Transitional arrangements for Part 3A

13 May 2011

We met with the Minister for Planning and Infrastructure, Brad Hazzard yesterday, and he outlined measures that will give effect to the government’s decision to roll-back Part 3A. Mr Hazzard’s decisions will be formally announced today (although some detail is already in this morning’s newspapers).

 

The NSW Government will publish changes to the Major Development SEPP on www.legislation.nsw.gov.au website. We expect today’s SEPP changes will remove the residential, retail, commercial and coastal development categories from the Part 3A scheme. This means that Part 3A will be primarily about government projects, , mining and heavy industry (although the government will still move to repeal Part 3A, see the separate news item “Planning legislation to come to Parliament” below).

 

We also expect that a planning circular will today be issued by the Department of Planning and Infrastructure (it will be available on their website). We anticipate that the circular will confirm the arrangements for Part 3A projects that are already in the system. As we understand it, the circular will make it clear that:

 

  • a project will continue to be dealt with under Part 3A if it has been formally recognised under Part 3A and the Director-General has issued requirements within the last two years;
  • an application will be nullified if no Director-General’s requirements have been issued, irrespective for whether or not a project has been given Part 3A status; and
  • an application will be nullified if the Director-General’s requirements were issued, but they were issued more than two years ago.

We anticipate that applicants will receive a refund of their application fees if their application is nullified under this process.

 

Applications for about 70 projects are being nullified. One estimate of the capital investment value of the nullified applications is $9 billion, although we have not yet been able to verify this ourselves. About 102 residential, retail, commercial and coastal projects will still be dealt with under Part 3A.

 

We recommend you check the above information against the actual Departmental circular when it becomes available. We will also issue a further Member Alert once the changes to the Major Development SEPP and the new planning circular have been published.

 

We understand that projects that remain in the Part 3A system will be dealt with either by the Planning Assessment Commission or by the Department of Planning and Infrastructure under delegation by the Minister. The Minister will, apparently, not deal with any matters personally. We’re told whether or not a project is decided under delegation will relate to number objections received, etc. Details on this delegation may not be available today, but are likely to be made public early next week.

 

This morning’s Sydney Morning Herald report of these changes is here. It includes a list of projects.  The Daily Telegraph’s report of the changes is hereThe Australian newspaper’s report of the changes (which includes comment from the Urban Taskforce) is here.