And continue to build in the flood plains where government departments and their desired agencies can pick over the bones while planning taxpayer funding exhibitions.

Funny isn't it how the actual landOWNER is hardly given any recognition when it comes to planning. The landOWNER is hardly ever considered as when planning restrictions are invented at the stroke of a pen.
Mostly referred to as the landholder. As if he is holding on to the land waiting for the government to come along and decide what he can or cannot do with his land.

As far as state government planning goes, one only has to look at the endless failures of the planning system. Roads are congested and hospitals are run down, to mention just a couple of failures. Infrastructure generally has been left to deteriorate. The environment has been used as the weapon to lock up private land and to justify the central planning. What has happened is that zoning has led to a land shortage and has reduced competition which has driven up prices and made housing unaffordable. So if this central planning is supposed to achieve a better outcome than would happen otherwise then tell me where I am wrong. Zoning is one of the tools that government use to play God politically.
Bureaucrats have given themselves power to become our masters instead of our servants.
Less control means less power to the bureaucrats and more economic freedom.
Stop telling people what colour they should paint their homes and what they can and can't do with their properties. Have a look at the hundreds of pages of controls that are part of every Councils Local environmental plan and say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
LESS IS BEST.

Thank you for this article, John Mant, and congratulations. Among the plethora of articles, presently on OLO and elsewhere, setting forth what the incoming O'Farrell government now 'must do' in NSW, yours has hit paydirt!

On the evening of Saturday 26 March 2011, Premier-elect Barry O'Farrell in his accession speech following Kristina Keneally's concession that the Liberal/National coalition had won government in NSW, said, inter alia:




"... and we will re-write the Planning Act."




I'm sure Barry O'Farrell meant by that the NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, as you made clear in the opening paragraph of your article is the relevant legislation.

It is to be noted that Barry O'Farrell has asked that his government be held to account for its delivery of what it has promised under the terms of the overwhelming mandate given it by the voters. It is also to be noted that the re-writing of the EP&A Act is not something that need be subject to what the incoming government will doubtless find to be the budgetary constraints that are expected by any thinking person to likely hamstring it in the implementation of some of its other commitments.

A careful, and truly consultative, re-write of the EP&A Act will cut the ground from under the feet of all the would-be bureaucratic control-freaks and bullying little-tin-hitler lower level enforcer types that that legislation in its present form has so facilitated and empowered. It will also cut the ground from under the business models of the feather-bedded inside-track-dependent consultancies and privatised 'service provider' contractors that have mushroomed in recent decades in response to the 'business opportunities' and 'post political career employment demand' created by the 1979 legislation as amended.

Few people acquire a good comprehension of the stultifying evil of planning legislation as we have come to know it. The informing of the public as to how planning laws really work is something that has historically been frustrated by vested interest. Please keep articles like this coming.