A comparison of the motivations, rhetoric and controversy surrounding recent planning reforms in New South Wales, Australia and Ontario, Canada

![CDATA[In recent years, there has been a shift in the way that land use planning systems – and particularly the power structures that shape them – are organized. Both in Australia and internationally, planning legislation (which in most jurisdictions governs both plan making and development assessment) has been a target for reform as governments seek to achieve ‘efficiency’ and ‘streamlining’, more often than not in the name of facilitating economic development. Particularly in New South Wales, the existing planning legislation is demonized as ‘the problem’ and the reforms are presented as ‘the solution’. In this paper, we seek to compare and contrast recent planning legislation reforms in New South Wales, Australia and Ontario, Canada. In both jurisdictions, planning legislation has been the subject of successive rounds of reform, with the pace of reform increasing since the turn of the century. After discussing the historic context of how planning is perceived generally in New South Wales and Ontario, we unpack the nature of recent key planning legislation reforms in both jurisdictions. We then explore the similarities and differences in the motivations, rhetoric and controversy surrounding these reforms. We conclude with a discussion of lessons that can be learnt: a fitting pursuit at a time when the planning system in NSW is being overhauled and the state government is claiming it wishes to learn from international planning policy and practice.]]