If you have ever given up on a Central Coast beach because the matting stopped short of the water, or spent an afternoon trying to find out whether a council venue has a toilet you can actually use, the plan the council adopted in May is the one that says what it intends to do about it.
Central Coast Council’s Disability Inclusion Action Plan 2026-2030 runs to 52 actions across four focus areas. Council says on its accessibility page that the plan “was formally adopted by Central Coast Council at its meeting on Tuesday 26 May 2026”.
That date matters. Under the Disability Inclusion Act 2014, as amended by the Disability Inclusion Amendment Act 2022, every local council in the state had to have a new plan in place by 1 July 2026. The NSW Department of Communities and Justice sets out the timetable in its guidelines for councils: the review was due 1 July 2025, “with new plans due by 1 July 2026”. Central Coast Council cleared that bar with five weeks to spare.
Why the Coast is not an average council area
The plan opens with a case for itself, and it is a stronger one than most councils could make. On every measure the plan cites, the Central Coast carries more disability, more chronic illness, more age and more unpaid care than Greater Sydney does.
| Measure | Central Coast | Greater Sydney |
|---|---|---|
| Have a disability | 7% | 5% |
| Have a long-term health condition | 38% | 28% |
| Provide unpaid care for others | 13% | 11% |
| Aged over 65 | 22% | 11% |
| Have a mental health condition | 11% | 6.6% |
Figures as published in the Disability Inclusion Action Plan 2026-2030. The plan separately cites the ABS: in 2021, 24,000 people on the Central Coast, 7 per cent of the population, required assistance with day-to-day activities due to disability. Over 35,000 people, 13 per cent of the population, provided unpaid assistance to someone with a disability, a long-term illness, or because of old age.
The plan is also explicit that this is not spread evenly. It names five areas where the share of residents with disability runs above the regional figure: Toukley and Canton Beach at 11 per cent, then Charmhaven and Lake Haven, Erina, Woy Woy and Blackwall, and Wyong, each at 10 per cent. Its own summary is blunter than the numbers: “There are people with disability living in every suburb across the Central Coast.”
What residents actually said
More than 450 people took part in the engagement that shaped the plan, through an online survey, a pop-up stall, one-on-one interviews, in-person and online workshops, community forums and focus groups including the Central Coast Disability Interagency.
The findings are worth reading in full, because they are specific in a way that plan documents often are not. Residents recognised improvements to beaches, libraries, playgrounds and walking trails. They then listed what still stops them: beach mats not long enough, uneven footpaths, lack of signage, missing accessible adult changing facilities and inaccessible toilets. Judgement and stigma, the plan records, “are still common”.
One theme runs through the rest: information. The plan reports “a common frustration was the lack of accessibility of information, and the time and energy people spend” on it. Residents asked for accessible platforms, and for Auslan-interpreted and Easy English material as a matter of course.
To the council’s credit, the plan itself was published that way. Alongside the main document there is an Easy English version, a one-page overview, and the plan signed in Auslan across a six-part video series covering the acknowledgement and mayor’s message, why accessibility matters here, the plan, the focus areas, the actions, and the monitoring. That is not a common standard for a council strategy document, and it answers, in the plan’s own publication, the complaint the plan records.
The 52 actions
The four focus areas are set by the NSW Government, so every council plan in the state addresses the same headings. What differs is what sits under them. On the Central Coast the weight falls heavily on the council’s own systems.
| Focus area | Actions |
|---|---|
| Improving access to mainstream services through better systems and processes | 20 |
| Creating liveable and safer communities | 15 |
| Supporting access to meaningful employment and independence | 10 |
| Developing positive community attitudes and upholding the rights of people with disability | 7 |
Counted by The Coast Record from the action codes in the plan’s four action tables (SP, LC, E and AB). Method note below.
Each action is set out in a six-column table: the action, why it is being done, the lead business unit, the key partners, the year it happens, and the indicators. That structure is genuinely useful. It means a resident can look up a commitment and know which part of the council owns it and when it is meant to land, which is more than many strategies offer.
Twelve residents have a formal seat at the table. Council has appointed 12 members to its Access and Inclusion Reference Group, selected, it says, for expertise in accessibility, communication, legislation, advocacy and planning.
The gap: counting the doing, not the difference
Here is our reading of the plan, and it is a criticism of one column rather than of the document. The indicators overwhelmingly count activity, not outcome.
Take the first action in the plan. Council will deliver an annual community education programme for local businesses and tourism providers, in all four years. The indicators are “Program delivered”, “Number of businesses engaged” and “Number of resources developed/distributed”. The second is public awareness campaigns, measured by “Number of campaigns delivered” and “Campaign reach”.
Each of those is a real, checkable number. None of them answers the question the plan itself sets out to address. The stated aim of that focus area is “To increase positive attitudes and behaviours towards people with disability”. You can run four campaigns with excellent reach and shift nothing.
The pattern holds across the document. Searching the plan’s text, the phrase “number of” appears more than 30 times. “Increase in” appears once. “Reduction in” does not appear at all. There is a single mention of satisfaction as a measure.
So in 2030, when the council completes the evaluation the plan promises for its final year, it will be able to say with confidence how many things it did. Whether it became easier to get around the Central Coast with a disability, the plan has not set itself up to answer. That is a solvable problem, and the reference group is the obvious place to solve it: several of the barriers residents named are countable. Beach matting has a length. Footpaths have a condition rating. Accessible adult changing facilities have a number, and it is currently a number the plan does not state.
How you check on it
The plan commits to a reporting chain, and it is worth knowing where to look. Progress is tracked quarterly by each business unit and shared with an internal reference group led by an executive sponsor. Annual progress is published in the council’s Annual Report, “including updates on all ongoing and completed actions”, and a copy goes to the NSW Minister for Disability Inclusion as the Act requires. An evaluation of the whole plan is due in its final year.
That means the first real test arrives with the next Annual Report. The document to hold up against it is the action table: 52 rows, each with a lead business unit named against it.
The year column will not narrow it down much. “Year 1” appears 45 times in the plan, “Year 2” 46 times, and “Year 3” and “Year 4” 45 times each, against 52 actions. Almost everything is marked as running through all four years. That is honest about how this work actually goes, since accessible footpaths and inclusive recruitment are not one-off deliverables. It does mean the timing column tells a reader very little about what should be finished when.
How we counted, and what we have not checked
We downloaded the plan and read it in full. The action counts come from the action codes in the four tables, deduplicated: 20 beginning SP, 15 beginning LC, 10 beginning E and 7 beginning AB, for 52. The word counts are of the plan’s extracted text as a whole, not of the indicator column alone, so they describe the document’s language rather than a strict tally of indicators; the exact figure for “number of” shifts by one depending on how the PDF’s columns are read, which is why we have written it as more than 30 rather than as a precise count. The demographic figures are the plan’s own, and we have not gone back to the ABS source to re-derive them. We have not verified the adoption date against the minutes of the 26 May meeting; the date here is the council’s own published statement. If any of that is wrong, tell us and we will fix it on this page.