THE MINNS GOVERNMENT’S PLANNING AND REFORM AGENDA – PAUL SCULLY

Population increases, home affordability issues and transport availability have all made planning reform a priority for state and local governments. Added to this is an unwieldy and overly complex bureaucracy that has grown and which is in need of overhaul. To explain some of the challenges and provide an insight into the Minns government’s planning for Sydney, The Hon Paul Scully MP, the NSW Minister for Planning and Public Spaces addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 22 April 2026.

THE MINNS GOVERNMENT’S PLANNING AND REFORM AGENDA

PAUL SCULLY

Thank you for the invitation to address the Sydney Institute this evening – a forum that has long encouraged debate from different perspectives on a range of important issues facing New South Wales and the nation. I note your past three functions were addressed by three astute economists – Warren Hogan, Dimitri Burshtein and Alex Sanchez – so in that esteemed company, you could conclude that either my address must either reach a very high bar or is the beginning of a joke that involves walking into a bar.…

Right now, there are defining issues in our national and global discourse:

• Housing
• Fuel prices and fuel security
• Data centres and artificial intelligence
• Cost of living and living standards
• And of course, what many consider to be the most emotionally engaging – the success of your footy team.

The planning system touches on almost all of them – perhaps even the success of your team. On that, I sometimes wonder whether housing costs that cause families to move will mean the next Clint Gutherson or Damien Cook will end up playing another sport rather than guiding future Dragons teams to a better position on the ladder.

If you look at the sign on my office front door – Planning and Public Spaces – the title suggests a pretty arcane mapping and regulatory exercise. I sometimes catch up with former Prime Minister Paul Keating for a tour de force about many issues. He said to me, when we first met in my new role, that if he had been a NSW minister he would have wanted the planning portfolio because of the shear breadth of it. And he’s right – planning is an economic portfolio that directly affects the value of land, buildings, and regions, and can influence the success of industries, industry policy, economic growth, productivity, communities, and living standards of Australians.

For that reason, we need a planning system that is transparent, accountable and built for everything from obtaining and enjoying your home, to driving investment, industry and job creation, and enhancing our urban and natural environments. The planning system I inherited often worked against aspiration. We inherited a complex, confused and confusing system that took too long to get projects underway.

As just one example, there were more than 100 different ways that a local community could be consulted on developments in their area, meaning that one side of the street had different consultation rules from neighbours’ opposite. Unsurprisingly, that has meant that we have not been building enough homes with NSW building just 6 homes per 1000 people, while Victoria and Queensland have been building 8 and 9 homes per 1000 people.

My incoming minister’s brief outlined that New South Wales was forecast to complete just 36,000 homes a year over the coming years – less than half of the target under the National Housing Accord. Even the homes we built became less diverse, with Sydney having less housing diversity today than 100 years ago. In many parts of Sydney, you couldn’t even submit a development application for a new dual occupancy, terrace or townhouse let alone have it approved. Housing types that had been part of Sydney’s housing past were banned from being part of its housing future.

When we think about housing supply, either large projects like apartment blocks or greenfield housing estates, probably come to mind. As vital as they are, 90 per cent of development applications are for less than $1 million – people trying to make modifications to their homes. Or, in many cases, seeking to modify conditions of a previously approved development application so that they can get on with it.

Over the nearly 50 years since the Wran Government introduced the Planning Act legislation, regulatory changes, the courts and others added multiple layers to the system. Individually the decisions may have been right for the time, but they weren’t reviewed or removed, they just grew. I have compared it to the build-up of cholesterol. It might have been okay to whoof down that burger or the pizza on that day but over time it has a bigger impact.

Blockages in the planning system resulted in blockages at the heart of the economy and society. Supply restrictions helped force up costs – the standard response of the price mechanism – but they also helped lower economic growth and living standards. It meant getting anything done was hard and kept getting harder.

Sydney has ended up becoming the second most expensive city on the planet to buy a home and rents were rising more quickly than other cities. It meant that young people in the key 30 to 40 year old age group – the most creative and innovative years of life – were leaving Sydney at twice the rate they were arriving – and they were going to live interstate.

This internal migration has real world consequences. It takes longer to innovate in construction or attract job-creating investment. It has meant that some of the environmental and climate outcomes that we have been seeking to achieve have been delayed. And industry was also affected as we had one of the lowest levels of serviced, available industrial land.

Across the board, productivity growth slowed. And that has helped create the sentiment that our system is failing us – where people now believe that their children and grandchildren will be worse off than they were. When Australians start to feel that they no longer have a chance of being able to afford to live in the area they grew up in, or where they choose, because of the explosion in house prices and rents – the impact of those price increases not only wreck the wallet – they start to rob a generation of their aspiration and of hope.

Communities start to fracture and a new class status is established around geography and the home ownership of your parents. Even basic services start to become limited in some areas, as police, teachers, ambos, aged care workers – even the local barista, can’t afford to live in the areas that need them.

Some of you may have heard of the “Housing Theory of Everything”, by the policy analysts and researchers, Myers, Bowman, and Southwood. They suggest that where we live, profoundly shapes nearly every aspect of our lives, and the performance of our economy. From poor health outcomes to escaping domestic violence, to climate change and low reproduction rates – almost every societal challenge is influenced by housing outcomes.

Faced with all of this, the Minns Government set about making broadscale reforms to the planning system. Both logic and international evidence indicated that making it easier to build homes should put downward pressure on prices and rents. Traditionally, the approach of governments would have been rezoning large land releases at the edges of existing communities, but our options were further constrained because we inherited a budget position that we had to get under control.

The facts are the previous government averaged annual spending growth of more than 7 per cent – and handed us the largest debt ever handed from one government to another in NSW’s history. Not to mention that the infrastructure needed to build greenfield land releases would likely take years to build and add to ongoing budget expenditure.

In addition, Sydney has geographical limits. Building in locations that force workers to travel journeys of two hours or more to work each way, is not reasonable, nor sustainable. In addition, large land releases for housing in the Hawkesbury-Nepean Basin had to be carefully reconsidered because of flooding. We had rightly made the commitment in the 2023 election that we would not allow further residential development on dangerous floodplains to protect long term individual and community safety. Instead, we targeted greater density – done well – in areas where there is existing infrastructure capacity through the Transport Oriented Development program and Low and Mid-Rise Housing Reforms.

Building more homes near to transport, services and jobs while increasing the diversity of homes by making dual occupancies, terraces and town houses permissible again across NSW. We created the Housing Delivery Authority to accelerate the delivery of major residential developments through a streamlined State Significant Development pathway. And we established an in-fill affordable housing program that provides opportunities for new affordable housing to meet the needs of a wide range of households on very low to moderate incomes.

We also expanded social and affordable housing. Not just to deal with a waiting list of more than 50,000 households, but also to make sure that the people who make our cities and suburbs tick have the chance of living near to where they work. When I was growing up my street included the homes of police officers, teachers, steel workers, truck drivers and the like. Now places like the Northern Beaches struggle to find bus drivers because they simply can’t afford to live there. I’ve met health workers who regularly sleep in their car for an hour after a long shift before they embark on the hour or two drive home.

It’s the reason we are investing a record amount to build and repair 8,400 social homes and modernise thousands more. It’s why making sure affordable housing is considered alongside market housing through a combination of inclusionary zoning and market incentives is so important. In addition, we’ve introduced tax reforms such as the extension of stamp duty discounts for first home buyers – more than 80,000 people paying less upfront getting the keys into a home sooner.

Our legislative reforms have, and will, continue to untangle the spaghetti bowl of rules, regulations and assessment processes. One of the most crucial is including housing supply – for the first time – as an Object of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act, placing a greater emphasis on proportionality and centralising the input to assessments from NSW Government agencies.

Before this reform, up to 22 different state agencies might be required to comment on proposals and develop conditions of consent. Advice and conditions were often in direct conflict – one agency might say remove all the trees while another agency would not want a tree on the site touched – this is how chaotic the system has been. You’d get to the end of one queue with an approval, only to join an even longer queue to secure post-consent approvals to then get building.

The new Development Coordination Authority will fix this. A single front door and a single set of conditions from the NSW Government. We also created the world-leading Pre-Sale Finance Guarantee that effectively sees the State going guarantor to help proponents secure construction finance and get building underway without using a dollar of taxpayers’ money upfront. It will mean new homes built sooner. In a small number of cases, it will mean that the NSW Government might own some homes, purchased at a discounted price, to use as key worker, social or affordable housing, or to sell on the market.

This novel approach to government intervention in the market – not a grant, not a subsidy, and no taxpayers’ money needed upfront – has been welcomed by the Housing Industry Association as “…a policy so good, we increased our forecasts”. As its architect I think it’s good too – and so too do the governments of West Australia and South Australia – who have already adopted it and other governments are looking at it too. We are bringing back good design in low and medium rise homes coupled with speedy approvals through our Pattern Book, with homes already under construction using designs developed through an international design competition – the first people move in later this year.

Rental reforms mean that tenants and landlords can be more secure in their dealings with one another. And the results are positive. The most recent ABS statistics record NSW as having the highest number of homes under construction of any state or territory. We have the highest number of homes under construction since March 2019 – almost two election cycles ago. And the lowest number of homes that have been approved and not commenced – a measure of construction intent – since June 2022. The highest number of completions in six years and the highest number of commencements in a quarter since September 2021. Or measured by another index – around half the cranes operating in the country are operating in NSW as measured by the RLB Crane Index.

At the same time, average DA assessment times of councils have fallen by around 30 per cent. This is encouraging, but events and decisions beyond our control are impacting home construction. We will be challenged by the conflict in the Middle East with material suppliers already reporting increases in materials prices with the expectation that price increases may stick around for some time through additional transport costs. These are on top of the 50 per cent increase in land prices in Sydney over the last decade and the more than 30 per cent increase in building materials during the COVID pandemic – prices that have plateaued rather than fallen.

Of course, previous interest rate rises with the possibility of more also challenge feasibility. As does the demand for skills. Electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, plasterers and even planners are the subject of competition for their skills and availability across the nation. That’s why we are looking to innovation for solutions to improve our productivity. The Planning system has a defined set of rules. Assessing against rules is where Artificial Intelligence excels and the market for planning assessment software has grown rapidly.

We have already invested in getting local councils more accustomed to AI so development application assessment can be sped up. At the end of last year, we went to tender for an existing market solution that could be introduced to improve the quality of data in a submitted proposal, because a big source of delay in the assessment process is the proponent and the assessor clarifying submitted information. The Australian technology company, Archistar, has been selected. It is already being used by the State of California to manage the assessment of homes affected by the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. In NSW it will be tested in a contained environment, carefully monitored, and double checked by experienced senior planners with a human always making the final decision.

I’m enthusiastic that this technology can lift performance and if it does, we will look at ways to extend its application. But I want to be clear about my view of AI driven productivity tools. There is no doubt this technology has already revolutionised society and will continue to do so. I believe that government and industry should use AI not to replace, but to increase the productivity of people already in the workforce so they can take on new and more challenging work.

Governments must lead this approach and be part of the digital economy by using tools that have demonstrated value. We need to set the standards. The signs are encouraging that the private sector understand this responsibility. Just last December, Open AI announced its first country-specific program in the Asia-Pacific region. A major pillar is a national workforce AI-skills program delivered in partnership with the Commonwealth Bank, Coles and Wesfarmers, which will mean AI literacy and applied skills training for more than 1.2 million Australians, starting this year.

Similarly, Anthropic has signed an MOU with the Australian government focused on AI safety, governance, and research. And the NSW government has established a Centre of Excellence in applied digital technology at TAFE. To take advantage of these developments we need data centres. They are critical infrastructure for Australia’s economic future because they provide one of the biggest opportunities we have ever had to make Australia a major global hub of advanced industry.

Since 2019, 20 State Significant data centre projects have been approved in New South Wales, representing more than $17.5 billion in development. In 2025, eight more projects were approved, including the biggest and one of the most sustainable data centres in the southern hemisphere. Last week, the United States Studies Centre referenced that in 2024, Australia ranked second globally, after the United States, as the most attractive destination for data centre investment. This is significant because Australia has always been hostage to our physical distance from global markets and investment.

Data centres and, critically, the technologies and industries they create and grow – not only render that distance irrelevant, but they also mean that perhaps for the first time, our distance is our key advantage. That’s because we have no shared border and are a long way from many of the major sources of global political instability. We have a sophisticated finance sector, the rule of law and renewable energy investment.

Given our attractiveness as a data centre destination, we must work with industry so that infrastructure and utility needs for data centre expansion are in addition to what is already planned and funded. And if we do this right – in a partnership – their expansion will support the renewable energy roll-out because the reality is that their investors and their customers have set very clear emissions goals.

I believe this investment could be further improved via a potential community benefit sharing scheme – the same as we have developed with renewable energy infrastructure investment across regional NSW. Most importantly, perhaps also a digital Accord-like agreement with the union movement, who have already demonstrated they are not antitechnology but want to see opportunities in training commitments for workers, and agreement to protections against unsafe uses.

I commenced my speech tonight by referencing some of the issues defining our times. I’ve focussed on two of these in housing and planning reform and new infrastructure in the shape of data centres that will reform industry and investment. The Sydney Institute has more than its fair share of historians and etymologists, so indulge me while I speak to the nature of reform itself.

At its root, the word reform means “to give a new form to something” – not to destroy it, but to re-make it. In addressing the housing challenge, the planning reforms I have outlined will change the future of our cities and suburbs in NSW over the coming decades – they don’t destroy them but remake them. Throughout human history, cities have evolved, changed, grown, been built and rebuilt, to suit the changing needs of society. They have led to advances that have extended lifespans and increased living standards.

In NSW under our reforms, this means we will be living in more densely populated areas, but we will also be better connected to jobs, transport, open spaces and vibrant communities. With data centres, we can introduce reforms that will boost our efforts to build out renewable energy, while reforming employment to make it more interesting and better paid and to create new industries. But we will not repeat the mistakes of the past.

We have a comprehensive approach to contributions that pays for state infrastructure so that communities are not left wondering and fighting for schools and hospitals long after their homes have arrived. One of the first Acts passed by the Minns Government replaced an ad hoc patchwork of infrastructure contribution schemes covering only a fraction of Sydney with an integrated system of infrastructure contributions stretching from the Hunter to the Illawarra. A scheme now matched with a works-in-kind arrangement that allows developers to undertake the work, dedicate land or pay a cash contribution associated with a comprehensive list of projects that will be updated annually so that they are adjusted for budget commitments.

Previous infrastructure investment decision-making was artificially dividing our city and regions, not just into the housing haves and housing have-nots, but dividing people along artificial economic lines. Some areas had the ability to shape or use the planning system to protect their self-interest at the expense of others. This exclusionary approach has left people behind. And when people are left behind, they feel the system no longer works for them, their anger, frustration and anxiety grow – we are seeing this play out across the world and increasingly at home.

As governments, we must be upfront about reforms – explain, justify, defend, and do it again, and again. NSW Labor, under Chris Minns’ leadership, was very upfront with the community at the last election and since. We explained why we needed more homes. We explained why we would rebalance housing growth in Sydney. We explained why we would make sure that community-enabling infrastructure was delivered alongside new homes. We explained why we would reform rental rules to make them fairer.

The reforms we have undertaken and will continue are about reminding all of us that the planning system – this great engine for the promotion of economic and social activity – should always focus on outcomes. But these reforms have not always been well received. Some councils and local communities who have become used to delivering a mere handful of new homes in their areas each year are so incensed by the thought of change that they are challenging the reforms in the courts.

The NSW Liberal- Nationals Opposition even sought to legislate against more homes near transport hubs! But the National Housing Accord – the agreement between the Commonwealth, states, territories, local government and industry – has pushed supply side reform to the front of the national agenda. NSW has been recognised by many as the standout reformer when it comes to addressing the constraints on our legislative and regulatory system. But it is also important that there is cultural change within government, at all levels and within industry, and within communities if we are to truly deliver on the longer-term objective of continuing to provide homes and jobs in better communities long into the future.

My approach as a minister has always been to comprehensively fix the system so the problems of today won’t spring up again for another government to deal with. Finally, our reforms are informed by the founding principles of the political party I’m proud to represent – the Australian Labor Party including:

• The political representation of working people so they can aspire and make their own contribution to our society 20
• Democratic, parliamentary change, not assertion without debate
• The dignity of labour and fairness at work
• Collective solutions to economic bargains
• The equality of opportunity
• Solidarity and mutual obligation
• And pragmatism over dogmatic ideology.

At a time when we are not only confronting significant domestic and global policy challenges, but also the shallow appeal of simplistic solutions based only on fearful sloganeering, I believe these principles have never been more relevant. Because they are enduring values that promote the centre ground – where I believe most Australians still rest – and they are based on reason and compassion. And, most importantly, they are based on hope that there is always a better future in New South Wales and Australia.