
These maps are not yet ‘clickable’, but the idea is ultimately to be able to navigate down to an individual lot, and simply click on it to retrieve all the relevant planning details from the new, integrated Local Plan, of which the current LEP will be just one part.
There’s still a bit of work to do, but we’re making progress…