After nearly 30 years the Development Act 1993 and the Development Plans for the respective Councils and areas outside Councils have been superseded. The new Planning, Development and Infrastructure Act 2016 and the Planning and Design Code – 25 March-Version 2021.21 (Design Code) came into effect on the 19 march 2021. The new Act and Design Code has been operating in rural areas for over six months but now it applies for the whole Metropolitan Area. From the 19 March the whole State of South Australia will be effectively controlled by the new Act and Design Code.
My initial reaction was not that the new legislation was so different but certainly the Design Code was completely different and a lot to absorb (some 8000 pages of new code) while giving advice and dealing with new and existing Development Applications (DAs). But what became evident early on was every new DA rather than being lodged through all the different Council Web Sites was now to be lodged through the Planning SA system and then distributed out to the respective Councils. This was an instant improvement as far as I am concerned because PlanSA has one system not all the different sites operated by all the respective Councils.
Further to this rather than the multitude of different Development Plans and unnecessarily complicated system for locating individual addresses each new address can now be sources through Plan SA. Although the Planning and Design Code is very long and maybe could have been better indexed in the long run it should prove easier to access one Code than all the separate Development Plans operated by the multitude of differen councils..
The volume of The Code and its format was originally daunting but after using it successively for different DAs it has become less confusing and more manageable. It can be a fairly normal human reaction to resist change but once we adapt it can often be for the better.