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 19 December 2024 with data extracted on 17 December 2024.
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.
Our data provider has recently applied substantial consolidation of overlay_label attribute values with ‘Planning Precincts’ overlay_group within the planning_insights_overlays tables.
The changes per state are described below:
ACT: In the ACT there are essentially 2 levels of precincts captured currently. This represents a Designated Precinct Map boundary indicating the ‘Precinct’ and a ‘Sub Precinct’ boundary value. Sites tagged with a ‘Sub Precinct’ value will also have tagging of the wider ‘Precinct Map’. The overlay_label values for Sub Precinct areas have been updated to reflect the concept of a ‘Sub Precinct’ boundary. The overlay_value values for these items have also been updated from a straight code value to a more descriptive item: - OP3 - Bonner residential area 3 - OP3 - Casey residential area 3 - OP3 - Coombs residential area 3 - OP3 - Throsby residential area
NSW: Records relating to the overlay_label value of ‘DCP’ have been removed from the planning_insights_overlays table. This State Government source has proven to be unreliable with many boundaries inaccurate and many discontinued documents not being removed as well as newer documents not being added. To this end our data supplier has decided that it should be removed for now as it is misleading. This tagging was applied to essentially all NSW sites historically with many containing multiple values. Our data supplier is actively looking to update this in the future once a better source can be located or created for these boundaries. This change has resulted in a 7.7 million reduction in the planning_insights_overlay table.
Overlay_label values have been altered to to exclude LGA-specific wording to allow comparison of similar overlays within a state. For example, ‘BAYSIDE-Foreshore Building Line Map’ and ‘CANADA BAY-Foreshore Building Line Map’ have both been consolidated to be ‘Foreshore Building Line Map’ in NSW as they represent comparable overlays.
The overlay_label value of ‘NSW – Precinct’ has been removed and replaced with a value more representative of the data point. For example, the overlay_value of ‘Greater Macarthur’ previously grouped under overlay_label of ‘NSW - Precinct’ is now listed under the overlay_label of ‘SEPP (Sydney Region Growth Centres) 2006 Greater Macarthur Growth Area Precinct Boundary Map’ which is more representative of what that particular item relates to.
QLD: The following planning overlay_label values have been assigned the overlay_group of ‘Planning Precincts’: - Dwelling house character - Pre-1946 Traditional building character
Much like in NSW the LGA-specific references in overlay_label have been removed in QLD. The overlay_value values however remain the same. Using Logan City as an example the overlay_label changes are as follows: - ‘Logan City - Zone Precincts’ becomes ‘Zone precincts’ - ‘Logan City- Local plan boundary’ becomes ‘Local plan’ - ‘Logan City - Precinct area’ becomes ‘Local Plan Precinct’
Two new sources have been added: - Charters Towers Precinct - Sensitive Land Map
SA: The overlay_label value of ‘SA – Precinct’ has been replaced with the term used by the SA state Government: ‘Subzones’.
A new precinct area overlay_label value of ‘Concept Plan’ has been added.
VIC: Where the overlay_label previously was represented as a code value this value has been updated to reflect a text description: - overlay_label ‘AEO’ updated to ‘AEO - Airport Environs Overlay’
Two new overlay_label values have been added: - Inclusion of ‘Future Land Use’ - Inclusion of ‘Greenfields’ overlay
For more in-depth information on these changes please contact: support@geoscape.com.au
Our data provider has recently updated the source for national heritage overlays. This has caused significant changes to the number of heritage listings nationally with several significant areas now removed: - ACT - Canberra and Surrounding Areas ~20,000 Sites - QLD - Cape York Peninsula ~9,000 sites - SA – Mt Lofty Ranges ~ 83,000 sites
These are as per the updated source and any related planning_insights heritage flag or planning_insights_overlays table count reductions are expected.
After receiving further advice from the NSW councils, our data supplier has removed sites smaller then 10,000 square metres from the overlay_label of ‘SEPP type’, overlay_value ‘2021’ data grouping. This has resulted in the removal of ~509,000 sites from this area designation. These sites were also tagged with a ‘Koala Protection’ overlay_group which specifically seems to have made up the bulk of records removed accounting for 420,000 sites alone.
We have recently gained access to LGA-based planning zone data for Burdekin Shire in QLD where previously no information was available. This information has been added to the product and has been labelled with a ‘Burdekin Shire’ value for zone_source in the planning_insights_zoning table.
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 become 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 are 10 missing NSW environment flags, 562 QLD industry flags and 673 QLD infrastructure flags. We will work with our data provider to include these overlay flags in a future release.
No resolved issues.
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.
We have become aware that the ‘Basin 1% AEP’ flood overlay in QLD is not suitable to be applied at the parcel level. For this reason, Geoscape intends to review its application of flood overlays for the March 2025 release.
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 |
42 |
15,900 |
94 |
0 |
5,942 |
2,941 |
840 |
9,992 |
4,124 |
39,875 |
Retired |
34 |
3,750 |
34 |
0 |
1,680 |
1,079 |
493 |
3,763 |
668 |
11,501 |
|
Updated |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
Total |
135,369 |
3,309,338 |
64,031 |
0 |
2,075,282 |
953,855 |
298,026 |
3,082,061 |
1,181,218 |
11,099,180 |
|
% Change |
0.01% |
0.37% |
0.09% |
0.00% |
0.21% |
0.2% |
0.12% |
0.2% |
0.29% |
0.26% |
|
planning_insights_overlays |
Total |
558,936 |
11,465,167 |
111 |
0 |
9,832,589 |
7,941,797 |
414,284 |
6,857,128 |
1,996,988 |
39,067,000 |
planning_insights_zoning |
Total |
134,703 |
3,381,404 |
59,344 |
0 |
1,756,278 |
961,384 |
301,195 |
3,210,858 |
1,901,627 |
11,706,793 |
planning_insights_address |
Total |
245,727 |
4,679,576 |
110,532 |
0 |
3,154,385 |
1,053,306 |
336,691 |
4,046,179 |
1,521,866 |
15,148,262 |