Exploring the Targeted Assessment Pathway

TAP works by narrowing the range of matters a consent authority is permitted to consider. For certain classes of development, categories that will later be defined through SEPP or regulation, councils and panels must step away from the broader, holistic s4.15 framework and instead assess only the issues identified within the TAP criteria. Other impacts, including some cumulative or contextual factors, may become legally out-of-scope unless they meet the threshold of “significant.” In practice, this places substantial emphasis on determining what qualifies as “significant,” a judgement that is often nuanced, debated and complex. As a result, the effectiveness of TAP will depend heavily on how this definition is applied and interpreted within real-world assessments.

Don’t get me wrong, planning can absolutely be faster, it can also be clearer, more predictable, and less procedurally heavy. But it also has statutory purpose. The EP&A Act has always required that authorities consider the broader public interest, cumulative impacts, contextual heritage effects, biodiversity values, ecological connectivity and, importantly, the objects of the Act itself. TAP appears to compress that entire decision-making universe into a narrower, prescribed set of matters. That raises a problem no amount of messaging can smooth over: a subordinate pathway cannot override the primary legislation. If a council is forced to ignore a relevant impact that the Act requires them to consider, then the decision they make under that pathway may not be legally durable.

This is why the legal community is already flagging risk. Not because planning reform is unwelcome, but because the design of TAP may place consent authorities in an impossible position, follow the streamlined pathway and potentially ignore matters they are otherwise legally obliged to consider, or expand their assessment and potentially breach the pathway’s limits. This will create uncertainty for applicants, consultants, councils, and the communities that will have to live with the outcomes. For disciplines like heritage and ecology, where impacts are often cumulative, landscape-based or setting-dependent rather than neatly “significant” in isolation, the pathway’s constraints risk undervaluing exactly the systems and stories planning is supposed to protect.

TAP isn’t inherently a bad idea. A genuinely proportionate, evidence-based assessment pathway could help free up resources, reduce delays, and let low-risk development move through the system more efficiently. But for that to work, it must be aligned with the EP&A Act’s purpose and with the realities of environmental and heritage practice. A planning system that asks decision-makers to ignore relevant impacts is not a streamlined system, it is a non-exisitant one.