Refusal grounds for childcare centres are remarkably consistent: traffic generation, parking, acoustic performance of children at play, and pedestrian safety. Applicants answer them with a traffic impact assessment, an acoustic report and a plan of management, prepared against published guidelines.

Where the same three questions are asked of nearly every application of a type, and answered by the same three disciplines against the same guidelines, the merits assessment is doing less discretionary work than its elapsed time suggests.

The pattern in the data is the appeal step. A Lithgow refusal in December 2025 on traffic, parking, noise and pedestrian safety grounds was reversed by the Land and Environment Court. That is not an isolated case for this use.

Look at what a reversed refusal produces. The community got no protection — the centre was built. The applicant paid for a court case. The council paid to defend one. The centre opened roughly a year later. Nobody in that sequence behaved unreasonably: the objectors had real concerns, the councillors responded to their electorate, the court applied the controls. The system produced a worse outcome for every participant than either a faster approval or a refusal that held.

A code-assessable pathway converts that into a question with an answer in advance. Meet the acoustic standard, meet the parking and queuing standard, meet the setback and hours-of-operation standard, and the centre is certified. Fail any of them and it goes to merits assessment as now.

Filed as an idea, not a proposal, because the thresholds are the whole argument and this project does not have them. Someone who has assessed these applications needs to say which of the standard objections can be reduced to a measurable standard and which genuinely require judgement about a particular street.

Who acts: the state, through the planning instrument. Not the Commonwealth, which funds the demand and controls none of this.