Guide · Development · Hunter
Who decides a Hunter development application, and why the panel reforms stopped at the Central Coast
In every Sydney council area, and in Wollongong and on the Central Coast, the contentious development applications are taken off the council and decided by a local planning panel of independent experts. There is no such panel in any Hunter local government area. So a Hunter application has three possible decision makers rather than four, and the reform that expanded panels in January 2026 says, in the department’s own words, that it changes nothing here.
This is the fourth guide in a set. The others cover how to object to a development application, how rezoning works, and how to find the projects the state decides. This one answers a question all three leave open: once an application is lodged, whose decision is it?
Three answers in the Hunter, and four almost everywhere else
For most building work, the council is the consent authority and the council decides. For bigger or particular kinds of development, the decision moves to the Hunter and Central Coast Regional Planning Panel. For a narrower band again it moves to the state, which is the State Significant Development track our third guide covers.
That is three. In Greater Sydney, Wollongong and the Central Coast there is a fourth, sitting
between the first two: a local planning panel, constituted by the council but deciding on its
behalf. The department describes it plainly: Local planning panels consist of a chair and 2
independent experts appointed by a council, plus a community representative.
Those panels take
the applications where there is concern that a development assessment may be compromised
,
along with sensitive and heavily objected-to proposals.
The panel the Hunter does not have
The department publishes a list of every local planning panel in the state. As at 1 March 2026 it names 36 of them, and the northernmost is Central Coast. Newcastle is not on it. Neither is Lake Macquarie, Cessnock, Maitland, Port Stephens, Singleton, Muswellbrook, Dungog or Upper Hunter.
The reason is in the ministerial direction that sends applications to those panels. Signed by the Minister for Planning and Public Spaces, Paul Scully, on 6 May 2024, it applies to councils in the Greater Sydney Region, Wollongong and Central Coast, and to any other council that constitutes a local planning panel under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979. No Hunter council appears in its table, and none has taken up the voluntary route.
One council has. Wingecarribee, in the Southern Highlands, is on the department’s panel list and is named nowhere in the direction’s table, which is what the voluntary route looks like when a council uses it. That is also how the two documents check each other: the direction’s table names 35 councils across its three schedules, the panel list carries 36 entries, and the single difference is Wingecarribee.
What those panels decide is worth knowing even where they do not sit, because it is a fair description of the applications that most reliably go wrong. Under the direction’s first schedule, a panel takes any application where the applicant or land owner is the council itself, a councillor, a senior planning officer, a member of parliament, or a relative of one of them. It takes any application drawing 10 or more unique submissions by way of objection, where a unique submission is one that is in substance distinctive rather than a petition or a form letter. It takes anything that breaches a development standard by more than 10 per cent. And it takes a list of sensitive categories: designated development, residential apartment development, the demolition of a heritage item, new licensed premises, sex services premises, and any application where the developer has offered a planning agreement.
In the Hunter, none of that applies. An application here that hits every one of those triggers at once is still the council’s to determine.
What 16 January 2026 changed, and what it did not
The state is midway through rebuilding this system, and the first tranche landed on 16 January
2026. Its effect was to push work down: regionally significant applications, previously
decided by a regional panel, were handed to local planning panels instead.
All regionally significant development applications lodged after 16 January 2026 are delegated
to the relevant Local Planning Panel for determination on behalf of the relevant Sydney District
or Regional Planning Panel
, the department’s fact sheet says, and many applications
already in train moved with them.
Which is a change you can only receive if you have a panel to receive it. The same fact sheet
is unambiguous about who did: Local Planning Panels have been established in all local
government areas of Greater Sydney, as well as Wingecarribee, Central Coast, and Wollongong local
government areas.
For everybody else, The 4 Regional Planning Panels will continue to
determine regionally significant development applications for council areas without an established
local planning panel.
And then, without hedging: For most councils in regional NSW, the changes introduced in
January 2026 will have no impact.
The department is not pretending this is the end state. It says it will consult regional
councils about setting panels up, and that it has not settled when:
We will be consulting with regional councils about the potential establishment of new Local
Planning Panels and are currently considering the timing of that consultation.
Until then,
Regional Planning Panels will continue to operate in these areas until Local Planning Panels
are established.
Read that alongside the stated purpose of the reform, which is to
return more development applications to council staff for assessment, ensuring decisions are
made closer to the communities they affect
, and the position in the Hunter is odd rather than
unfair. A programme whose banner is local decision making has, in its first tranche, moved
decisions closer to the community in the places that already had the most machinery for it, and
left the Hunter waiting on a consultation with no date. That is our reading of the sequence, not a
claim about anyone’s intent, and the documents above are the whole basis for it.
What actually goes to the Hunter and Central Coast panel
Since the regional panel is the Hunter’s only step between the council and the state, the
threshold for reaching it matters more here than it does in Sydney. The department defines the
category by size and kind: Regionally significant development is larger in investment value,
scale and/or complexity.
The types are set in schedule 6 of State Environmental Planning
Policy (Planning Systems) 2021, in the Act, and in the 2021 regulation. The typical cases the
department lists are:
projects with a capital investment value of more than $30 million
- projects above $5 million that are council-related, lodged for the State of NSW, private infrastructure and community projects, or eco-tourism facilities
- extractive industries, waste facilities and marinas
- coastal protection works with no certified coastal management program, and certain coastal subdivisions
projects with a capital investment value of $10 million to $30 million that the applicant refers to the planning panel after 120 days
That last one is a right the applicant holds and the objector does not. If a council has sat on a mid-sized application for 120 days, the developer can lift it out of the council and put it in front of the panel. Nothing equivalent runs the other way.
The council-related trigger is the one to keep in view locally. At $5 million it is six times lower than the general threshold, and it exists because a council assessing its own proposal is the plainest conflict in the system. It is also the trigger that a local planning panel would otherwise catch at any value at all, which is the practical gap in the Hunter: a council project under $5 million is assessed and determined by the same council, with no panel of any kind involved.
Who sits on it, and how much of it is the Hunter
There are nine panels in the state. NSW has 9 planning panels: 5 for the Sydney district and
4 for regions.
Hunter and Central Coast is one of the four, alongside northern, western and
southern.
Membership is the part worth knowing before you read a determination:
Each panel has at least 3 members: a chair and 2 regular members appointed by the Minister for
Planning. Local councils may nominate another 2 members.
So on a Hunter application, the state
appoints three and the council nominates two. The chair of the Hunter and Central Coast panel is
Alison McCabe, and its state members are Roberta Ryan and Stephen Leathley.
The panel is regional in the widest sense: one body covers the Hunter and the Central Coast together, so a Newcastle application and a Gosford application go to the same three state appointees, with only the two council nominees changing.
None of this changes how you object
This is the reassuring part, and it is the reason our
submission guide still applies
whichever way an application is routed. The council remains the body that assesses the application
and puts it on exhibition. The department describes the regional panel process exactly this way:
The council assesses the application and shows it to the public as usual but then presents its
findings to the planning panel instead of its own council officers for approval.
Your submission still goes to the council, on the council’s timetable, and it still lands in the assessment report. What moves is the signature at the bottom.
Finding out that a panel is deciding something near you
Panel meetings are public, and the department lists the upcoming ones on a single page covering all nine panels. It has no filter. When we read it on 24 August 2026 it carried two upcoming meetings in the whole state, both Southern Regional Planning Panel matters, at Bega Valley and Queanbeyan-Palerang, and none for Hunter and Central Coast.
Two things follow. A quiet page is not evidence that nothing is happening, because only certain matters go to a public meeting at all. And there is no way to subscribe to your own area, so watching for a Hunter matter means re-reading a state-wide list, which is the sort of task nobody does twice. The regional panel’s own application numbers carry the prefix PPSHCC, which is at least a usable string to search when you have one in hand.
A correction to our own guide
Our state significant development guide opens by saying that most building work is lodged with and determined by your council. In the Hunter that is right. Written as a general statement about New South Wales it is not, because across the 36 council areas above the determining body for a contentious application is a panel the council constituted rather than the council itself. We have left the sentence in place, since that guide is written for Hunter readers, and record the qualification here.
How we made this
Read from the department’s own instruments on 24 August 2026: the list of local planning panels as at 1 March 2026, the Local Planning Panels Direction covering development applications and modification applications, the January 2026 fact sheet on changes to the panel system, and the department’s pages on local planning panels and regionally significant development. The count of 36 panels was taken twice by different methods and then checked against a second document: the direction’s own table names 35 councils across three schedules, and the difference between the two lists is Wingecarribee alone.
The Local Planning Panels Direction is published by the department as a photocopied scan with no text layer, so it cannot be searched, cannot be read by a screen reader and cannot be quoted by any automated check. We read it as page images and describe its contents rather than quoting it, which is why no sentence attributed to that document appears here in quotation marks. Every passage that does appear in quotation marks comes from a document with real text behind it.
What we have not established: how each Hunter council exercises the consent authority it keeps. Whether a given application is signed off by staff under delegation or voted on by the elected council is set by each council’s own delegations, and we have not read them. That is the next question on this beat and it is a different document in eight different places. We also have not asked any Hunter council whether it has considered constituting a panel; the department’s consultation is the mechanism that would surface that, and it has no date.
Sources
- NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, List of Local Planning Panels, as at 1 March 2026 (read 24 August 2026): the 36 panels and their local government areas, the absence of every Hunter council, the presence of Wingecarribee, Central Coast and Wollongong.
- NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Changes to the planning panel system in NSW, fact sheet, January 2026 (read 24 August 2026): the 16 January 2026 commencement, the delegation of regionally significant applications to local planning panels, the statement that the four regional panels continue where no local panel exists, that the changes have no impact for most regional councils, the undated consultation with regional councils, and the stated purpose of the reform.
- NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Local Planning Panels Direction: Development Applications and Applications to Modify Development Consents, signed 6 May 2024 (read as page images 24 August 2026): the councils to which it applies, the voluntary route for any other council, the table of 35 councils across three schedules, and the schedule 1 criteria for conflict of interest, contentious development, departure from development standards and sensitive development.
- NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Local planning panels (read 24 August 2026): panel membership, the circumstances in which a panel determines an application, and the January 2026 reforms.
- NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Regionally significant development (read 24 August 2026): the definition, the instruments that list the types, every capital investment value threshold quoted above, the nine panels, panel membership including the two council nominees, and that the council assesses and exhibits the application before presenting its findings to the panel.
- NSW Planning Portal, Hunter & Central Coast Regional Planning Panel (read 24 August 2026): the chair and state members named above.
- NSW Planning Portal, Planning panel meeting details (read 24 August 2026): the two upcoming public meetings in the state on that date, both Southern Regional Planning Panel matters, and the absence of any filter by panel or council.
Spotted an error in this guide? Request a correction and we will check it against the sources and log the outcome here.