Working with Planners and the Approvals Process

About this course.

Planners assess whether a proposal is acceptable when measured against the applicable planning rules and the relevant considerations the system requires them to weigh — not whether they personally like it, and not merely whether it is a good building. Understanding this is the foundation of working effectively with a planning authority, because it tells you what to address, what evidence to provide, and how to frame your proposal. When you present a development in the language of the assessor's criteria, you make their job easier and your approval more likely; when you ignore those criteria and argue on other grounds, you make the process harder for everyone.

At the core of assessment is the applicable planning framework for the site: the zone and its purpose, the permitted and assessable uses, the development standards (such as height, setbacks, site coverage, density, car parking and landscaping), any overlays or additional controls (heritage, flooding, bushfire, vegetation, contamination and the like), and the broader policies and objectives that guide decisions. A planner reads a proposal against all of these together. So the first thing understanding assessment tells you is to organise your proposal around the same structure: show how it responds to the zone's purpose, where it complies with the standards, and how it deals with each overlay or control that applies.