By Duncan Leys, Acting President

The Environmental Planning & Assessment Amendment (Planning System Reforms) Bill 2025 was passed by the NSW Parliament in late November.

The Bill aims to speed up the development approval process essentially by limiting the role of local councils and communities and instead giving power to state public servants and ministers, through the creation of the Development Coordination Authority.

The purported purpose is to deliver more homes through a modern, faster and fairer planning system for NSW. The Bill also seeks faster approval for resource projects.

I share the concerns about the Bill of the Environmental Defenders Office, the Nature Conservation Council, the Centre for Public Integrity, the Paddington Society and other community groups.

Cutting red tape … again?

We have been here before.

I remember the private certification reforms of the late 1990s that were supposed to cut council red tape and make for faster approvals.

Who could think that a private certifier engaged and paid for by the developer or builder would not come under pressure to let go work that ought to have been stopped and redone? Clearly, too many private certifiers could not resist the pressure.

The consequences of this act of naivety by the government led to a period in which virtually all new apartment buildings in NSW had defects (UNSW 2012[1]). Apartment buyers were often left to pay tens of thousands of dollars to fix substandard work. I cannot forget the images of residents being evacuated from their defective buildings in the middle of the night.

It took the appointment of the Building Commissioner in 2019 to start to put a line under the shambles.

Today’s regulatory push to cut red tape risks perpetuating the same problems, a significant decline in housing quality and community amenity, and opportunities for community input.

I see the NSW Government has announced its intention to introduce Building Productivity reform legislation in 2026 which will include measures to make clear the overriding obligation of private certifiers to buyers of homes, not to builders and developers. Penalties for breaches are to be raised substantially, although what is a sufficient penalty when a new home is uninhabitable? These reforms will be welcome, but they are 30 years too late.

We are still living with the legacy of years of shoddy apartment building. The Sydney Morning Herald regularly runs articles on apartment buildings that have been abandoned because of Stop Work Orders issued by the Building Commissioner and/or because the developer is insolvent.

Shortage of qualified tradies

We have a huge task in NSW to build the number of homes needed to meet the current shortage and we simply do not have enough qualified tradespeople to build them. Who is responsible for the shortage of tradespeople? Certainly not local councils. Developers and the state government are responsible for training tradespeople.

I understand there are not even enough qualified tradespeople to undertake the work currently approved by the City of Sydney Council.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Shoddy Sydney series of articles earlier this year has also highlighted the use of tradespersons with bogus qualifications or fraudulent licences, reporting that the Building Commissioner’s staff had prepared criminal briefs to bring more than 50 charges against a ‘number of people’, with more charges expected as their investigation continued (SMH 8 April 2025).

Defects and non-compliance

Another Shoddy Sydney article (SMH 7 April 2025) revealed that the Commission’s data showed that 40 percent of work rectification orders for stand-alone homes were not being complied with within the mandated period, and defects were being found in close to 25 percent of apartment complexes.

Where is the plan for recruiting and training the workforce we need to build the homes in the quantity we need? Where is the enforcement of the licensing rules, to keep shonky tradespersons out of the industry?

Premier Minns told an audience at the recent Sydney Investment Summit ‘We are in the process of making NSW the quickest, the easiest, the most direct state to develop and realise big projects in’.

I fear the Premier is too focused on quantity, to the exclusion of quality and amenity. We need all three.

[1] Governing the Compact City: The Role and Effectiveness of Strata Management in Higher Density Residential Developments (Final Report) by Hazel Easthope, Bill Randolph and Sarah Judd, City Futures Research Centre, Faculty of the Built Environment, University of NSW, May 2012.