Every construction site in Sydney has a neighbour like this one.Every construction site in Sydney has a neighbour like this one.

Not a planner, not an engineer, not a bureaucrat. Just someone living beside a project and dealing with what it produces. When the dust gets bad enough that the windows stay shut through summer, they don’t lodge a submission or write to their local member. They ring the builder. Then they ring the council. Then they keep ringing until somebody agrees to come and look.

They would describe themselves as a nuisance. I would describe them as the only person in the whole arrangement actually solving the problem in front of them.

I watch that with equal parts admiration and frustration, because I spend my working life inside the machine they are trying to get the attention of. And behind the dust sits a larger story: how planning and development in this state became so complex, so procedural and so risk-averse that it now struggles to deliver the outcomes it was built to protect.

Thousands of pages to dig a hole

Out of curiosity, I have gone looking at what actually sits behind an approval for early works. Excavation, shoring, soil removal. Digging a hole, essentially.

What you find is not a construction management plan and a few pages on dust control. It is thousands of pages. Reports upon reports, each cross-referencing the next, each addressing another conceivable environmental, acoustic, archaeological or social scenario. All of it assembled, reviewed, conditioned and filed before anyone puts a shovel in the ground.

None of that is any individual’s fault. The planners assessing it have done their jobs. They have sought expert advice, demanded detailed risk assessments, and ticked every statutory box in front of them. Taken in isolation, the work is exemplary. Taken in context, the system it serves is broken.

What the paper doesn’t do

I am not arguing that contaminated site management doesn’t matter. It does, and the public deserves the protection. But we have reached a point where protection has turned into paralysis, where each safeguard layered on the last produces a system so dense that the people meant to follow it cannot read it.

Thousands of pages do not settle the dust. They do not make a compliance officer more likely to attend a site, when attending means first wading through two thousand pages to work out what they are supposed to be checking. And they do not make housing more affordable. Every consultant report, every extended approval, every delay adds cost, and that cost lands on buyers and renters in a state already short of homes.

Everyone in their lane, nobody watching the road

The planning system here is a patchwork of overlapping responsibilities and competing accountabilities. Consent authority, developer, certifier, consultant, regulator. Each performs their role diligently, within their own lane, to the standard their role demands. Almost nobody steps back to ask whether the collective output is sensible, proportionate, or effective.

We have built a culture where compliance outranks comprehension, and where risk is managed by producing more paperwork rather than by enforcing the basics. The people left holding the consequences are the ones with no role in the system at all. Residents. Workers. Neighbours.

A façade of safety

So it is worth asking plainly. In cases like this, has the regulation delivered any tangible public benefit? Or has it produced a façade of safety, an illusion of control that exists only on paper?

Perhaps if the conversation had been “dig your hole, keep the water running and keep the neighbours informed”, we would have fewer fenced-off dust bowls and more finished homes. Perhaps we would have a compliance system that measures outcomes rather than outputs. One that enforces what matters, instead of documenting everything that might.

In The Castle, Dale Kerrigan says proudly, “Dad, I dug a hole.”

In New South Wales, digging a hole now requires building a castle made of paper.