Housing supply, construction cost and the cost of finance all turn on how long approvals take, and the national argument about it is conducted largely on anecdote.

New South Wales has fixed this for itself. Councils have been required to use the NSW Planning Portal since 1 July 2021, and the state publishes an interactive council league table tracking time to lodge and determine applications by council, region and development type, a Local Development Performance Monitoring dashboard covering every council, and an Online DA Data API carrying applications lodged since January 2019. Determination timeframes are also monitored against the Statement of Expectations Order 2024.

So the question is answerable, precisely and by anyone, for a third of the country. What does not exist is the national picture. Every other jurisdiction runs its own arrangements or none, and the definitions of lodgement, stop-the- clock periods and determination differ enough that the series cannot simply be concatenated.

The remaining obstruction is therefore federation and definitions, not secrecy or collection cost -- and NSW has demonstrated that the technical objections do not hold.

For NSW, use the Planning Portal league table, the LDPM dashboard or the Online DA Data API directly. Other states publish partial aggregate performance data of varying scope; researchers have built one-off datasets by scraping council portals, which works until a portal changes.

Checked on 2026-09-02, and the check overturned the entry.

It previously recorded no, with the claim that DA timing was individually public in hundreds of separate council portals and available nowhere in comparable form, and its notes called it "the strongest single case in the register". That was written before anyone looked at the NSW Planning Portal. NSW publishes a council league table, a dashboard covering all its councils, and an API.

The correction is worth dwelling on because of how the error was made. The entry reasoned from the structure of local government -- many councils, many systems, no common standard -- to a conclusion about what must therefore be unavailable. The reasoning was sound and the conclusion was false, because a state government had mandated a single lodgement system and then published the results. Structural arguments about what cannot exist are exactly the kind this register should test before publishing, and this one went unchecked through several revisions.

What survives is narrower and still real: no national series, and definitional differences between jurisdictions that would prevent one being assembled from existing state data. fragmented and inconsistent are the honest blockers. format has been dropped -- an API is not a format problem.

The companion project's estimate of council DA timeframes should now be checked against the NSW data rather than continuing to estimate for that state.