Enter the fast pathway by meeting published criteria, not by being selected into it
Both major fast-track housing pathways in Australia are entered by ministerial declaration on a panel's recommendation. A proponent cannot know in advance whether they qualify, cannot appeal exclusion, and waits on a meeting cycle to find out.
Steps this would change
- Build a multi storey apartment building via the Housing Delivery Authority — New South Wales — Expression of interest to the Housing Delivery Authority
- Build a multi storey apartment building via the Housing Delivery Authority — New South Wales — Housing Delivery Authority considers the proposal
- Build a multi storey apartment building via the Housing Delivery Authority — New South Wales — Ministerial declaration as state significant development
Rationale
The Housing Delivery Authority and the Victorian Development Facilitation Program are the two most consequential planning reforms in Australia and they share a design feature that has attracted almost no scrutiny: entry is discretionary.
A proponent lodges an expression of interest, waits for a panel that meets on a
cycle and considers proposals in batches -- 137 at one meeting in June 2026 --
and then waits for a ministerial declaration. In this database that is 105 days
of scheduling before the substantive process starts, and it exists only
because someone must decide whether you may enter.
Three consequences follow, and only the first is about time.
It reintroduces the delay it was built to remove. A gateway designed to escape a queue has a queue at the gate.
It cannot be planned around. A developer choosing between pathways is choosing between a known slow process and a possible fast one, without knowing which they will get. That uncertainty is priced into feasibility, and a pathway that cannot be relied on at the point of land acquisition delivers less than its approval statistics suggest.
It makes housing approval a matter of ministerial discretion. That is a significant change in the character of the planning system and it is being made without the debate it would attract if it were proposed directly. Discretionary entry to a favourable process, with no published entitlement and no review of refusal, is exactly the arrangement that planning panels were introduced to move away from. It should not be reintroduced by accident on the way to a housing target.
The proposal: publish the criteria the panel is in fact applying -- capital investment, dwelling yield, location relative to infrastructure, affordable housing contribution -- and give any proposal meeting them an entitlement to the pathway. Keep a discretion to include borderline proposals. Remove the discretion to exclude qualifying ones.
Who acts: New South Wales and Victoria, independently. The Commonwealth's only lever is the National Housing Accord, which is where this belongs as a condition.
What is being traded away
The objections to this are stronger than they first appear.
Discretion is doing real work. A panel can decline a proposal that meets every published criterion and is still a bad idea -- wrong site, undeliverable, a proponent with a record of not building what they are approved for. Codifying entry means approving the ones you can describe and losing the ability to refuse the ones you cannot. Anyone who has watched a code-based pathway meet a determined applicant knows how that ends.
Objective criteria get gamed, and NSW has the scar tissue. Complying development is the domestic precedent for entitlement-based fast tracking, and it is also the domestic precedent for what happens when a fixed code meets sustained commercial pressure to fit inside it. This proposal cannot cite the complying development pathway as a success without also owning its failures.
Entitlement removes the ability to manage volume. A discretionary gateway lets the state control how much work enters the pathway. An entitlement does not, and a fast pathway that everyone qualifies for is a slow pathway with extra steps. The department would need resourcing set by demand rather than by selection -- which is a budget commitment, not a planning reform.
A caution about the numbers on this site. On our estimates the
HDA pathway runs longer end to end than the
council pathway -- 1,048 days against 870 -- because it adds
an entry queue and an environmental impact statement while removing a referral
sequence. Those durations are estimate grade and that comparison should not be
quoted. It is published because it is what the model says, and because it raises
the right question: the case for these pathways rests on published,
comparable, end-to-end timing data that does not currently exist. Until it does,
every claim made about them -- including this one -- is an argument from
structure.
Precedent
New South Wales already runs an objective-trigger pathway for smaller housing: complying development is available to anyone whose proposal meets published standards, assessed against a code, with no discretion about entry. The question is why the same design principle stops at a capital investment threshold.
Sources
- NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, published Housing Delivery Authority meeting outcomes, 2025-2026
- Premier of Victoria, 'Fast-Track Pathway Unlocks More Than 10,000 Homes', 2026
- Productivity Commission, Housing supply regulation, interim report, 27 July 2026