Planning

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.
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Overview

Planning provides detailed planning zone codes and descriptions for parcels of land across Australia. By representing the detailed planning classification for each cadastral parcel, as well as links to the relevant planning scheme/instrument, Planning provides a simple lookup for the classification on sites nationally.

Planning is created by combining Geoscape Australia’s Cadastre product with planning zones defined by a state, territory or local governments and is released on a quarterly schedule against the latest Cadastre data, with planning zone source data updated bi-annually.

Geoscape welcomes your feedback on the Planning product. We also publish regular product development updates on our website (www.geoscape.com.au).

Release Summary

This product was released to customers on 27 March 2024 with data extracted on 4 March 2024.

  • This release is a full national data population for Version 1.3 of the Planning product, described by the Planning Product Guide v1.3.

Any issues that have been identified for this release are described in the Issues section.

Change Notifications

Secondary Zone Description width increase

The attribute width for the secondary_zone_description has been increased from 100 to 350 characters, resulting in a minor update to the product versioning from 1.2 to 1.3. This has been applied to allow larger strings to be included.

Esri Shapefile width increase - Cancelled

In the previous release report, we mentioned that the width of numeric fields within Esri Shapefiles would increase by one for this current release. A recent bug fix in our packaging application has been applied to make this change not necessary. No change to Shapefile field widths (besides secondary_zone_description mentioned above) has been applied for this release.

Removal of the ‘Documents’ folder from data packages

From November 2023, Geoscape will be progressively moving product descriptions, guides and reports online to https://docs.geoscape.com.au

Commencing with the May 2024 release, data packages will no longer include the Documents folder.

Issues

New Issues

Truncated secondary_zone_description value in NSW for ESRI Shapefile and MapInfo TAB formats

The planning zone data for NSW includes seven records that have a secondary_zone_description value of 'MOUNT PENANG PARKLANDS BULKY GOODS PREMISES; BUSINESS PREMISES (OTHER THAN MEDICAL CENTRES); CHILD CARE CENTRES; COMMUNITY FACILITIES; EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENTS; FUNCTION CENTRES; HELIPORTS; KIOSKS; LANDSCAPE AND GARDENING SUPPLIES; MARKET; OFFICES; RECREATION FACILITIES; RETAIL PREMISES; RESTAURANTS; TOURIST AND VISITOR ACCOMMODATION'.

Geoscape has increased the width of the secondary_zone_description attribute from 100 characters to 350 characters for the March 2024 release. The above value will not be truncated for File Geodatabase and GeoJSON formats. However, within ESRI Shapefile and MapInfo TAB file formats, there is a character length limit of 254 for strings. As the above value exceeds these file format limitations, the value is truncated to 'MOUNT PENANG PARKLANDS BULKY GOODS PREMISES; BUSINESS PREMISES (OTHER THAN MEDICAL CENTRES); CHILD CARE CENTRES; COMMUNITY FACILITIES; EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENTS; FUNCTION CENTRES; HELIPORTS; KIOSKS; LANDSCAPE AND GARDENING SUPPLIES; MARKET; OFFICES; REC'.

Resolved Issues

No resolved issues.

Known Issues

Queensland state-sourced data is not current

The state-sourced data for Queensland is from 2010 and is no longer maintained. Geoscape Australia has sourced local government data for 15 local councils with significant populations to remedy these currency issues, although the state-sourced data is still used for other areas of the state. We are continuing to look at expanding our supplies to include more current source data for Queensland into the future.

Commonwealth maintained areas not necessarily covered

Planning information may not be available for land held by the Commonwealth Government, as this land is not managed by state or local government authorities. For example, planning data is not available for the Jervis Bay Territory as the territory is maintained by the Commonwealth.

Cocos (Keeling) Islands data missing a cadastral polygon

Cocos (Keeling) Islands within the Other Territories data has a missing relationship between the cadastral polygon and planning data. This has occurred due to the cadastral centroid falling outside a planning zone boundary. This is a unique scenario as the cadastral parcel is much larger than the available planning boundaries in this area. This has caused the cadastral centroid to fall within a gap between planning zones and has resulted in no planning zone information being related to the parcel. Elsewhere across the country the cadastral parcels generally are the same size or smaller than the planning zones and do not experience this issue.

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.

Legacy ‘CAD’ naming

The planning table contains fields of ‘cad_pid’ and ‘cad_polygon_pid’, while the new Cadastre product has attributes of ‘cadastre_pid’ and ‘cadastre_polygon_pid’. We have input the new ‘cadastre_pid’ and ‘cadastre_polygon_pid’ values into the ‘cad_pid’ and ‘cad_polygon_pid’ fields respectively to not affect customer processes with attribute name changes. There is no current plan to change these field names in Planning.

Annex A – Release Counts

Additional, retired and total Planning counts and the percent change to the previous release have been listed in the table below.

TABLE

ACT

NSW

NT

OT

QLD

SA

TAS

VIC

WA

TOTAL

planning

Additional

1,182

25,865

241

0

22,024

12,016

4,786

424,542

47,577

538,233

Retired

855

14,925

58

0

14,696

7,730

3,692

414,764

41,322

498,042

Total

160,264

4,730,278

91,400

1,222

3,003,006

1,154,399

391,975

4,326,226

1,548,612

15,407,382

% Change

0.20%

0.23%

0.20%

0

0.24%

0.37%

0.28%

0.23%

0.41%

0.26%