Planning scheme reviews are often dismissed as routine housekeeping. But occasionally, they expose something far more consequential: a long‑standing planning error that has quietly shaped land use outcomes for decades.
While giving evidence to the Panel for Amendment C147surf, I encountered precisely that – a large parcel of privately owned land zoned Public Conservation and Resource Zone, a designation that had persisted for nearly 50 years despite the land never being acquired or publicly owned.
The land was identified for public open space in the late 1970s by the former Shire of Barrabool despite remaining in private ownership. When the new format planning scheme was introduced in 2000, the public land zoning was carried across. The land was never acquired and remains private today.
Here’s the problem.
The Ministerial Direction on the Form and Content of Planning Schemes is unequivocal: public land zones are to be applied only to Crown land or land owned or controlled by a public authority.
And Section 12B of the Planning and Environment Act requires planning scheme reviews to assess whether schemes comply with those directions.
In this case, it didn’t.
The amendment itself wasn’t designed to fix that error. But the landowner made a submission pointing out that the Anglesea Structure Plan 2012 had already committed Council to rezoning the land to reflect its private ownership and environmental constraints. A commitment that had never been acted on.
The Panel agreed this wasn’t something that could continue indefinitely.
It supported a clear action in Clause 74.02 (Future Strategic Work) requiring the rezoning to occur promptly. To Council’s credit, it advised this could be done within 1–2 years, despite a crowded strategic work program.
The Panel stopped short of nominating the future zone, concluding that doing so would be premature given the site’s constraints. That was a fair and measured outcome.
The bigger lesson?
Planning scheme reviews, and Section 12B in particular, matter. They are not just about policy updates or administrative consistency. They provide a mechanism to identify historic zoning errors, test schemes against Ministerial directions, and commit to fixing things that should never have occurred in the first place.
For practitioners, it’s a reminder to look closely at what’s already there – not just what’s being proposed.
Panel report: https://planning-schemes.app.planning.vic.gov.au/All%20schemes/amendments/C147surf?schemeCode=surf