The Hunter and Central Coast Regional Planning Panel refused the three development applications for a seawall along Wamberal Beach on 18 June 2026, after a public meeting by teleconference two days earlier. The decision was unanimous. The northern section (DA/1264/2024), the middle section (DA/947/2024) and the southern section (DA/1389/2024) each got a separate determination and statement of reasons, and the reasons in all three are word for word the same.
That was in June. What the decision means depends on why. The panel’s reasons, the council assessment it adopted and the correspondence filed on the NSW Planning Portal this year tell a fairly specific story: the applications could not show that every affected owner had signed, could not show the wall would stand up, and could not say who would keep sand on the beach in front of it. Each of those matters again now, because the approval route still open was built to get past the first.
The threshold: not every owner signed
A development application in New South Wales needs the written consent of every
owner of the land it covers. The panel called this the threshold issue of
owners’ consent
and listed it first: it was not satisfied the applications had
valid and complete consent for all the land affected, and called that a fundamental
deficiency in the application
.
The gaps were not small. The council’s addendum assessment report for the middle section, dated 27 May 2026, records six lots with no consent at all and eight more where the consent form was incomplete or wrong: an incorrect lot number, a strata building where one owner signed but the strata did not, a property where two of three owners signed. Two of the six lots with no consent belong to the NSW Government. The council’s consent schedule shows three more State-owned lots without consent in the southern section. The council’s coastal plan lists taking those five lots into council ownership as an action, but the addendum report says no transfer had happened.
The panel tied the consent gaps directly to the engineering. Its second reason is that
the unresolved consents create the prospect of a fragmented or discontinuous
structure
. A seawall with a gap in it does not protect the houses either side of the
gap the way a continuous one would, and the ends of a wall concentrate erosion on whatever
sits next to them. When the panel first deferred the matter in February, its
record
of deferral said what Wamberal needs is a lagoon to lagoon solution
covering
every property, private and public.
The applicants were given a timetable to fix it: four weeks to resolve consents, twelve weeks for a full response with amended plans and technical reports. On 12 May they asked the council to amend the applications to leave out the properties without consent. The council rejected that on 18 May, because not all consents had been received or were correct and because no amended technical reports or plans came with the request. The addendum report records that no amended plans or reports were lodged at all after the deferral.
The applicants disputed how this was handled. In
a
letter to the council on 19 May their planning consultant said they had been denied
procedural fairness, because information they had asked the panel for had not been
provided, and said every owner in the northern section had in fact consented. The panel
addressed this in its reasons: it said it was satisfied that procedural fairness had
been afforded
, including the chance to lodge written material and to speak at the
meeting.
The engineering: a wall not shown to stand
Consent was the threshold. It was not the only problem. The council had an
independent coastal engineering review done by Worley, and its
third
report, dated 18 November 2025, advised the council not to approve. Under the scour
conditions it says the design must handle, the wall becomes a 10 metre high cantilevered
concrete secant pile wall, and Worley said the concept design has not been shown to be
structurally sound
. It also found the calculated overtopping, waves coming over the
top, unacceptable for public safety and for the houses the wall was meant to protect, and
that no details of the wall’s end controls had been provided.
The panel’s February deferral went further on the design, recording advice that a
cantilever with no tie-backs could be seen as experimental
for a beach with
Wamberal’s storm waves and rips. It also raised a concern that the footings would be
exposed more often than the applicants had indicated, and pointed to the scouring at
Collaroy-Narrabeen in 2025. The final reasons list unresolved concerns about coastal
engineering, erosion, beach amenity, public access and the longer-term effects of climate
change.
The sand: who keeps a beach in front of it
A wall stops the land behind it eroding. It does not stop the beach in front of it
eroding, and in big storms it can make that worse. Worley said approval could not be given
without sand nourishment to make up for it. The applicants’ position, as the panel
recorded it in February, was that nourishment was not their responsibility. The panel said
it does not accept that no sand nourishment will ever be needed
, and did not accept
that it should simply fall to the council either.
That runs into the panel’s seventh reason: it would not let gaps in the
applications be covered by future actions, parallel processes or possible alternative
measures
that the applications themselves did not lock in. Concerns raised at the
meeting, it noted, included reliance on future sand nourishment and impacts on the lagoons
that were not formally committed.
Contamination, biodiversity and the missing paperwork
The rest of the reasons are about what was never lodged. The panel was not satisfied on contamination: the preliminary site investigation pointed to a detailed investigation and a construction environmental management plan, and the addendum report says neither came with the applications. It was not satisfied on biodiversity: there was no Biodiversity Development Assessment Report, and the council’s ecology advice raised a concern that the ecological assessment had been split in a way that avoided one. The council’s recommended reasons list 19 reports or plans it said were missing, including a flood impact assessment, a visual impact assessment, a maintenance plan and a sand nourishment plan. The panel adopted those reasons with minor changes and concluded the applications were not in the public interest.
The plan that arrived just after
One detail in the reasons reads differently now. The panel noted that the council and
the NSW Government had been changing the strategic framework for Wamberal, but that
none of these changes are currently in place in legislation, policy or statutory
planning requirements
. Fifteen days after the refusal that changed: the council’s
certified Open Coast Coastal Management Program was
gazetted
on 3 July 2026 and took effect.
It would not have rescued these applications. The three DAs followed the council’s
2022 Engineering Design Requirements, which grew out of a study that found a vertical
seawall likely to give better public and environmental outcomes than a sloping rock
revetment, and the council’s assessment described the result as a hard, regular, man-made
and visually dominating concrete and sandstone structure
. The certified program’s preferred
approach is different: sand nourishment backed by a rock revetment. The addendum
report says that if the design requirements change significantly, a new development
application, not an amended one, would likely be needed.
What is still open
The route still running is the one The Coast Record reported in July. The council lodged an initial application with the NSW Reconstruction Authority on 14 May 2026 for a section 68 authorisation for sand nourishment underpinned by a sloping rock revetment, which the council says is consistent with the certified program. The Authority asked for more detail, the council held a second session with beachfront owners on 16 July, and it lodged the updated application on 23 July, according to its coastal-erosion page. The page says progress will be posted there; it shows nothing newer.
A section 68 authorisation is the mechanism the Authority used at The Entrance North on
4 July 2025. Its
own
description is that the works there were authorised without approval or assessment
under the planning Act, or consent from any person
. It is available at Wamberal
because the parishes of Kincumber and Wallarah are a declared reconstruction area, a
declaration now extended to 21 May 2027.
The applicants saw this coming. Their consultant’s 12 May letter to the panel described the section 68 application as an alternative approval pathway for the same development, asked the panel to take no action until the Authority’s position was known, and said the DAs might no longer be needed if the Authority approved a suitable solution.
The refusal is not necessarily the end of the DA route. The council’s page lists what owners can do after a refusal: lodge a new application that addresses the reasons, seek a review of the determination, challenge it in the Land and Environment Court, or stop.
Our view
Read together, the reasons are less a verdict on whether Wamberal should be protected than on whether this vehicle could deliver it. The panel acknowledged the landowners’ significant concern about erosion and the difficulty of holding multiple landholders to one proposal. But a seawall is only as good as its weakest lot, and an application that needs every signature on a beach where some owners, the State among them, had not signed was always going to struggle to produce the single continuous structure the panel, the council and its engineers all said was needed.
The section 68 route removes that obstacle by design. It does not need the missing signatures, and it does not go back before the panel. That makes it the more workable tool for a beach the council itself says has some of the worst impacts of coastal erosion of any beach in NSW. It also means the questions this panel spent nearly two years asking, about end effects, sand supply, the lagoons, public access and who pays to maintain the thing, will now be answered, if they are answered in public at all, by an agency and a Minister rather than an independent panel. Those questions did not go away with the refusal. Residents are entitled to see how the Authority answers them.