Disclaimer
Planning Insights is a comprehensive representation of planning zone and overlay information applicable to land parcels and addresses across Australia. Planning Insights aims to provide insights to enable a greater understanding of how land can be developed and to inform about limitations and specific characteristics of planning sites.
Geoscape welcomes your feedback on the Planning Insights product. We also publish regular product development updates on our website ( www.geoscape.com.au ).
This product was released to customers on 31 March 2025 with data extracted on 17 March 2025.
This release is a full national data population for Version 1.0 of the Planning Insights product, described by the Planning Insights Product Guide v1.0.
Any issues that have been identified for this release are described in the Issues section.
We have identified a QLD flood overlay with overlay_value of ‘Basin 1% AEP’ that should not be applied at the parcel level. Where a cadastre only has a flood overlay with overlay_value of ‘Basin 1% AEP’ associated, a ‘true’ flood flag will not be assigned in the planning_insights table. The ‘Basin 1% AEP’ flood overlay records have been retained in the planning_insights_overlays table.
We have identified a NSW heritage overlay with overlay_value of ‘City of Broken Hill’ that should not be applied at the parcel level. Where a cadastre only has a heritage overlay with overlay_value of ‘City of Broken Hill’ associated, a ‘true’ heritage flag will not be assigned in the planning_insights table. The ‘City of Broken Hill’ heritage overlay records have been retained in the planning_insights_overlays table.
There have been a number of changes in the planning_insights_overlays table that have resulted in count increases for NSW and QLD.
NSW has a new source for environmental overlays relating to ‘Threatened Ecological Communities’ and ‘Biodiversity Areas’ overlay_value values which has resulted in a ~430,000 increase in record count. The Central Coast flood map has been updated to include ~12,000 new ‘Probable Maximum Flood’ flood records. ~12,000 records have also been introduced for fire overlays relating to ‘Vegetation Buffer’ and ‘Vegetation Category X’ (X = 1,2 or 3) overlay_value values.
In QLD, the Logan City Council flood data has been updated to reflect additional gradients of flood risk (e.g. ‘High Flood Risk Area’, ‘Medium Flood Risk Area’, etc.), resulting in an increase of ~70,000 additional records. There are also ~20,000 additional Flood/Planning Precincts records added for Brisbane City LGA.
Additional planning zone sources for the LGAs of Charters Towers Regional, Isaac Regional, Somerset Regional and Southern Downs Regional have been added, resulting in an increase of ~48,000 planning_insights_zoning records in QLD.
There are 8 additional PDA zones in Brisbane City which has resulted in ~27,000 additional planning_insights_zoning records. These zones often relate to cadastre that already has a planning zone assigned.
We have noticed unexpected increases in the number of Strata parcels with a primary link to planning zone information. At these sites we have noticed that both the Lot and Strata parcel have a primary link to zoning information when only the Lot should have a primary link. There are 150 Strata with a primary link in the ACT and 241 in TAS, though in the December 2024 release there were 0 Strata with a primary link to zoning information for these states. In SA, there are now 4,235 Strata parcels with a primary link, when only 39 Strata parcels had a primary link in the December 2024 release. Geoscape is working with our data partner to resolve this issue for the June 2025 release.
In the December 2024 release we were aware of some minor mismatches between overlay flags in the planning_insights table and the unique counts of planning_insights_overlays table records with corresponding overlay_category. There were 10 missing NSW environment flags, 562 QLD industry flags and 673 QLD infrastructure flags. We have worked with our data provider to resolve these mismatches in the March 2025 release.
We have noticed small reductions in population for the ‘permitted’, ‘permitted with controls’ and ‘prohibited’ values in the planning_insights tables. We are investigating the rules used to link this information to planning zones with our data supplier and will look to improve this association for a future release.
We have noticed 216 records in the QLD planning_insights_zoning table relating to 8 zone_label2 values that exceed the 120 character limit for this field. These values have been truncated to 120 characters for this release and will be investigated with our data supplier. The zone_label2 values provided by our supplier that exceed the 120 character limit are:
SA31 - Special Opportunity - Riverview - Kenneth Street, Riverview Road, Station Road, Brisbane-ipswich Rail Line & the confluence of the Brisbane & Bremer Rivers - Including Salv
SA34 - Special Opportunity - Gooda - Bounded by Brisbane-Ipswich rail line & Railway Terrace to the North of the Ipswich Motorway
SU10RV - Special Uses - Place of Worship - including an Auditorium, Administration, Cafe, Meeting House & Caretaker’s Residence
SU54 - Special Uses - Plant propagation and production, wholesale plant nursery and ancillary buildings, structures and access
SU73 - Special Uses - Highway Oriented Uses, Business Uses, Service Trades Uses and Light Engineering/Metal Fabrication Works
SU81 - Special Uses - Highway Service Centre comprising Service station, Automatic/Manual Carwash, Shop not exceeding 100m2 GFA, Restaurants, Fast Food Stores, Accommodatio
TCP - Town Centre - Town Centre Primary Business Area, including land situated at 3, 5, 11, 13-15 and 17 John Street and land situated between John, Railway, Albert and
TCS - Town Centre - Town Centre Secondary Business Area, including alnd situated between Church Lane, Skinner, Albert and William Streets and fronting the eastern side of
There are approximately 22,000 text strings within the planning_insights tables that contain non-breaking spaces (NBSP) within the permitted, permitted_with_controls and prohibited attribute values. We are investigating these values and will look to replace them with ASCII equivalents in a future release.
There are approximately 1,200,000 text strings within the planning_insights tables that contain HTML entities such as non-ASCII right apostrophes within the permitted, permitted_with_controls and prohibited attribute values. We are investigating these values and will look to replace them with ASCII equivalents in a future release.
There are <13,000 Lot parcels in NT that have a poor secondary linkage to Planning Insights. These parcels mostly relate to remote communities. This occurs as there are large base Lot parcels that have a primary link to the Planning Insights data that contain smaller block-sized parcels that inherit a secondary relationship through the larger parcel. The secondary link is likely to produce an incorrect result in these locations, as the larger parcel’s relationship to zoning and overlays does not necessarily translate to the smaller scale. An example of this can be seen at 130.635580,-11.763371, with the secondary linkage Lot parcels (blue) contained within the south-eastern corner of the larger base Lot parcel (red) that has a primary linkage to Planning Insights.
This section outlines enhancements or changes under consideration, but not planned into a specific release. For further details on future initiatives, please contact Geoscape Support.
Geoscape is investigating the inclusion of two new attributes called zone_colour and zone_source in the planning_insights_zoning table.
Zone Colour will provide a colour for each planning zone in hexadecimal format (e.g. ‘#A88484’), assigned on a scheme by scheme basis. Please be aware that this colour information is not consistent between planning schemes. For example, SA Commercial zones may have a different colour to NSW Commercial zones.
To assist in differentiating the planning schemas that provide the planning zone information, a Zone Source attribute will also be included that will provide the name of the zone source.
This change will result in a minor increment to the product versioning from v1.0 to v1.1.
The planning_insights table currently provides a pi_zone_code attribute that provides a single zone code for a cadastre. Where a cadastre relates to multiple zones, a single zone code is consistently selected for the pi_zone_code.
We are investigating with our data provider the option of increasing the intelligence around this attribute so that it represents the planning zone with the largest area of overlap with the cadastre.
Additional, retired and total Planning Insights counts and the percent change to the previous release have been listed in the table below.
TABLE |
STATISTIC |
ACT |
NSW |
NT |
OT |
QLD |
SA |
TAS |
VIC |
WA |
TOTAL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
planning_insights |
Additional |
869 |
7,625 |
79 |
0 |
4,744 |
7,272 |
723 |
2,733 |
3,815 |
27,860 |
Retired |
23 |
3,761 |
12 |
0 |
1,437 |
1,417 |
377 |
2,622 |
629 |
10,278 |
|
Updated |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
Total |
136,215 |
3,313,202 |
64,098 |
0 |
2,078,589 |
959,710 |
298,372 |
3,082,172 |
1,184,404 |
11,116,762 |
|
% Change |
0.62% |
0.12% |
0.1% |
0.00% |
0.16% |
0.61% |
0.12% |
0.00% |
0.27% |
0.16% |
|
planning_insights_overlays |
Total |
562,044 |
11,958,221 |
111 |
0 |
9,926,660 |
7,942,796 |
422,181 |
6,827,414 |
1,998,057 |
39,637,484 |
planning_insights_zoning |
Total |
141,123 |
3,369,465 |
59,334 |
0 |
1,832,595 |
964,667 |
298,484 |
3,125,948 |
1,908,829 |
11,700,445 |
planning_insights_address |
Total |
253,704 |
4,693,676 |
110,636 |
0 |
3,166,426 |
1,062,626 |
337,765 |
4,047,528 |
1,527,853 |
15,200,214 |