Back in 2012, the newly elected Queensland Government set out to fulfill a bold promise made at the polls - to create Australia’s best planning system.

A key goal was a “one-stop shop” for all development applications that required some state agency approval.

This would replace a highly fragmented referral process, which at times left applicants lodging separate referrals and negotiating conflicting advice across multiple state agencies at once.

Within just seven months, a dedicated team of planners working almost around the clock had pulled off the seemingly impossible and created the State Assessment and Referral Agency (SARA).

They’d also crafted a single state planning policy, defined a consolidated set of assessment criteria for each state interest, created new workflows, built a new online application portal, codified state mapping and trained its regional planners to use the new system.

“Looking back, I’m more amazed now than I was then,” says Greg Chemello, who led the reform as Queensland’s State Planner from 2013 to 2016. “It was a lot of very challenging work to do in a short period of time, a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

The reforms were led by a team of change-making planners who broadened their thinking, challenged established methods and - given the ridiculously short timeframe - focused on delivery. This proved fundamental to the project’s success.

A planning gridlock that demanded a rethink

Before SARA, Queensland's planning system had accumulated decades of growing, often-conflicting state agency policies and fragmented processes that made some development applications a bureaucratic ordeal.

Whenever an application touched a state interest — such as a heritage place, major transport corridor or the clearing of native vegetation — the relevant state agency had to be consulted.

In practice, that could mean negotiating with up to 12 separate agencies, each with its own requirements and timelines.

"Often these matters would conflict or overlap," Greg recalls. "The poor applicant was often left to negotiate with multiple departments demanding different things. It could go on for years."

This created significant delays and uncertainty, and in some cases even stalled projects indefinitely.

Amid mounting criticism from community groups and developers, the then-new Queensland Government was elected in 2012 on a promise to cut red tape and simplify the system.

To lead the reform, Greg — a self-confessed “lapsed town planner” and respected change-agent — was headhunted for the role.

“I was really enjoying life with a project management consulting business, so I was a reluctant applicant,” he recalls. 

“But the recruiter said: ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to play a role in setting up Australia's best planning system. If you miss it, you're going to regret it for the rest of your life.’ And she was right.”

A formidable task with an immovable deadline

The new centralised development assessment system had a hard launch date of 1 July 2013, enshrined in law.

Greg joined the team in January 2013. The scale of what had to be built — from scratch, in now five months — was formidable.

First, Greg lured senior planner Steve Conner from the Department of Transport and Main Roads to lead the SARA teams.

“I needed someone with experience to live and breathe SARA full-time from 9 to 5, five days a week, at least until 30 June,” he says. “Fortunately, Steve also appreciated the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and leapt at the challenge.”

James Coutts also joined the core leadership team. “James is an absolute planning guru and the best sounding board and sage advisor you could hope for,” Greg says.

Next, 14 individual state planning policies had to be merged into a single, conflict-free document. It was painstaking work, led by planner Nicole Warren.

"Nicole walked around the office with an increasingly-tattered draft State Planning Policy under her armpit, covered in scribbled sticky notes and yellow labels; that was the working draft," Greg recalls. "She’d joke that if she lost that draft, we were up the creek..."

Meanwhile, another team led by planner Marisa Graetz was defining the State Development Assessment Provisions; clear criteria for every state interest — from state-controlled roads and community infrastructure, heritage areas, railways and extractive resources to native vegetation, koala habitat, wetlands and bushfire areas.

Some agencies already had well-defined assessment criteria, but many assessed on a case-by-case basis, Greg recalls.

“I remember we got this giant wad of documents from Transport and Main Roads, and were told, ‘Here's all the stuff we use,’" Greg says. "Our people had to refine all that material, which was a raft of really complex work."

"My job was to set the vision and direction, get the right people on board and make sure they had the resources they needed to work their magic."

'Trepidation and excitement’ while building new system

Meanwhile, a myriad of separate state planning interests maps were codified into a consolidated geographic information system (GIS) framework that used over 100 mapping layers and sub-categories.

Another key challenge was building SARA’s new online lodgement portal from scratch.

This was much more than just a simple form. The system needed to consolidate legislative triggers from 12 different state departments into a single workflow for lodgement, assessment and decision-making. 

Finally, as SARA would be delivered by planners across all regional offices, local teams had to be trained on this new system, as it was still being built.

"We were creating statutory codes, policy and software at the same time as training the people who would use it, before anything was finished," Greg says."Imagine the trepidation and excitement that brings. There was a lot of considered work in change management, encouraging folks to get on board."

Approval times cut from years to months

Greg says his leadership role as Deputy Director-General of the State Development, Infrastructure and Planning Department — a title often simplified to just ‘State Planner’— was as much about people as policy.

My job was to set the vision and direction, define our operating mindset and framework, get the right people on board and make sure they had the resources they needed to work their magic," he says.

"Really, the biggest part of my job was walking around every day, going, ‘It’s going to be fine, we’ll get this done, piece of cake.’ But the truth was that at night, I'd often lie in bed thinking: “We're stuffed, we're not going to get there."

To this day, he remains awed by the team that pulled off such an enormous piece of work.

On 1 July, 2013, SARA launched — the first consolidated state planning development assessment system of its kind in Australia.

It went live as what the experts would call “a minimum viable product”: functional, but admittedly a little clunky. MyDAS, the $2.2 million online portal, would later undergo a $20 million upgrade.

But the foundation was strong, and the feedback from both industry and planners was largely positive.

Having one single point of contact within the Planning Group for all state interests made a huge difference, cutting approval times for complex projects from years to months.

A simpler system with three clear pathways

• Council only: The simplest applications are handled by councils alone.
• Council + SARA referral: Where a state interest is triggered — say, proximity to a transport corridor or impact on koala habitat — SARA steps in as a referral agency, providing advice while council retains the final decision.
• SARA decides: For state-significant projects such as wind farms, ports and airports, SARA becomes the decision-maker outright.
  

State interests covered by SARA’s now-27 state codes span everything from dams and Great Barrier Reef wetland protection to hazardous chemical facilities and solar farms.

The model helps protect councils from local community/political pressure and resource strain on complex projects while empowering them on local matters.

A free pre-lodgement service helps applicants navigate the process before formally submitting, and discounted fees are available for community and non-profit projects.

And KPIs, including approval timeframes and customer satisfaction, have been tracked and released publicly from day one, helping keep everyone involved accountable.

“Customer satisfaction was tracking pretty low, so my thought about tracking it publicly was: well, we can only do better than what it was at that time. And then — bang! — it went up,” Greg recalls.

By 2015, a massive 84% of industry professionals surveyed by the Property Council of Australia rated the state's planning system as "satisfactory or better” — a vast improvement from the 70% “poor" or "very poor” 2012 rating.

Talented planners made the difference

Greg insists none of this would have been possible without forward-thinking planners in the room.

As a qualified town planner himself, he knew his limits. "I knew a bit, but the planners who were working in and around the system had the intricate knowledge of where things had gone wrong," he says.

The leadership group was made up almost entirely of planners — only a tech project manager, a change manager and a communications person weren't — so everyone had on-the-ground experience.

"The group had some amazingly talented planners, really dedicated to doing the right thing by the state," Greg says. "We owe those folks an enormous debt."

It also required some planners to shift their thinking away from processes to outcomes.

"It wasn’t a matter of just following a process that inevitably led to a formulaic decision or advice," Greg says. "It's actually about a good decision for our communities: is this development proposal inherently a good outcome or not?"

The need for continuous improvement

More than a decade on, SARA has gradually accumulated new triggers and drifted back toward complexity. The current Queensland Government is reviewing the system to simplify it again.

Planning Institute of Australia Queensland President Martin Garred says that’s a chance to ensure the system remains coordinated and customer-focused, reducing duplication and improving decision-making without compromising important state interests.

"SARA remains one of the most significant planning reforms Queensland has undertaken," he says.

"The challenge for this review is identifying where policy and process can be streamlined while ensuring state interests are considered efficiently and consistently through a single assessment pathway, rather than being dealt with separately."

Greg agrees — and hopes the review returns to the philosophy his team worked by in 2013.

“‘Making it real’ was a catch-cry I invented one night to say: let’s focus on recrafting a planning system that only deals with what’s important,” he recalls.

“That became the benchmark for our process: Let’s make a planning system that’s real, so every condition we impose has real meaning and impact. If it doesn’t add to the quality of the development, it’s not real — so take it out.

“That has stood the test of time as it's the right way to deal with planning applications.”