9,484 conditions across 37 councils · 295 audit errors found across 33 councils · Newcastle, Central Coast, Wollongong added · CB & Lake Mac document checkers live · 37-council directory with LEP links · LEP clause reference + key timeframes ·

About

About DAPlanner

What it is, where the data comes from, how it works, and what to watch out for.

What It Is

DAPlanner is a free reference tool for searching and comparing development consent conditions across NSW councils — 33 Sydney Metro and 4 Non-Sydney Metro.

Planning officers, consultants, developers, and lawyers currently have to manually download consent PDFs from the NSW Planning Portal, open each one, and read through the conditions. DAPlanner makes that data searchable.

It also includes:

  • Error Audit — AI checks every condition for outdated legislation, abolished agencies, typos
  • Legislation Feed — live feed of NSW LEP/SEPP/Act changes with amendment PDFs and legislative history links
  • PAN Checker — lodgement document checklist with copy-paste output
  • Quick Links — 37-council directory with verified LEP links, referral agencies, mapping tools
  • What's Current? — reference tracker for abolished agencies, renamed legislation, superseded standards
  • Referral Checker — tick site characteristics, see which referrals are triggered
  • Compare Councils — side-by-side condition comparison between any two councils
  • Council Report Card — per-council error rate, top categories, and benchmarking
  • Court Feed — LEC Class 1 appeal decisions categorised by planning topic
  • Dashboard — council league table and daily quick access tools for planners

Data Sources

9,484 conditions from 273 DAs across 37 councils

FINAL CONDITIONS

NSW Planning Portal — Regional Planning Panels

Published Notices of Determination for panel-determined DAs. These are final issued conditions — the legally binding conditions attached to the development consent. Scraped going back approximately one year.

FINAL CONDITIONS

City of Sydney ePlanning Portal

Notice of Determination PDFs from the City of Sydney's ePlanning system. These are final issued conditions for DAs determined by City of Sydney.

DRAFT CONDITIONS

Local Planning Panel (LPP) Meeting Agendas

Council officer reports presented to Local Planning Panels. These contain draft recommended conditions — what the officer recommends to the panel. The panel may approve, modify, add, or remove conditions before issuing the final consent. Applicable to Sydney Metro councils only (Non-Sydney Metro councils have councillor-determined DAs).

COURT DECISIONS

NSW Caselaw — Land and Environment Court

Class 1 appeal decisions from the Land and Environment Court, sourced from NSW Caselaw. Categorised by planning topic with summaries extracted from judgment text.

Not Currently Included

— Delegated DAs — staff-determined applications (typically CIV <$30M). These represent 90%+ of all DAs by volume.
— State Significant Development (SSD/SSDA) — determined by the Minister or Independent Planning Commission.
— Complying Development Certificates (CDCs) — assessed by private certifiers, not published centrally.
— Court-modified conditions — Land & Environment Court modifications to consent conditions.

Methodology

Planners currently have to download consent PDFs one at a time from the NSW Planning Portal, open each document, and manually read through the conditions. There's no way to search across councils, compare approaches, or check for errors at scale. DAPlanner automates what would otherwise take weeks of manual work.

1 Download determination documents from public portals (PDFs and DOCX files). Council is tagged at scrape time — no guessing.
2 Extract text using PDF/DOCX text extraction. Find the conditions section, split on condition numbers.
3 Match whole conditions to 19 categories using 15 keyword profiles with include/exclude regex patterns.
4 Clean: remove extraction artefacts, deduplicate, drop unattributable conditions. Current attribution rate: ~83%.
5 Run automated error audit against current legislation, agencies, standards, and spelling. Date-aware — only flags errors that were wrong at time of determination.

Fully Automated

The entire pipeline runs weekly on a scheduled cron job — zero manual intervention. New DAs are scraped, conditions extracted, categorised, audited, and deployed automatically. The legislation feed updates from the NSW Gazette at every build.

Error Audit

Every condition is checked against a reference list of current NSW legislation, government agencies, and Australian Standards. The audit is date-aware — references are only flagged as errors if they were outdated at the time the DA was determined. 55 references were suppressed because they were correct at the time of determination.

The audit checks for:

Legislation

EP&A Act/Reg, POEO Act, WHS Act, BC Act, current SEPPs

Agencies

SafeWork NSW, TfNSW, WaterNSW (not abolished names)

Standards

Current AS editions (AS 4970:2025, AS/NZS 2107:2016)

Quality

Placeholders (XXXX), typos, AU spelling (licence not license), missing recipients

An error is systemic if it appears in 2+ DAs determined after the reference became outdated — indicating a template that hasn't been updated. Currently 19 systemic patterns found across 33 councils.

Built By

DAPlanner was built by Priscilla Prakash, a town planner based in NSW. The project demonstrates AI capability for planning quality assurance — how AI can audit consent conditions at a speed and scale that would be impractical manually.

Disclaimer

This site is provided for reference purposes only. It is not legal advice.

Conditions in the search database are extracted from published Notices of Determination on the NSW Planning Portal and council ePlanning portals. They are reproduced verbatim. Some conditions may also be sourced from Local Planning Panel meeting agendas (draft recommended conditions that may have been modified before final consent).

Data quality: Conditions are extracted from PDFs using automated text extraction. Some conditions may be incomplete or may not have a DA number attributed. 9,484 conditions are currently indexed across 37 councils (33 Sydney Metro, 4 Non-Sydney Metro).

Always verify conditions against the original determination documents on the NSW Planning Portal.

DA conditions of consent are public records under the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 (GIPA).