Planning Insights Release Report

Disclaimer

Geoscape Australia believes this publication to be correct at the time of printing and does not accept responsibility for any consequences arising from the use of the information herein. Readers should rely on their own skill and judgement to apply information to particular issues.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission of Geoscape Australia.

Overview

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 ).

Release Summary

This product was released to customers on 31 March 2026 with data extracted on 24 March 2026.

  • 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.

Change Notifications

WA Flood overlay removals

The DWER‑003 flood overlay has been removed for selected LGAs in Western Australia where it is unlikely to indicate the need for a flood study in the traditional sense. This change has resulted in a reduction of approximately 37,000 WA flood overlay records.

ACT Environment overlay removals

~125,000 environment overlay records in the ACT have been removed.

SA Industry overlay removals

~616,000 industry overlay records in SA have been removed.

NSW Industry, Infrastructure and Environment overlay additions

~17,000 industry, ~101,000 infrastructure and ~220,000 environment overlay records have been added for NSW.

SA Environment overlay additions

~104,000 environment overlay records have been added for SA.

WA strata linkage changes

There have been some changes in the ‘site’ logic applied by our data supplier in WA. This has resulted in an increase in strata parcels linked to planning zone information by ~19,000 records.

Issues

New Issues

No new issues to note.

Resolved Issues

Brisbane fire overlay overrepresentation

We became aware of an issue for the December 2026 release where a fire overlay with incorrect dimensions was applied in Brisbane. These overlay boundaries have been remediated for the March 2026 release, leading to a valid reduction of ~136,000 in the QLD planning_insights_overlays table.

Known Issues

QLD zone_label2 values that exceed 120 character limit

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

Non-breaking spaces in planning_insights tables

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.

HTML entities in planning_insights tables

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.

NT linkage to large base Lot parcels that contain other Lot parcels

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.

Image of poor secondary linkage in NT (1) Image of poor secondary linkage in NT (2)

Future Considerations

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.

New overlay_source attribute

Geoscape is investigating the inclusion of a new attribute called overlay_source, which would describe the source of the overlay in the planning_insights_overlays table.

This change will result in a minor increment to the product versioning from v1.0 to v1.1.

New zone_colour and zone_source attributes

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.

Primary Zone Assignment Improvement

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.

Annex A – Release Counts

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

366

6,924

223

0

6,296

3,589

749

8,632

23,260

50,039

Retired

8

3,651

11

0

1,400

1,078

255

3,185

573

10,161

Updated

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Total

137,244

3,327,872

62,242

0

2,085,759

951,930

298,601

3,116,989

1,219,730

11,200,367

% Change

0.26%

0.1%

0.34%

0.00%

0.24%

0.26%

0.17%

0.18%

1.9%

0.36%

planning_insights_overlays

Total

398,618

13,133,261

94

0

11,943,084

6,540,517

408,860

10,187,042

2,921,667

45,533,143

planning_insights_zoning

Total

142,631

3,388,686

57,762

0

1,862,762

959,193

301,372

3,139,645

1,989,657

11,841,708

planning_insights_address

Total

270,811

4,735,907

113,936

0

3,202,697

1,049,226

339,390

4,101,620

1,567,791

15,381,378