Central Coast Council has lodged an application for a section 68 authorisation with the NSW Reconstruction Authority for “sand nourishment underpinned by a sloping rock revetment to provide coastal protection at Wamberal”, according to the Council’s coastal-erosion page. The application, the page says, is consistent with the approach set out in the Council’s adopted Open Coast Coastal Management Program, the plan whose certification The Coast Record covered on 3 July. What has changed is not the design. It is the door the design is now being pushed through.
Two tracks to the same wall
Wamberal already has coastal-protection works in the normal planning system. Three development applications, one for each section of the works set out in the Council’s Engineering Design Requirements, were lodged in 2024 and put on public exhibition that spring. They have been under assessment by the Hunter and Central Coast Regional Planning Panel ever since, an independent panel that weighs submissions, expert studies and objections before it decides. That process is slow by design, because it is the process that gives the public a say.
The section 68 application is a different animal. It does not go to the planning panel at all. It goes to the Reconstruction Authority, the state agency stood up after recent disasters, and asks the Minister to authorise the works directly. The two tracks aim at the same beach and, on the Council’s account, the same design; they just travel through different parts of the state.
What a section 68 authorisation actually does
The power exists because, on 21 May 2025, the parishes of Kincumber and Wallarah in the Central Coast were declared a reconstruction area under the NSW Reconstruction Authority Act 2022, a declaration since extended to 21 May 2027. The trigger was the storm of 1 to 2 April 2025, when large surf met the highest astronomical tide and cut into the dunes near homes at Wamberal and The Entrance North. That declaration is what unlocks the Authority’s stronger powers, including the one at the centre of this story: a recommendation to the Minister to grant an authorisation under section 68 of the Act.
The Reconstruction Authority describes what such an authorisation does in plain terms. When it was used at The Entrance North on 4 July 2025, it authorised coastal protection works there “without approval or assessment under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, or consent from any person”. That is the whole point of the mechanism, and it is a significant one. The planning assessment that a development application must pass, and the owner consent that ordinarily has to be obtained, can both be set aside. Wamberal is now the second Central Coast beach for which Council has sought that treatment.
Why the faster path is tempting, and what it trades away
It is not hard to see why Council would want the quicker route. Wamberal has, on the Council’s own description, some of the worst coastal erosion of any beach in New South Wales. Major storms threatened every beachfront property in 1974; two neighbouring houses were washed into the sea in 1978; and in July 2020 about 54 residents were evacuated while Council placed 4,400 tonnes of rock under emergency orders to stop the erosion reaching further. Against that history, a process that has kept three applications in assessment since 2024 is a long time to wait for a wall.
The trade is the scrutiny. The planning-panel track is the one that hears the objections on the record, tests the expert studies in public and lets those who made submissions address the panel directly. A section 68 authorisation is designed to move faster precisely because it does not carry all of that. Both things are true at once: it is the more responsive tool for a genuine erosion emergency, and it is the tool that does the least to reassure a resident who is worried about, say, the flood modelling or the look of the finished structure. A reader is entitled to know that the speed is bought with the assessment.
Who pays, and the conflict Council is managing
The funding split is set by the certified management approach and does not change with the approval route. Private landowners are required to pay for the works that protect their own land; Council funds only the elements that sit on public land, such as the protection of beach accessways it manages on the community’s behalf. Council is also both a proponent of parts of the works and a body that assists the planning panel’s assessment, and it has published a management statement, under its own conflict-of-interest protocol, to keep those two roles apart. That tension does not disappear on the section 68 track; it simply moves to a different desk.
The Reconstruction Authority will now assess the application. Council says it will post updates on the progress of the submission on its coastal-erosion page. For a beach that has been losing to the ocean for fifty years, the question is no longer really what to build. It is which door the wall comes through, and how much public daylight falls on it along the way.