Planning and Infrastructure

7.1. The precautionary principle— if there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, the benefit of the doubt must lie with protecting the environment. Lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as cover to allow development to proceed.
7.2. Inter-generational equity – when making planning decisions the health, diversity and productivity of the environment must be maintained or enhanced for future generations.
7.3. Biological diversity and ecological integrity— conserving diversity and ecological integrity is fundamental and these values must not be traded away for alleged economic benefits.
7.4. Improved valuation, pricing and incentive mechanisms— environmental factors (clean air, water, trees, minerals and quietude) should be included in the valuation of development. Nature must no longer be seen as inexhaustible and free to be exploited. Polluters should pay for their pollution and waste management. The valuation of development must include its full life cycle costs.

8.1. Requiring proponents to document the emissions of their development (construction, operation and decommissioning) and evaluate a proposal’s susceptibility to the likely impacts of climate change such as sea level rise, extreme heat, bushfires and flooding.
8.2. Ensuring the government provides guidance on estimating the emissions of development and the likely impacts of climate change such as sea level rise, extreme heat, bushfires and flooding.
8.3. Embedding incentives for low emission development in planning policies including standardised instruments to assess the greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water use of developments to promote more sustainable development.
8.4. Prioritising any new development capable of reducing or preventing greenhouse gas emissions.
8.5. Ensuring all planning laws, policies, planning instruments and decisions are consistent with achieving the goal of zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.
8.6. Ensuring that the assessment of proposals for fossil fuel mining and extraction consider the impact on the climate caused by burning the fossil fuels that are extracted.

9.1. Decisions being made as close to communities as possible by local, elected representatives.
9.2. Maximising community consultation
9.3. Limiting the ability for state intervention by the planning minister.
9.4. Reducing the focus on quick approvals and instead focusing on good development outcomes.
9.5. Ensuring large projects, including infrastructure projects, are subject to full environmental, heritage and social impact assessment.
9.6. Ensuring local communities benefit from development by requiring more green open space and improved community facilities to accommodate increased density.
9.7. Giving equal appeal rights to the community and developers to challenge planning decisions.
9.8. Reinstating public funding for the Environmental Defenders Office.
9.9. Adopting collaborative, regional assessment processes where the impacts or benefits of a planning proposal extend beyond any one locality. The final decision is to be made by elected representatives from the affected councils with genuinely independent state planning officials undertaking the co-ordination of local responses and the assessment of the proposal.

10.1. Maintaining and expanding the ban on developer donations to political parties and politicians.
10.2. Real time reporting of all political donations.
10.3. Preventing councillors from approving development contrary to the recommendation of council planning staff by providing an automatic review by a genuinely independent state planning commission whenever that happens.
10.4. Requiring environmental and other specialists who provide reports or assessments for planning matters to act with integrity. This includes the ability to obtain peer reviews of controversial reports with significant penalties and sanctions for providing wrong or misleading information in planning matters.
10.5. Abolishing private certification and reinstating public certifiers employed by local councils with independent professional regulation.

11.1. Expand protected natural areas to maximise biodiversity and provide more resilient natural reserves.
11.2. Maximise, and where necessary reinstate, links and corridors between parks, nature reserves and forests to allow for the movement of biodiversity across the landscape.
11.3. Prioritise tree protection in both urban and regional NSW.
11.4. Recognise that First Nations people have the right to own and control First Nations culture and heritage. They must have the right to provide free, prior and informed consent before activities which will impact on First Nations heritage are permitted, and.
11.5. Implement Australia’s international conservation and heritage conventions in our planning laws.

12.1. Prioritisation of principles of universal design, and universal access to public spaces and services.
12.2. Affordable housing.
12.3. Healthy communities.
12.4. Active and public transport links.
12.5. Attractive human scale development.
12.6. Innovative design.
12.7. Decentralisation.
12.8. Food security.