🧟♂️ Zombie DAs and the Return of the Regulatory Dead
It’s alive! And it still doesn’t have a cultural heritage assessment!
No, we’re not talking about a low-budget horror film. We’re talking about a development application from 2006 — a relic of a different era that’s somehow clawed its way back from the bureaucratic graveyard to threaten the Wallum landscape in 2025.
This is the terrifying tale of the Wallum (now sneakily rebranded as Bayside Brunswick Heads) development — a DA so old it predates smartphones, climate targets, and most modern environmental protections (including under the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Act). But thanks to outdated planning laws and developer-friendly loopholes, it’s back — bypassing the critical ecological and cultural assessments we expect today, like:
✅ Proper environmental impact studies under the Biodiversity Conservation Act (2016)
✅ Assessment of Matters of National Environmental Significance, under the federal EPBC Act (1999)
✅ Assessment under the Koala Habitat Protection SEPP 2021, nor the SEPP (Biodiversity Conservation) 2021
✅ Any contemporary, comprehensive cultural heritage assessments that acknowledge the deep connection of the Bundjalung people to this Country
✅ Protections for threatened species, like the Koala now listed as Endangered where the listing was Vulnerable when this DA was first approved.
That’s the thing about Zombie DAs — they linger in legal limbo, immune to the reality we now live in. Climate change? Bushfire risk? Species collapse? Apparently none of that matters, because back in past, none of it was “required to be considered.”
It’s an outrageous loophole, and Save Wallum is fighting hard to close it. Because when a decades old development plan can bulldoze High Ecological Value land today, it shows just how disconnected our planning system is from science, culture, and community expectations.
Let’s be real: a DA that’s nearly two decades old shouldn’t have a say in our future. There is no social license.
Wallum has changed. The science has changed. The laws have changed.
The only thing that hasn’t? This undead approval — animated not by logic, but by profit.
This isn't planning. It's planning necromancy. And it needs to stop.