Skip to content

OPAX is on iPhone and iPad. Get the app

Menu

The exercise of discretion under Part 3A of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979

Corruption prevention publication · Independent Commission Against Corruption (NSW ICAC) · New South Wales · Published

Summary

The report's own summary: Chapter 1: Introduction and overview, pages 4 to 8

Generated summary: written by an AI model from the report text and checked against the cited pages.

  • The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption reviews discretion and corruption safeguards in state-level planning approvals, following work with the Department of Planning.

    Report, page 4

  • It examines project declarations, assessment and decisions under Part 3A, together with processes for listing state-significant sites.

    Report, page 4 · Report, page 6

  • The Commission identifies broad discretion, complex rules and outdated local plans as risks, while stating that corrupt use of the powers had not been established.

    Report, page 5 · Report, page 9 · Report, page 10

  • Its 20 recommendations address planning controls, independent scrutiny, transparency, the Planning and Assessment Commission and third-party appeal rights for private projects.

    Report, page 6 · Report, page 7 · Report, page 8

In the body's own words

  1. Conclusion

    The greater the departure from the previous norm, the greater the corruption risk.

    Report, page 6

Findings and recommendations

Allegations are not findings. A commission's finding or opinion of corrupt conduct or misconduct is not a finding that a person is guilty of a criminal offence, and the commissions say so in their reports.

No findings or recommendations are reproduced in this record. This does not establish that the report contains none.

Read the report (PDF, 38 pages)

Published responses

Responses to this report have not been checked.

Notes on this record

  • Corruption prevention and research reports make no findings about individuals; any recommendations are not extracted unless set out as numbered recommendations that could be read confidently.

Coverage

This publisher

  • Reports on investigations made public before 2016 are not online: the ICAC keeps only a summary for each, and copies must be requested from the ICAC. Those records hold the ICAC's published summary; findings and recommendations are not extracted.
  • The ICAC copyright statement reserves all rights (fair dealing aside). OPAX keeps short verbatim finding and recommendation passages with links to the original report.
  • Findings are read from the summary chapter of each report PDF. Where a finding's particulars run past the cited page only the finding statement is kept, and reports whose layout could not be read confidently are marked not_extracted.
  • Agency action plans and progress reports are listed as documents; their contents (implementation status for each recommendation) are not parsed.
  • Report PDFs without a text layer (scanned images, for example Operation Scania) are not OCRed; their findings stay not_extracted.
  • Many pre-2016 summaries give only the month a report was made public; those records carry no date and a note with the month, because the schema holds day-level dates only.