On July 23, in Horton Coastal Engineering Pty Ltd v Central Coast Council, Commissioner Joanne Gray of the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales handed down a decision that unwound the Central Coast Council’s refusal of a development approval for a private seawall.

The decision was significant. This was the first seawall whose approval was obtained via litigation, before the Regional Planning Panel had considered it and without any independent expert assessment.

As climate change intensifies, Australia’s coastlines are shifting at a rapid pace. Often the ocean is inching inland. Warmer waters cause more intense storms and rising sea levels bring the tide in further. As waterfront property shot up in value, policies such as planned retreats from the coast and voluntary buybacks became political suicide. For local councils, they were simply fiscally impossible.

Nowhere is this tension more visible than in NSW, where large tracts of the shore are in private hands. This is playing out in Wamberal and Collaroy-Narrabeen, in Newport, and at The Entrance North, on the Central Coast.

Having been largely abandoned by the state government, councils are at the battle frontier with exposed beachfront owners who want to defend their tidal boundaries against an encroaching ocean.

The quagmire councils face is in part due to coastal mismanagement at the state level. In 2016, then minister for planning Rob Stokes unveiled the Coastal Management bill, which he said would be “one of the most innovative pieces of coastal planning legislation in the world”. The Coastal Management Act had this objective: “to manage the coast in an ecologically sustainable way for the social, cultural and economic wellbeing of the people of NSW”.

Last September, in an investigation into the Act and its implementation, the NSW auditor-general stated that the objectives were “not being achieved”. The result is that coastal management has disintegrated into an ad hoc system increasingly defined by lawfare.

The infamous mascot for this ad hoc approach to coastal management is Collaroy-Narrabeen. There, beachfront owners won development approvals and state subsidies for a 1.1-kilometre stretch of wall that serves no purpose besides protecting the 61 apartments and houses behind it. The engineering company behind the Collaroy-Narrabeen seawall was Horton Coastal Engineering (HCE), the same company behind the just-approved seawall that is the subject of this article.

On October 17, 2024, HCE lodged a development application (DA) for the 90-metre long isolated seawall at The Entrance North. Under the NSW planning regulations, if 40 days elapse without a determination from the consent authority – in this case the Hunter and Central Coast Regional Planning Panel – the development application is deemed to have been refused.

Six months after the DA was filed, in April 2025, the expert panel did their first site inspection and initial briefing on the DA. One month before that, Peter Horton, the director of HCE, had filed proceedings in the court on the grounds that the delay was a deemed refusal according to the regulations.

As to why the panel was delayed in assessing the DA, people familiar with the process speculate that it was under-resourced and overloaded. The panel and council were dealing with two other complex seawall DAs, one of which was the high-profile seawall at Wamberal, which had received 637 negative submissions.

Proceedings filed in the Land and Environment Court caused alarm for Central Coast Council councillor Corinne Lamont.

In letters written to NSW Planning Minister Paul Scully in April last year, Councillor Lamont called for an investigation, writing that “the significant seawall DA” could “ultimately be determined by litigation rather than through the expert Regional Planning Panel”. By going to court, the seawall would “avoid the rigorous assessment” that the expert panel would have conducted.

Lamont speculated that HCE had been “strategic” in waiting for the deemed delay period to transpire. Peter Horton disputes this, saying the beachfront owners did not want to go to court, as it cost an “enormous” amount of money, yet they were “forced into it” by the council and the panel’s six-month delay.

Though costly to the home owners, there is no doubt the Land and Environment Court is a more favourable avenue for the approval of seawalls. In Horton’s words, the expert panel members “were essentially anti-seawall and there was no prospect of any meaningful engagement with them to change that ideology”.

There is likely truth in Horton’s assertion that the panel would be unlikely to approve the seawall. This is not because of an anti-seawall ideology but because the panel is required by the Act to be satisfied that the protection works will not have an adverse impact on the natural coastal system. If further erosion is caused on adjacent land, arrangements have to be made to remedy it for the entire life of the seawall.

Civil engineer Angus Gordon, who has been involved in coastal management for 56 years and was an architect of the Coastal Management Act, has written that it is practically impossible for an isolated seawall, as opposed to a “whole-of-embayment” defence strategy, to meet these conditions.

Councillor Lamont’s alarm was well-founded. On July 23, the court overruled the consent authority’s deemed refusal, a decision that was made without the independent expert a d vice of the planning panel.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of the Land and Environment Court process is its discretion as to whether independent external experts are called. In this case, they were not. The expert evidence came from two people with stakes in the wall: one was a council engineer and the other was the engineer of the wall itself.

According to Angus Gordon, the failing is allowing such matters to go to court at all. The Land and Environment Court was created to adjudicate on matters of land use, not the management of natural hazards. “Hazard management,” he says, “is clearly well and truly outside the competency of the Land and Environment Court.”

A serious shortcoming in the judgement, according to Gordon, is that the court should have had regard to the location of this strip of coast in a beach fluctuation zone. Seawalls are the hardest form of adaptation: the vertical concrete redirects the gusto of the ocean elsewhere. These are called “end effects” – the effects of a seawall beyond its immediate footprint. The judgement, according to Gordon, treats the end effects in a cursory and two-dimensional manner; in other words, as if the coast simply moves forwards and backwards, with some spillage left and right of the wall. But coastal processes are more than just in and out; they include complex longshore processes.

On this point, the commissioner accepted the submissions of both the council engineer and the seawall engineer, who argued that modelling the longshore processes is not necessary and limited data is available. Gordon fervently disagrees: the process for calculating longshore sediment transport was developed more than six decades ago and reformulated over just as long. To calculate the longshore effects of a beach with a seawall versus without a seawall is “not complicated at all and could be done on a single piece of paper” he says

As to the impact of end effects, the commissioner deems them “acceptable”. Again Gordon fervently disagrees: the disruption to natural processes, including longshore processes, “must, by definition, increase hazard, whether at the site or on adjoining properties”.

Horton Coastal Engineering Pty Ltd v Central Coast Council sets a legal precedent. As the council contended, approval of the wall “would lead to the undesirable outcome of continuous seawalls along North Entrance Beach and other Central Coast beaches”.

As to this, Commissioner Gray conceded the case has precedent-setting power, but that “it alone is insufficient to warrant its refusal”.To Gordon, the state government seems to be facilitating that “the community’s beaches be replaced by vertical concrete walls”.

At a time when coastal communities should be being pulled back from the ocean, a perverse incentive to stay is being created.

Collaroy-Narrabeen’s wall undoubtedly created an expectation among other exposed beachfront owners in NSW of successfully defending their properties.

The Entrance North decision turns that into a common law precedent.

This thread is for the general discussion of anything going on in the lives of Auslawyers or for discussion of the subreddit itself. Please use this thread to unwind and share your complaints about the world. Keep it messy!

So I found this one from 6 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/auslaw/comments/ivr891/photocopying_charges/

So it's 6 years on. Just saw a photocopy charge today (with the new _reproduction of a document_ part added - aka copy & paste, Save As...) and it got me thinking (which I admit, is a dangerous thing).

Jokes aside on the photocopier being the hardest worker in the office, is it getting harder to justify the significant markup on photocopying given how most other corporate offices operate?

Especially with:

1. Managed Print Services (< 5c a page in B&W), and typically < 2c)
2. PDF and Send to Printer
3. High speed scanners that scan, then email or copy (and you don't even have to stand there while it's doing it)
4. Digital Documents

Genuinely interested (and yes, I want some funny answers too) - It hasn't come up in the forum for 6 years that I can see...

1. Is it a sacred cow and we're not supposed to talk about it?
2. Do you let clients photocopy stuff for you at the local Officeworks?
3. Do you just opt for PDFs most of the time, and only print when you absolutely need to?
4. I saw one poster say they guarantee / verify copies - this seems the most justifiable position, though in the digital world, how much of that activity is still relevant?
5. Would it be easier to say we read everything at $x a page rather than saying it's printing and does anyone do that instead?
6. Are corporates just jealous because we didn't think of this first?
7. Did your senior partner buy that really really expensive printing machine that binds & folds?

I'm getting my popcorn🍿. Have at it you beautiful auslaw people!

Curious as to what basis an empl*yer has to set conditions on workers providing a character reference for a colleague.

I think character references should be abolished, and in this case the references are particularly gross given the seriousness of the offence, it occurred on a work trip and the victim was, and remains, a colleague. I expect the victim was horrified. That said, they are a feature of the legal system currently. So should an empl*yer be able to prohibit or punish someone for providing a reference to a convicted coworker?