The New South Wales state government has made significant changes to its planning rules to deny the ability of long distance agitators to mount orchestrated campaigns and hold up planning approvals for new wind, solar and battery projects.
The package of changes, made by state planning minister Paul Scully, lifts the bar on the number of objections that can trigger an automatic independent review of projects, disallows interstate and overseas complaints, and excludes grid scale battery projects from the process altogether.
The NSW system currently requires projects that attract more than 50 objections to be referred to the Independent Planning Commission.
But the process has been hijacked by a group of agitators, many of them living interstate, overseas or hundreds of kilometres, with sometimes wild claims that have no relevance to the project itself. This is affecting nearly nine out of 10 renewable energy projects, adding up to 300 days to the assessment process.
“The Independent Planning Commission plays an important role in the planning system, but objectors from interstate and overseas have turned what should be a clear pathway into a clogged pipeline,” Scully said in a statement.
