Performance-based planning in Queensland

The performance-based planning experiment in Queensland is now in its eighth year. The Integrated Planning Act 1997 (IPA) is the legislation governing Queensland's planning and development assessment system. The IPA is administered by 125 local governments, involves the State Government (including at least 7 State concurrence agencies), and directly engages over 3,000 people in State and local government agencies, and the private sector. Up to 100,000 development applications (including building approvals) representing over S6 billion of development work, are processed annually through the IPA's Integrated Development Assessment System (IDAS). Unlike most other Australian States, local governments in Queensland have the primary responsibility for plan-making and development assessment and approval. Prior to the IPA, local councils dealt with a range of planning approvals including applicant-initiated rezoning applications, This approach was based on the long-held acceptance of local government autonomy (subject to reserve powers), and the principle that planning approvals should be made at the level of government closest to the community most affected. The IPA is one of the most wide-ranging regulatory reforms undertaken in Queensland, and possibly Australia. It is much more than just an update of town planning legislation and forms an important part of successive State government commitments to broader micro-economic and administrative reforms. It is a long-haUl agenda which focuses not only on modernising and making sense of the land use and development regulation regime, but also on making changes to old cultures and ways of doing things. These issues present some of the difficulties and impediments to change, and directly impact on implementing a performance-based planning system. This paper presents a review of Queensland's experience in moving towards aperformance-based planning system that is part of major legislative and administrative reforms. Central to these reforms is the ability prOVided by the Integrated Planning Act 1997 (IPA), to move away from traditional prescriptive "activity based" regulation, to an "effects based" planning system where development proposals are judged on their merits and in keeping with policy outcomes sought by the community. This papers is comprised of three parts. First, is an overview of the performance-based planning literature, which presents some of the challenges that have been encountered by other governments in implementing and administering performancebased planning systems. The overview focuses on the planning experiences in the United States and New Zealand, Secondly, the core performance-based elements of IPA are summarized; and finally, we assess some of the implementation difficulties encountered in Queensland's move to performance-based planning.