Australian planning coverage has a gravity well. Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane get the headlines, the data tools and the case commentary. The smaller jurisdictions — Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory — run their own planning tribunals, hand down their own binding decisions, and are almost entirely absent from any national view.
That gap is the whole reason we ingested them. Our corpus now holds 467 tribunal and court decisions from these four jurisdictions: 197 from Western Australia's State Administrative Tribunal, 134 from Tasmania's TASCAT, 127 from South Australia's Environment, Resources and Development Court, and 9 early decisions from the Northern Territory's NTCAT. Small next to VCAT's 3,734 — but for anyone working in those markets, it is the difference between flying blind and having the record.
Western Australia: the widest spread
WA's 197 decisions are spread across 66 different councils — the broadest distribution of any state in the dataset. That tells you something about WA planning: disputes are not concentrated in a handful of inner-Perth municipalities the way Melbourne's are. They surface everywhere from the metro coast to regional shires. WA is also the jurisdiction with no short zone codes at all — its schemes use free-text names like "Residential" and "Urban Development" — so matching a dispute to the right zoning context is harder there than anywhere, and more valuable once done.
South Australia and Tasmania: small registers, real precedent
South Australia's ERD Court (127 decisions across 43 councils) and Tasmania's TASCAT (134 across 29) are modest in volume but not in weight. SA recently rebuilt its entire planning system around a single statewide Planning and Design Code, which means its recent tribunal decisions are some of the first to interpret that code in practice — genuinely formative case law. Tasmania, with development pressure rising fastest around Hobart and the coast, is producing a steady stream of decisions that almost no national tool tracks.
Why the small states are the alpha
In a crowded market, edge comes from information other people don't have. Everyone watching Australian development is already watching Sydney and Melbourne. Almost no one is systematically reading WA SAT or SA ERD Court decisions across every council. For a developer, consultant or investor active in those markets, that asymmetry is the opportunity: you can know how a tribunal has treated a setback variation, a heritage objection or a density argument in Fremantle or Glenorchy when your competitors are guessing.
It also makes cross-border comparison possible. Because we map every state's zone codes to a common set of families on the zone equivalence page, you can line up a medium-density dispute in WA against its NSW or Victorian cousin and see how differently each tribunal reasons about the same planning question.
See it for yourself
Open the planning disputes table and filter by state to WA, SA, TAS or NT. Every row links to the council's own page — for example its page for the City of Fremantle — where the full local judgment history sits next to the zoning and development activity for that area, and through to the public judgment itself. The big three states are well covered by everyone. These four are where the record has been missing, and where it now isn't.