The Planning and Environment Court’s 2025 decisions on the conditions power, and in particular the reaffirmation in Aesthete No. 15 Pty Ltd v Council of the City of Gold Coast (No 2) [2025] QPEC 25 that a lawful condition must be relevant to but not an unreasonable imposition on the development, or reasonably required, continued to frame the analysis in the first half of 2026. Two questions recurred: what a council may lawfully require of a developer through conditions, and when an infrastructure charge is soundly based.
Gympie Terrace Pty Ltd v Noosa Shire Council [2026] QPEC 24 is the clearest example on conditions. McDonnell DCJ upheld a condition requiring onsite waste collection for a new mixed-use building at Noosaville, accepting that onsite collection was safer and more efficient and enabled recycling, and holding that the existing kerbside servicing of the site did not set the standard for a new development or confine the conditions power. The Court struck down a separate condition restricting service-vehicle hours, however, because the restriction was more onerous than the applicable code supported, a reminder that a servicing or hours condition must be grounded in the scheme’s benchmarks.
In Garbutt v Brisbane City Council [2026] QPEC 14, Kent KC DCJ upheld conditions requiring landscaping and ongoing maintenance of the public road verge for a residential development set into a disused quarry, finding them enforceable and binding on the owners and not an impermissible use of public land for a private purpose, again invoking the description of a condition as the community price of an approval. Conditions were also in issue in Hanson Construction Materials Pty Ltd v Sunshine Coast Regional Council [2026] QPEC 27, where several proposed conditions guarding against improbable risks were found unnecessary and not shown to be lawful under s 65, and where the Court noted that s 66(1)(b) prevents a condition from requiring a person to enter an infrastructure agreement, so that offered road works could only be secured if the Council elected to sign the agreement.
On charges, Grunske v Fraser Coast Regional Council (No. 2) [2026] QPEC 16 is the significant decision. Cash DCJ dismissed an appeal from a Development Tribunal and upheld an infrastructure charges notice of $54,720 levied on a reconfiguration of one lot into five. The appeal turned on whether a charge could attach to a reconfiguration that did not itself generate a use, and on the “extra demand” requirement in s 120 of the Planning Act. The Court held that the approved development was “for” the accepted dwelling-house use of the new lots, that s 120 does not confine extra demand to demand directly caused by the reconfiguration, and that the reconfiguration was merely a “trigger point” for the charge. The decision also applied the amendment, effective 30 June 2025, that deleted the word “only” from s 120, and emphasised that an appeal from a Development Tribunal to the Court is confined to error or mistake of law or jurisdictional error, while an infrastructure charges appeal is in any event precluded by s 229(6)(a) from being about the charge itself.
Read alongside the 2025 decision in OPD Developers Pty Ltd v Logan City Council [2025] QPEC 8, in which a notice was set aside for want of lawful authority, Grunske (No. 2) shows that a charge grounded in the correct statutory demand analysis will be resilient on appeal, while confirming that the “extra demand” principle remains the pressure point for any challenge. The practical lesson runs both ways. For local governments, conditions and charges must be precise, grounded in the scheme’s benchmarks and the correct demand analysis, and no more onerous than the power allows. For developers, a condition that is unnecessary, unsupported by the code, or beyond power remains open to challenge, and the “extra demand” requirement continues to be the natural focus of any dispute over a charge.
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