Choosing a Council Is Not the Same Thing as Choosing a Timeline

Choosing a Council Is Not the Same Thing as Choosing a Timeline

General information for South Australian landowners only. This is not legal, conveyancing, planning or financial advice, and nothing here is a prediction of how long any particular application will take. Route questions about assessment pathways, notification and referral triggers on a specific title to a planning consultant; boundaries, site dimensions and plans of division to a licensed surveyor; contracts, due diligence conditions and settlement terms to an SA property lawyer or conveyancer; and questions about a live application, panel meeting arrangements and fees to the relevant council and PlanSA. Statutory arrangements and Code policy change over time, so confirm the current position for your own site before relying on anything here.

The question underneath the question

Two sites, two council areas. One is closer to where you already own land; the other is cheaper, or bigger, or the agent has a deadline on it. Somebody — a neighbour who subdivided, a forum thread, a search engine that answered before you finished typing — has told you that one of those councils is faster than the other.

What you are really deciding is whether that reputation is worth paying for: whether to stretch for the site in the "good" council, or to walk away from the one in the "slow" one.

It is worth being blunt about what a council ranking can and cannot do for that decision. A ranking is an average across every application a council handled. Your decision is about one proposal on one title. The gap between those two things is not a rounding error — it is most of the answer, and it runs through a part of the system that a league table cannot see.

Where the official clock starts counting

Start with the instrument. The assessment timeframes in the regulations do not run from the day you lodge. Writing when the regulations were made, Kelledy Jones Lawyers noted that "the assessment timeframes in regulation 53 of the new Regulations run from the date when the notice is placed on the SA planning portal as per the above – i.e. at the end of the verification process (see regulation 53(2))" (source: Kelledy Jones Lawyers). Regulation numbering and detail can change over time, so treat the mechanism as the point and confirm the current provisions through your own planning consultant.

The mechanism matters because the period an owner experiences and the period an assessment timeframe measures are not the same period. On the reading above, the regulation 53 assessment timeframes start at the end of verification — so whatever the application spends being verified is not time that particular clock is counting. Sorting out a missing document, a fee, or which authority the application belongs to all happens inside verification, which is a stage in its own right rather than a preamble to one; it is dealt with separately in what verification actually is. For the purposes of comparing two sites, the honest reading is narrower: a number built on an assessment timeframe is not measuring the whole of your wait, and two owners with identical assessment timeframes can have very different experiences of them.

The clock is assembled from triggers, not from reputations

The second thing a ranking cannot see is that the statutory period is not one number. It is a base period with extensions written into the regulations.

On the SA Law Handbook's account, "the time frame for assessment of the performance assessed development application is extended where: where the relevant authority is the SPC or Assessment Panel...; where the application is referred to an agency for comment...; if public notification is required" (source: SA Law Handbook — Planning and Development). Three extensions, three triggers — and two of them, notification and referral, are set by the proposal and the land rather than by the council area. The third, whether a panel rather than an assessment manager is the relevant authority, is the one place where local arrangements genuinely enter, and it is a question to put to each council and to your own planning consultant rather than to a league table.

They do not all simply stack, either. Kelledy Jones recorded that "public notification, referral and concurrence timeframes run concurrently as per regulation 53(3)" (source: Kelledy Jones Lawyers). On that account a site that is both notified and referred does not wait for the two in sequence, and a site that trips neither sits in a different band altogether. How the relevant-authority extension sits alongside those is a separate question for your own planning consultant. That shape — bands set by triggers, with overlap inside a band — is what an average across a council area flattens into a single figure.

"The council" is often not the body deciding

There is a further problem with treating the council as the unit of comparison, which is that for much of what an owner lodges, the council is not the decision-maker.

The Law Handbook describes the position this way: "Local Councils are the relevant authority for making decisions about certain building-related development applications. Otherwise, a council-appointed assessment panel and assessment manager is the relevant authority for development applications within that Council zone", and adds that "the CAP and assessment manager are considered a relevant authority in their own right and are not considered a delegate of the Council" (source: SA Law Handbook — Planning and Development).

Nor is a panel necessarily unique to one council. Among the panel types the Law Handbook lists is the Regional Assessment Panel, "established by the Minister comprising representatives from two or more councils" (source: SA Law Handbook — Planning and Development). Two council areas can share one deciding body — in which case the comparison you were making was never between two assessors at all.

For land division specifically, the same source lists among the State Commission Assessment Panel's functions that it acts "as the lodgement authority for all land division applications" (source: SA Law Handbook — Planning and Development). Whether your file is determined by an assessment manager or by a panel is its own question, and it changes the rhythm of the wait rather than the substance of your scheme — whether an assessment manager or a panel decides your file.

What makes a trigger fire attaches to the land

If triggers set the bands, the question becomes what fires a trigger. The answer is mostly the land and the proposal, read against a policy instrument that is not the council's.

The Planning and Design Code replaced the old development plan process, and on the Law Handbook's account is "the most important document in the day-to-day assessment of development applications" (source: SA Law Handbook — Planning and Development). Whether a performance assessed proposal carries public notification is settled through that instrument rather than by the council: "Unless an exemption is provided under the Planning and Design Code or Practice Direction from the Minister, notification of performance assessed development applications must be given to adjacent land owners" (source: SA Law Handbook — Planning and Development). The exemptions live in the Code, and the Code is a state instrument. So one of the two extensions that attach to the proposal and the land is set in a document no council area writes for itself.

Referrals behave the same way. The Law Handbook notes that councils and the State Planning Commission must often seek the views of other agencies "such as the Environment Protection Authority (EPA), or Commissioner of Highways or Coast Protection Board" before deciding, under the Act and the regulations (source: SA Law Handbook — Planning and Development). Those bodies are engaged by facts about the land. The EPA describes its own trigger as arising "for development applications involving a change of land use to a more sensitive use (or a 'sensitive use' in the case of land division) where certain classes of potentially contaminating activities previously occurred" (source: EPA South Australia). A former workshop on the block, a frontage onto an arterial road, a coastal position: those travel with the title, and they would travel with it if the boundary of the council area moved tomorrow. How those attributes are read on one particular block, and what an owner has to establish about them before committing, is worked through for a single council area in what the overlays on an Onkaparinga title decide.

The raw comparison, and the one worth making

Set the two views side by side.

The raw view groups every application by the council that handled it and takes an average. It answers a question nobody actually has: how long does a typical application take here, across all proposal types, all pathways, all triggers, all applicants.

The controlled view holds the proposal and its triggers constant and asks what is left. Once you have fixed the pathway, whether notification is required, which referral bodies are engaged and whether an assessment manager or a panel determines the file, much of what looked like a difference between places turns out to have been a difference between application mixes. A council area whose stock of sites carries more notification and more referrals will post slower averages while treating each individual file no differently.

What survives that correction is real, but it is narrower than the ranking implies, and it is not the sort of thing a table can show you: how an authority handles verification, how often its panel sits, how quickly requests for further information come back and get resolved. Those are worth asking about. They are simply not what you learn from an average.

The instrument to be sceptical of is the ranking, not the councils. A ranking built from raw averages has not controlled for the mix of applications behind them, and neither has an instant answer assembled from the same averages; whether any particular ranking has done that work is worth checking before leaning on it.

What to compare, site by site

The comparison worth doing is not council against council. It is title against title, and most of it your own advisers can settle before you commit.

For each of the two addresses, ask your own planning consultant to tell you: the zone, sub-zone and overlays that apply; which assessment pathway they expect your proposal to fall into; whether the Code requires public notification for that proposal on that site; which referral bodies they expect to be engaged and why; and who they expect the relevant authority to be. The pathway question carries several of the others with it: a proposal that does not meet the Code's deemed-to-satisfy criteria falls to be performance assessed instead, and it is the performance assessed pathway that the Law Handbook attaches those extensions to (source: SA Law Handbook — Planning and Development). Ask your licensed surveyor what the shape, fall and existing boundaries actually are, and what layout they leave room for.

Then ask one question people routinely skip. Where a referral is likely, what will that agency want to see before it can respond? The Law Handbook notes that "a referral agency can ask the applicant for more documents or information before considering the application" (source: SA Law Handbook — Planning and Development). A referral where the supporting work is already done and a referral where it has not been started are the same line in the regulations and completely different waits. How the stages fit together across a whole division is covered in the subdivision timeline.

If the answers come back materially different between the two sites, you have found something real. If they come back the same, then the council names were never the variable you were choosing between.

Where that leaves the offer in front of you

None of this says councils are interchangeable. Local engineering standards, infrastructure requirements and panel meeting arrangements do differ, and they are fair questions to put to each council directly. It says something narrower: the council name is a poor proxy for the thing you are trying to buy, and the triggers on the title are a much better one — and unlike a reputation, they can be checked before you sign.

It also means the honest answer to "is it worth buying in a different council area?" cannot be given by anyone who has not seen both titles. What the difference is worth in money is a separate exercise again; what a longer wait costs an owner is set out in the cost of delay.

Cyberate PM's part in this is narrow and worth stating plainly. We do not assess applications, determine pathways or advise on planning law. We coordinate the owner's own professionals — planning consultant, licensed surveyor, engineers — so that the trigger questions on each site are answered before an offer is made rather than after, and so the preparatory work those advisers identify can be commissioned before the referral is made rather than once the clock is already running. What a referral body will ask for is determined by that body, not by us.