Town Planner — Bayside

Our experience in the Bayside area

We act for landowners, builders and small developers on sites across the Bayside local government area. The work has run from dual occupancy and multi dwelling proposals in the established residential suburbs, through torrens and strata subdivision, industrial and warehouse development and change of use applications, to section 4.55 modifications and building information certificates for work already carried out.

Client names, addresses and application numbers stay confidential — we describe the type of matter, never the site. The person who reviews your site is the person who writes the report and deals with Council.

The planning controls that apply

Bayside Local Environmental Plan 2021 is the principal instrument, and it is worth knowing that it is genuinely one instrument. When Rockdale and Botany Bay merged in 2016 they inherited three planning instruments between them; all three were repealed on 27 August 2021 when the consolidated LEP commenced. There are no deferred matters. Zones are fully translated to the reformed suite — R2, R3 and R4 for residential, E1 through E4 for the centres and employment land, MU1 for mixed use, and SP4 Enterprise, which is unusual and now covers most of the Cooks Cove land.

Two areas sit outside the LEP altogether. Cooks Cove is governed by the Eastern Harbour City Precincts SEPP, and Port Botany and its surrounding land by Chapter 5 of the Transport and Infrastructure SEPP — which prevails over the LEP, still uses the old IN1, IN2 and IN3 industrial zones, and makes the Minister rather than Council the consent authority for land in the lease area, unzoned land and the Intertrade Industrial Park. On that land your application may not be a Council application at all.

Bayside Development Control Plan 2022 came into force on 10 April 2023 and replaced the two inherited DCPs — but those older plans still apply to applications lodged before that date. That is a lodgement-date rule, not a geography rule, and it still catches people out on long-running matters.

What has changed recently

• Four station precincts carry Transport Oriented Development controls — Turrella and Kogarah from May 2024, Banksia and Rockdale from July 2024. Council did not pursue an alternative scheme, so the state standards apply: 22 metres for a residential flat building, 24 metres for shop top housing, floor space ratio 2.5 to 1, a 21 metre minimum lot width, and two per cent affordable housing in perpetuity where gross floor area exceeds 2,000 square metres.
• Seven locations are nominated under the Low and Mid-Rise Housing policy: Arncliffe, Banksia, Bexley North and Turrella stations, Rockdale station and town centre, Rockdale Plaza shopping centre, and Kogarah station and town centre — which the Department attributes to both Bayside and Georges River. Mascot, Botany, Eastgardens, Wolli Creek and Brighton-Le-Sands are not on the list.
• Where the two policies overlap, the TOD controls win and the low and mid-rise policy does not apply at all. The Housing SEPP excludes TOD land from the low and mid-rise chapter outright. So at Turrella, Banksia, Rockdale and Kogarah the mapped core runs on the TOD standards, and the familiar low and mid-rise inner-area figures apply cleanly only at Arncliffe, Bexley North and Rockdale Plaza. Getting this the wrong way round is the most common error we see on Bayside sites.
• Regionally significant applications have been determined locally since 16 January 2026. The mechanism is a delegation rather than a transfer — the Sydney Eastern City Planning Panel remains the consent authority and the Bayside panel determines on its behalf. Thresholds are unchanged, though the test is now expressed as estimated development cost rather than capital investment value.
• The Bayside West Precincts rezoning is finalised, carrying a special infrastructure contribution of up to $88.3 million over twenty years. Land west of Arncliffe station is flagged for further master planning.

What we check before anything else

• Aircraft noise, and it is not one threshold but two. LEP clause 6.8 engages at ANEF 20 or greater and requires the consent authority to consider the siting table in AS 2021 and to be satisfied of its indoor design sound levels — for housing, schools, child care, hospitals and places of worship from ANEF 20, and for offices, retail, hotels and hostels from ANEF 25. The low and mid-rise exclusion sits higher again, at ANEF 25. Land between the two remains eligible for the policy but still attracts assessment. Neither the clause nor the Standard prohibits anything; the Land and Environment Court has confirmed the Standard is a guide, so there is real merit-assessment room above the contours.
• Airspace, which is a separate Commonwealth approval. If the proposal is a controlled activity under the Airports Act — typically a structure or crane intruding into prescribed airspace, but also glare, smoke, dust or turbulence — LEP clause 6.7 says consent must not be granted unless the applicant has obtained Commonwealth approval. It cannot be dealt with by condition, and there is no NSW referral or concurrence process to fall back on. On a tall building near the airport this determines the program.
• Acid sulfate soils, almost everywhere. All five classes are mapped across roughly 43 square kilometres. Class 5 covers about 42 per cent of the mapped area and Class 2 about 23 per cent — and in Class 2 land any works below natural ground surface trigger the clause. Council assesses every application for the likelihood of acid sulfate soils.
• Contamination, the local signature. A century of tanneries, wool scourers, chemical works, metal platers, service stations, depots and landfill sits under this local government area. Council keeps a contaminated sites register but does not publish it — the section 10.7 certificate is the practical way to find a declaration. The Orica Botany declaration covers the industrial park and surrounding land, and a groundwater extraction exclusion area bans residential groundwater use around it.
• Groundwater. The Botany Sands aquifer is often less than two metres below the surface, and embargoes dating from 2003 and 2007 bar new commercial extraction licences. Any meaningful dewatering needs a State licence and a disposal pathway, which is a program and cost item on almost any basement here.
• Flooding. There is no flood planning map in the LEP; the clause turns on what Council considers to be flood affected, and the special flood considerations clause was not adopted at all. The working controls sit in the DCP. A flood advice certificate costs $320 and takes about fifteen business days — order it early.
• The foreshore and coastal land. There are 87 mapped coastal wetlands across the Botany Wetlands, the Cooks River, Scarborough Ponds and the Botany Bay foreshore. The bands are narrower than people assume — at Brighton-Le-Sands the coastal use area is essentially the foreshore reserve. Note the catchment instrument here is the Georges River Catchment, not Sydney Harbour, and it reaches only the south-west of the local government area.

How Council assesses a DA

Bayside runs two tiers of pre-lodgement advice. The Development Advisory Service is free and by appointment at the Rockdale and Eastgardens customer service centres, and is the right first call for pathway and permissibility questions. Formal advice comes through a paid pre-lodgement meeting, priced on a cost-of-works ladder that runs from $904 for work up to $500,000 to $5,315 above $20 million.

Budget for the Design Review Panel. All new commercial, industrial, multi-unit housing and residential flat buildings must be presented to it, at the applicant's expense — currently around $4,300 under $50 million and $6,300 above it, with further fees for repeat referrals and for the separate design excellence process that LEP clause 6.10 imposes on some sites. It is a real cost and a real timing item, and it is the one most applicants have not allowed for.

The Bayside Local Planning Panel meets at 5pm on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month and determines roughly 95 of the 600 or so applications lodged each year. Ten or more unique objections will send an application to the panel, as will a contravention of a development standard by more than ten per cent or of any non-numerical standard. Requests to speak close at 5pm on the preceding Friday and you get three minutes.

On the Department's most recent Faster Assessments figures, Bayside averaged 102 assessment days in 2025-26, measured gross with no stop-the-clock. That sits mid-field for the area — Randwick 69, Canterbury-Bankstown 80, Sutherland 97, Georges River 147 — against a benchmark that tightened to 90 days from 1 July 2026.

Dr George Greiss

Principal, Greiss Planning · PhD (Urban Planning) · Adjunct Associate Professor

About the practice