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  • The System Is Working Fine. That’s the Problem.

    The System Is Working Fine. That’s the Problem.

    23 June, 2026

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    Simon Halcrow

    MAKE PLANNING GREAT AGAIN Article 4 Why the DA system cannot reform itself, and what it will take to change that. The DA system is not broken. That is the first thing to understand, and the hardest. A broken system fails to deliver what it was designed to produce. The NSW development assessment system…

  • Nimbin, Co-Living and Cooperative Housing: 50 Years of ignoring council and getting on with it

    Nimbin, Co-Living and Cooperative Housing: 50 Years of ignoring council and getting on with it

    4 June, 2026

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    Simon Halcrow

    How Australia’s planning system spent fifty years failing to understand something a group of hippies solved on a hillside in 1973. The road into Nimbin doesn’t announce itself. You leave the highway somewhere past Lismore, climb into the hinterland through cane and cattle country, and then the landscape changes. The air gets heavier. The…

  • The Registered Planner Certified Assessment Model: How to Make It Work in NSW Right Now

    The Registered Planner Certified Assessment Model: How to Make It Work in NSW Right Now

    27 May, 2026

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    Simon Halcrow

    MPGA: The Limited Planning Series Nobody Asked For – Article 2 The first article in this series argued that the Council DA Planner is redundant for permissible use assessments and should be replaced with a Registered Planner certified assessment model. The response was significant. The argument clearly touched a nerve. But provocation without a…

  • Delete the Council DA Planner: Why the Council DA Planner Needs to Be Cut from the Approvals Process

    Delete the Council DA Planner: Why the Council DA Planner Needs to Be Cut from the Approvals Process

    21 May, 2026

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    Simon Halcrow

    Australia is in a housing crisis. Every level of government acknowledges it. Targets have been set, strategies published, and Regional Plans gazetted. The State has done the strategic work. The LEP reflects it. So why is a single Council DA Planner still sitting between a compliant development application and an approval? The strategic studies…

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