The National Retirement Living Report Card: A Health Check on Australia’s Planning Systems

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As our ageing population continues to grow, it's more important than ever that retirement living is addressed in strategic plans and policies by state and local governments.

Kylie Newcombe View Profile

Why a Planning Report Card?

The report card serves as a tool to launch and support conversations with policymakers and authorities. It highlights the issues and, more importantly, the solutions to make our planning systems ‘retirement ready’. 

The final scores are informed by three components: a survey, industry and planner engagement, and the 2017 Report Card scores. 

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A promising starting point could be setting explicit targets for retirement living, backed by a consistent set of controls and design guidance for application across the state.

Kylie Newcombe View Profile

To improve the ability to compete, state governments should review zones and identify other zones where retirement living could be permitted, where residential is not. 

To improve understanding, a consistent set of controls and design guidance at the state level for retirement living should be defined. 

To improve efficiency, departments and councils need to set about changes regarding timeframes. An impactful change is a simple move to mandate a 20-day timeframe for responses from referral agencies and the authority to declare ‘deemed to satisfy’ if responses are not provided in the timeframe. 

In summary, we haven’t moved on too far since the 2017 Report Card with limited progress on specific provisions for retirement living. We can see how to move forward in a positive direction taking ideas from a mix of jurisdictions that have already proven to be effective.