There have been many important developments on the question of permitting Dual Occupancy in the Hawkesbury, and I promised you an update.
This advice is currwent at July 8th 2026, and follows many other updates I have given in the past:
Granny Flats – You Deserve More Choice! (2021 – big explainer about why this issue is important)
Dual Occupancy – Approved in principle! (Labor opposes) (June 2025 – tracks the progress of the proposal I moved to progress the issue)
For example, you might have read that recently the State Government has issued its response to a NSW Parliament Upper House inquiry on this subject, so I’d like to give you an update.
This is one of the most common issues I am asked about, so I’d like to dig a little deeper and explain how we got here.
This video is a bit more technical than others I’ve made, but if you’re still watching I’m guessing you’re one of the interested ones.
Dual Occupancy is the ability to build a second house on your own land, without subdividing it. Your land remains under one title.
There are three kinds.
“Secondary dwellings”, otherwise known as granny flats are already permitted in these zones, but there are size limits, meaning they’re usually one bedroom, and they need to be close to the primary dwelling.
An “Attached Dual Occupancy” could be a second full sized house but it needs to be connected to the original house, like a duplex or connected with a common wall, a breezeway or covered walkway.
They are already allowed in these zones.
What isn’t currently permitted are detached dual occupancies – second houses, of any size, anywhere on your acreage block, and that’s something I’ve been going on about for a long, long time. If you want to know more, see my various earlier videos and especially this 2021 explainer on why I have advocated for this for so long.
I think it’s useful to know some of the history of this issue.
The earliest reference I can find to Council trying to permit Detached Dual Occupancy is November 2012, when Councillor Bob Porter failed to persuade the Chamber to allow Hawkesbury Council to have the same policy as Penrith already had, which permitted it.
He had another go with a motion in June 2014 that passed. It said we should amend our LEP to permit detached dual occupancy for all rural properties 5 acres and up.
That led to a report in 2015 and a refusal of the State government in February 2016.
The reasons given for refusal included flood evacuation concerns.
In both May and October 2016, more in hope than expectation, we asked again for “updates”, which I think details part of the problem – motions that just ask for information and don’t have any action words associated with them.
Councillor Peter Reynolds had a go in September 2017, suggesting that we might have more success if we asked to have Detached Dual Occupancy in just certain areas, like Oakville and Maraylya.
That also went nowhere.
In December 2021, at the very last meeting of my first term on Council, the chamber voted to endorse the form of a long delayed new LEP or “Local Environmental Plan” and advance it to a process called “Gateway” where the State Government gives it their tick. The LEP is our key planning document. It dates to 2012, and it’s completely out of date.
You can see from this document that the new LEP included another go at getting Detached Dual Occupancies approved in Rural Zones. It was our best chance to finally get it up, and crucially, we were told that the State Government were finally on board.
Many, including me were baffled when, in literally the first meeting of the newly elected Council in January 2022, a combination of Liberal and Labor Councillors joined forces to pull the LEP back. I likened it at the time to trying to take a newly launched ocean liner and pulling it back up onto the slipway.
Those Councillors said the delay was to let an obscure group called the LEP Reference Group, which included property developers, to meet with Councillors. They suggested that they had not been given a chance to give us their advice. This, despite the fact that the reference group had met ten times since November 2020 to provide guidance into the final wording of the LEP.
Months later, the group finally met with us… and told us they did not understand why the LEP document had been pulled.
It remains my belief that if the Chamber had not caused the unnecessary delay, the new LEP would be in operation right now, including Dual Occupancy. In my opinion, delaying the LEP was an act of vandalism.
Fast forward four and a half years and the new LEP is nowhere to be seen, without even a forecast date from staff. It’s an embarrassment.
In June of 2025 I moved my own motion before to take action in an attempt to finally make progress.
If the huge LEP was constipated, let’s try laser micro-surgery.
My goal was simple: Take every zone where Attached Dual Occupancy was already permitted in the current LEP and remove the word: “Attached”.
That’s it. Remove one word.
The motion passed. The Local Planning Panel gave it their endorsement on July 17th. We voted again on August 12th to send it to the State Government’s Gateway process. It came back on November 13th giving us conditional approval to proceed.
This is, in the scheme of things, light speed and hopes were high.
The gateway approval told Council we had to do three things:
- Do some consultation with the NSW Reconstruction Authority and the SES.
- Place the policy on exhibition and finalise it before a deadline of 25th August 2026, and, crucially
- Consider the impacts of an upper house inquiry into dual occupancy AFTER our proposal came back from exhibition.
That deadline had no additional qualification. We were told to get it done.
So what is the Upper House inquiry?
Shortly after Hawkesbury moved our proposal, I started getting calls from other people telling me what a good idea it was.
Mark Hornshaw, an ex-Liberal, now Libertarian Councillor up at Port Macquarie Hastings Council successfully moved a similar motion inspired by ours.
In July 2025 I got a call from a state colleague, John Ruddick. He sits in the upper house as a member of the Libertarian Party, but he is also a former Lib and a good friend. By the way, you might note that the common theme here is that if you want to get anything useful done in the world, leave the Liberal Party. But that’s a discussion for another time.
He successfully pushed for the NSW Parliament to hold an inquiry into Dual Occupancy with remarkable bi-partisan support. With John as the Chair, they deliberated from October to December. John and the committee came to the Hawkesbury and we spoke to residents who want to build dual occupancies for their adult kids, for their elderly parents, or to build farm accommodation to keep our agricultural lands viable.
Our Council officials and local advocates like Troy Myers explained at public hearings what we were doing, and the inquiry produced its report on the 30th of March.
Most recently, the NSW Government has made its own response to the Inquiry’s report on June 30th.
Now why is this important?
There are three ways that residents in the Hawkesbury are going to get some changes to their ability to site a second detached dwelling on their land, under one title.
And it’s a race to see which one bears fruit first.
Now we can see the government’s response, we can see they have given in principle support for secondary dwellings and dual occupancies in these zones (gesture) as what’s called “Compliant Development” through the Housing SEPP and some other SEPPs. SEPPs or “State Environmental Planning Policies” take precedence; they gazump whatever conditions our Council’s LEP has in effect.
For people who have illegal or unapproved Dual Occupancies (and there are a lot of those in the Hawkesbury), the Government was more muted about there being an amnesty, only saying that the inquiry’s recommendation was ‘noted’. This doesn’t mean there is no hope for people wishing to regularise dual occupancies they already have on the sly, but that the government will ‘consider’ the implications. Stay tuned.
If the NSW Minister for Planning, Paul Scully decides to act at State level to implement the recommendations of this Inquiry, some parts of what we’ve tried to do locally become moot.
The second track is for Hawkesbury Council’s proposal to be exhibited, attract community feedback, come back, and then be voted on before the end of the year and become an active policy.
I’ve pushed Council staff regularly about whether we will meet the August 25 deadline set for us, and I’m disappointed to say that the most recent advice back is that we will not. Staff are telling me this will be pushed out to Christmas.
I’m very unhappy about that, because the reason they are citing to me for the delay is because of the “need to update the Planning Proposal following the NSW Governments response to the recommendations of the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry”
That’s the one we’ve just been talking about.
However, look! The gateway approval we received from the State told us fairly clearly not to do that. It told us to get the document out onto exhibition and tweak it to include these impacts AFTER it comes back from exhibition.
Worse, I’ve been told that the other work, the consultation we were told to do back in November with the NSW Reconstruction Authority and the SES has not happened. We could have acted on that seven months ago.
I have conveyed my disappointment to the Mayor.
Then there is the third and final way we might see movement, and that is through the new LEP, which is now eight years late, finally emerging from the mist.
That process is now so laughably delayed I don’t even know what to tell you. There is no date, and no pre-requisite condition anyone has been able to tell me that might let us all know when it will be presented to the chamber for approval. Don’t hold your breath.
I am approached regularly by people who just want this reform to happen so that they can look after their parents with dignity, or give a leg up to their adult children to stay in the communities they feel an affinity for, but without keeping them crowded under one roof.
At a time when there is a crisis in housing affordability, where the costs of rural living are eased by facilitating multi-generational households, and where people should enjoy the flexibility of building on their own land, all I can say is that I will continue to advocate for you.