Queensland’s opportunity to lead digitally-enabled planning reform and bring back infrastructure certainty

As the Commonwealth prepares to unveil critical planning and approval harmonisation reforms, Queensland is well placed to deepen collaboration with Canberra and reposition itself as a national testbed for digitally-enabled planning reform. This shift is necessary to unlock certainty, accelerate infrastructure delivery and meet the scale and speed demanded by national energy transition goals.

The cost of divergence

Recent Queensland policy shifts, like mandatory Community Benefits Agreements and Social Impact Assessments intended to strengthen social licence, have also increased complexity and uncertainty around approval frameworks. Known federal bottlenecks in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act process can significantly reduce project scope and cause years of delays. The result is a fragmented, risk-averse approvals landscape that slows investment and infrastructure rollout. 

With federal EPBC reform underway, the new package proposes a new national framework for environmental standards, an independent regulator and streamlined assessment pathways with strengthened bilateral agreements to remove duplication. These changes inject fresh momentum for all jurisdictions. Queensland’s opportunity isn’t simply to react, but to pre-empt: to build a planning and approvals system that aligns with Commonwealth reforms and promotes a higher standard of certainty and digital integration.

In October 2025, Queensland released its Energy Roadmap, outlining a five-year investment and infrastructure trajectory. It signals up to 6.8 gigawatts of new wind and large-scale solar with 3.8 gigawatts of new firming capacity by 2030, while renewing emphasis on private-sector investment. Crucially, it also signals a pragmatic timeline for extending existing coal-fired assets and faster deployment of peaking gas and storage.  

The roadmap confirms that Queensland’s transition will not be linear, acknowledging the continued role of coal and gas in maintaining system reliability, while directing record renewables investment. This dual trajectory amplifies the complexity of the approvals task; one that demands a modern, digitally-enabled planning system capable of handling real-time scale and nuance. Without this, approvals risk slowing delivery, weakening investment cases and undermining Queensland’s ability to balance energy security with decarbonisation.

Creating digitally-enabled certainty

Heading into 2026, Queensland's window to lead is open. By designing digital processes that meet or exceed the national standards to be introduced under the EPBC reform, the state can position itself as a national exemplar.

Engineering, environmental and digital expertise must be embedded earlier. When approvals and design programs run out of sequence, evolving engineering design becomes misaligned with planning pathways, creating blowouts as design changes clash with conditional approvals. 

Digital maturity is essential at this stage. Live, government-led, collaborative digital integration allows for real time management of design changes and associated impacts, bridging gaps between technical design, environmental constraints and government expectation. This enables consistent use of specialist data across disciplines and avoids duplicating work through each assessment stage.  Because approvals depend on clear data and narrative, digital integration improves information flow, removes bottlenecks and can ultimately reduce risk of late costly redesigns or non-compliance, replacing regulatory uncertainty with more predictable and transparent processes.

The need for Queensland’s digital backbone

Harmonisation of approval frameworks are advancing, but efforts will fall short if not underpinned by coordinated investment in the digital backbone.

Historically, federal authorities can lack confidence in the rigour of state-level assessments to satisfy EPBC requirements. Successful harmonisation requires elevating confidence in Queensland’s regulatory powers, strengthening bilateral agreements with imminent National Environmental Standards and allowing the Federal Government to accept Queensland’s assessment outcomes without adding further unnecessary duplication.

Queensland must shift focus to centralised, authoritative spatial data, spanning both state and local government. While tools like Queensland Globe are leading the way with highly visible, authoritative state government data, the challenge is at the local level where spatial data is more fragmented. Other states are starting to play a central role in linking policy directly to a single, leveraged data set, demonstrating the benefits of alignment across all levels of government. Queensland possesses robust open data but needs to integrate key policy levers with digital solutions. The state must lead this top-down effort to build shared platforms necessary for engineers, environmental teams and government to operate digitally-first and work from the same transparent data.

The new system must also be intelligent, leveraging precedent and a deeper understanding of place. The rise of AI offers a significant opportunity, while government-backed solutions provide the trust needed for stakeholders to utilise published insights. For example, AI can analyse large geographic information systems and spatial datasets to identify suitable environmental offsets, drawing on existing land-use, biodiversity and tenure data. This approach can help align offset decisions with policy intent and reduce assessment duplication. By using AI to extract insights from spatial and environmental data, practitioners can focus effort where it adds the most value to progress projects more efficiently.

A turning point for collective leadership

In 2026, governments, industry, digital innovators and environmental bodies should be co-designing a planning and approvals system that is digital by default. Queensland has an important window to reshape how it plans and approves major infrastructure. The convergence of federal reform, state energy ambition and rapid digital advancement gives it the means to act. By taking coordinated action Queensland can strengthen collaboration, improve transparency, restore certainty and demonstrate that efficient delivery and strong environmental outcomes are not opposing goals, but two sides of the same solution.