Growth Centres Commission decommissioned

On 29 October Planning Minister Kristina Keneally announced the Growth Centres Commission would be merged with her department.  In a news release from her office she said,

“The Growth Centres Commission has been useful in kick-starting planning and development in Sydney’s north west and south west, but it’s only helping to provide 28% of Sydney’s land supply.”

The Commission was established in 2005 to speed up the zoning and development process for new land within the Growth Centres identified in the newly released Sydney Metropolitan Strategy.

 The North West and South West Growth Centres were planned as areas of high population and jobs growth to help meet the city's planned growth targets set out in the Metropolitan Strategy.  The North West Centre was designed around the planned major centre of Rouse Hill while the South West Centre spread out from the planned Leppington major retail centre.


The commission was also set up to liaise with other state agencies and local councils to coordinate the planning and infrastructure of the growth centres.  Part of the goal of fast and efficient zoning revolved around a new planning system called Precinct Planning.  In this system, the Growth Centres are subdivided into large precincts which are designed to maximise efficient population growth, water and power usage and full access for all new residents to shopping, amenities and transport.  Most importantly, is the precinct plan eliminates a lot of the development red-tape.

A usual development application must adequately address local environmental and heritage concerns before it can be approved.  In the Growth Centres, these issues would be addressed once as part of the precinct plan.  Once the precinct plan is approved developments within the precinct don't need to address these issues in their application.  According to the Commission, this will make developments fast and efficient and can cut the rezoning process from 10 years down to two or three.

The Planning Minister is hoping that by merging the Commission with the Planning Department the Commission's expertise can be more usefully spread across broader development regions across Sydney and NSW.  She said in her news release,

“The Department of Planning will be restructured to have a stronger focus on the state-wide accelerated release of land in Greenfield areas and the redevelopment of existing urban areas.”

This acceleration may be in response to analysts who have recently said population growth in Sydney is accelerating faster than previously modelled.  Housing and jobs growth planned for 2031 in the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy may not adequately cover the latest population growth estimates.

The Growth Commission has put out a statement confirming the Planning Minister's intention to merge the Commission with the Planning Department.  It goes on to address the issue of cancelled transport links to the new centres.  In order to provide mass transit connections to the Growth Centres, the NSW Government rolled out the South West Rail Link and the North West Rail Link that later became the North West Metro.  When both these projects were cancelled earlier this month the Commission responded by sating that neither the restructure nor the cancelled transport projects would change the planned rollout of Growth Centre precincts and that transport access would be addressed.