New documents reveal in detail how the head of the New South Wales planning department was involved in fast-tracking the rezoning of land for a multibillion-dollar housing development on Sydney’s fringes before he left the department to work with the project’s developer, Walker Corp.
The documents, released under freedom of information laws, detail the involvement in 2022 of the former department secretary Michael Cassel in both developing a fast-track process and then shepherding the plans to rezone land at Appin through the new process.
The documents reveal Cassel was on first-name terms with Walker’s chief executive, David Gallant, pushed for meetings on Walker’s behalf, and urged other departments to speed up their decisions in relation to the project.
The 13,000-block housing estate was proposed by the building giant Walker Corporation, which owned farmland worth tens of millions – but its rezoning will make it worth billions. Two smaller nearby sites – Gilead 2, owned by Lendlease, and North Appin, owned by Ingham Properties – were also put on the fast track.
Cassel left his role as department secretary in May this year after the Minns government was elected in March. He began working for Walker Corporation around July. The Appin housing estate was approved after he left, in July, by his former deputy.
The government has launched an urgent review of all recent development approvals handed to Walker Corp.
“While I have been assured all appropriate processes were followed in relation to Walker Corp projects, I have asked the secretary of the department to take steps to satisfy herself that all probity and conflicts of interest requirements were met,” the NSW planning minister, Paul Scully, said in a statement.
As a senior public servant, Cassel was not subject to a cooling-off period before entering the private sector. When he left the public service, he would have been given the usual advice about not using confidential government information in his new role, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Cassel did not respond to a request for comment.
In July the NSW government gave conditional approval for the massive housing development despite the state’s environment minister, Penny Sharpe, expressing reservations in opposition and again in June that the koala habitat protections in the region “don’t strike the right balance” between housing and the environment.
The area has no planned public transport or water infrastructure and roads require major upgrades.
Changing processes
The rezoning of the Appin site, Gilead 2 and North Appin was controversial because usually it is the local council that approves a land use change, but there is no suggestion Cassel or the department did anything wrong by embarking on a different process.
Under Cassel, the department developed a new process during the second half of 2022 – “state assessed” development – which involved the department taking over the decision-making and sidelining councils.
Wollondilly council had made it clear in March 2022 it would not support Walker’s plans for Appin because of the lack of infrastructure and because it is in sensitive koala territory.
In 2019 the planning department had told a previous planning minister housing development at Appin was not needed until 2036.
As secretary of the department, Cassel was always likely to be involved in important decisions such as devising a new approval path.
But under the state-assessed process, Cassel and his colleagues found themselves wearing several hats.
As well as overseeing the policy, Cassel was the final arbiter about which three sites would be put on the fast track. Cassel became the “planning proposal authority” – the person responsible for ensuring the application meets the department’s requirements before the public exhibition of the planning proposal. His deputy became “the plan-making authority” with responsibility for final assessment.
The documents show that from at least June 2022 Walker Corp was lobbying Cassel to take over rezoning powers from the council.
An earlier plan for “state led” approvals – where the state government assisted councils – was the subject of industry consultation. The new “state assessed” process came as a surprise.
It was only made public when the former Liberal planning minister, Anthony Roberts, announced the first three sites in November last year, including Appin. The reason given was an urgent need to boost housing supply.
Until June the documents talk about “state led” assessment.
But the industry was urging a more radical approach.
On 21 July 2022, Gallant wrote to Cassel: “As mentioned in our previous correspondence, it is our preference that the proposal is dealt with by DPE [the Department of Planning and Environment] and the minister for planning via an amendment to the State Environmental Planning Policy (Precincts – Western Parkland City) 2021 (“SEPP PWPC”) as an acceptable statutory pathway.
“We look forward to hearing from Adrian to establish a time to meet and discuss the state-assessed framework.”
The rezoning pathways program was presented to the department’s probity committee in either July or August. (The dates on the document are ambiguous).
This presentation was for five pathways including “state-assessed” and another pathway called “call in”, which appears to have been subsumed into “state-assessed”.
Two members of the probity committee, planner Gary White and former departmental secretary Sam Haddad, “emphasised the need for clear criteria and transparency in applying the criteria”.
Haddad suggested the framework should go to cabinet “for whole of government approval”. Another member, Carolyn McNally, also a former secretary of planning, suggested approval by a cabinet committee.
The chairman of the committee, barrister Peter Singleton, noted that some of the criteria were “judgment calls”.
“Where there are judgment calls it is important to have the right person making the decision. It is not clear enough – is it the deputy secretary or the secretary?” he is recorded as asking.
The documents appear to indicate it did not go to cabinet, but one FOI document was withheld entirely. Other documents suggest the minister approved the new pathway, which did not require legislation.
‘State assessment’
The documents show that once the pathway was established, a panel of departmental officials, supervised by a probity auditor, identified seven sites as candidates for “state assessment” and that a list of three was compiled for approval by Cassel.
Charts that scored the sites were entirely redacted so Guardian Australia cannot say what criteria were used to whittle down the list and how they scored.
By the end of August, a separate multiagency panel working on Appin’s infrastructure needs, the Technical Assurance Panel, was complete and Gallant emailed Cassel again to ask what was happening.
“Dear Mick, Further to my previous correspondence to the Department, Walker are yet to have any certainty on the pathway that follows the TAP process,” Gallant wrote.
I would be grateful if we could arrange an urgent meeting to discuss the above matter, Regards David.”
Cassel told his team to arrange the meeting, which took place on 11 October.
Guardian Australia has previously revealed that Roberts’s former chief of staff and political confidante Robert Vellar went to work for Walker Corp in 2019 after Roberts lost the planning portfolio in a ministerial shake-up.
The documents show that Vellar and Gallant met Cassel and two junior colleagues, as well as bureaucrats from Transport for NSW.
No notes of the meeting were found by the department in response to the Guardian’s request.
However, after the meeting there was a terse exchange of emails between the then transport secretary, Rob Sharp, and Cassel over Planning’s rapid timeline for exhibition of Appin. Cassel wanted it exhibited for a month before Christmas. This left no time for the transport department to consult the public about the new road corridor for the future expressway known as the Outer Sydney Orbital Stage 2, as part of an amended plan for the Macarthur region.
The department declined to comment on Cassel’s interactions with Walker Corp, noting that the new secretary, Kiersten Fishburn, was now conducting an inquiry for the minister.
In April the department told Guardian Australia: “It is common process for departmental staff to meet with a range of stakeholders, including councils, peak groups, community groups and proponents and their designers.”
Asked how often planning staff had met Walker Corp, the department said there had been 16 meetings “on a range of matters, including the Technical Assurance Panel process, its Appin planning proposal, as well as other matters such as employment zone reforms and the Wilton complying development code”.
It did not say when those meetings took place, or who attended.
