The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal has confirmed that it is not a breach of the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 (‘PPIP Act‘) to disclose personal information to a local council to enable the council to carry out investigations…

A Court of Appeal decision has left open the possibility that the amendments to the Environmental Planning & Assessment Act 1979 (EPA Act) made in 2018 have expanded the scope of matters which can be the subject of a merit…

The Supreme Court of New South Wales recently held that three media companies were the ‘publishers’ of comments made by members of the public on their public Facebook pages for the purposes of a defamation claim.  The case sets a…

The Court of Appeal has clarified what the word ‘land‘ means in the context of s57(1)(e) of the Heritage Act 1977 (Act) which requires approval to be obtained before development is carried out ‘in relation to the land’ on which a State heritage…

We recently blogged about the need for conditions of consent to be final and certain here. However, in another recent judgment, the Land & Environment Court has discussed how to provide flexibility in a condition of consent when the information…

This update will consider two recent decisions of the Land and Environment Court in which Commissioners, when determining appeals in Class 1 of the Court’s jurisdiction, declined to grant development consent on jurisdictional grounds.

Ku-ring-gai Council was recently required to defend a decision to amend its local environmental plan (LEP) to remove properties as heritage items from the LEP on the basis that it denied the owners of a house which remained listed procedural…

The State Environmental Planning Policy (Aboriginal Land) 2019 (‘SEPP‘) came into force on 6 February 2019. The SEPP provides for the making of ‘development delivery plans‘ (‘DDPs‘) for land owned by Local Aboriginal Land Councils (‘LALCs’) which must be considered when…

It has long been the case that reasonably minimal preparatory works are sufficient to prevent a development consent from lapsing. A recent case has held that a consent was prevented from lapsing as the result of removal of shrubs, thus…

The Department of Planning’s publication, Coastal Planning Guideline: Adapting to Sea Level Rise, states that time limited development consents are an option to allow for the occupation of coastal lands until they are compromised by coastal hazards. Such development consents have often…

Two recent Land and Environment Court decisions have considered what constituted the land on which a heritage item is situated, and what constituted the land on which an extractive industry was being carried out. The cases remind us that the Court will not consider…

In the recent case of Hakea Holdings Pty Ltd v Louisiana Properties Pty Ltd [2018] NSWCA 240, the NSW Court of Appeal held that the construction of a road did not constitute the erection of a building, and as a result…