What Government Data Reveals
About Boroondara's Performance

Four measures moved materially in 2026: keeping the community informed up 9 points, making decisions in the interest of the community up 6, environmental sustainability up 6 and opportunities to give feedback up 5. These are the areas the council identified as lower performing in 2025 and targeted. The 2026 result is evidence that the response worked.

What did not move is the pair that sits underneath the others. General direction of Council is 52 and spending of public funds is 62. Communication improved. Confidence in direction and in value for money did not follow it. Read alongside Section 03, where rates carry three quarters of revenue and the council forecasts that share rising, spending of public funds is the measure most likely to be raised publicly over the next two budget cycles.

Participation in the survey fell from 56 councils in 2025 to 38 of 79 in 2026. Where a named peer did not participate in a given year, this brief holds the comparison at the most recent year both councils appear in, and says so, rather than comparing across different years.

The survey is a sample based instrument and carries the sampling error stated by its publisher. Year on year movements of one or two points should not be read as change. The movements reported above are 5 points or more, with the single exception of the 2 point fall in appearance of public areas, which is identified as within the range where sampling error is a plausible explanation.

A councillor reading 67.68% against a 65 per cent target will reasonably conclude that roughly two thirds of applications are decided inside the statutory period, and that the council is meeting its target. Both are true of the blended measure.

What the blended measure does not show is that VicSmart, 1,771 decisions or roughly a quarter of the caseload, is carrying it at 79.28% on a 10 day clock, while the standard applications that attract objections, shape streets and end up at VCAT run at 61.86% with a median of 116 days and an average of 166.7. The gap between the median and the average on standard applications is itself a finding. It indicates a long tail of applications taking far longer than the midpoint suggests.

This brief takes no view on whether the prescribed measure should change. It reports both populations because only one of them is the one a councillor is being asked about at a public meeting.

The Annual Report 2024-25 states that the introduction of deemed to comply provisions has reduced the ability for officers to raise grounds with problematic applications, while noting that the impact of this has tapered down over the year. It also notes that a number of matters were resolved by mediation and did not proceed to appeal.

That explanation is plausible and it is the council's own. It is also testable. The deemed to comply provisions apply across Victoria. If they were the whole explanation, the metropolitan median would have moved with Boroondara. It did not. The metro median held at 71% across 2023-24 and 2024-25, and three of the four named peers improved over the same period, with Stonnington reaching 88% and Whitehorse 71%.

The reasonable reading is that the codified pathways are a contributing factor experienced by every council, and that something specific to how Boroondara selects and argues its refusals accounts for the residual gap. Identifying which of the two dominates requires the council's own file level data on grounds of refusal and VCAT outcomes, which is not published and is not available to this brief. That is a scoping question, not a finding.

Boroondara issued permits on 82.9 per cent of the applications it decided, against 80.6 per cent across the inner and middle urban cohort. On volume it carries about one in thirteen of the cohort's applications.

This matters for how Section 02 is read. Boroondara is not a council that refuses more than its peers. It is a council that takes longer to decide, and that is upheld less often when its refusals are tested. Those are different problems with different responses, and conflating them would point management at the wrong one.

Boroondara's standard applications run 2.92 points below the cohort. Its VicSmart applications run 8.02 points below, close to three times the gap. The same pattern appears in elapsed time: standard applications take 116 days against a cohort median of 109, while VicSmart takes 23 days against 14.

That is not what the peer table in Section 04 would lead a reader to expect. On the blended measure Boroondara sits below its cohort, and the natural assumption is that contested, discretionary applications are the drag. The split says otherwise. On the applications that involve the most planning judgement Boroondara is close to normal. On the applications that involve the least it is furthest behind.

VicSmart is a prescribed pathway with no third party notice and no review rights, assessed against set requirements. Underperformance there is a throughput and administrative question rather than a planning judgement one, and it is usually the more tractable of the two. This brief stops at identifying it, because the causes sit in workload allocation, delegation practice and information request behaviour, none of which is published.

Across the cohort, VicSmart runs 87.30% within time against 64.78% for standard applications, a spread of 22.52 points. In Boroondara the spread is 17.42 points. VicSmart is 25.3 per cent of cohort decisions and 24.9 per cent of Boroondara's, so the two are carrying the measure to almost exactly the same degree.

The consequence is that the prescribed service standard sits above the standard application rate for every council in the cohort, not just this one. Boroondara is not gaming anything and neither is anyone else. The measure is defined that way. But a council comparing its blended figure with another council's blended figure is comparing two numbers that each depend on how much VicSmart work happened to come through the door.

This is the strongest argument for reporting the two populations separately in internal and councillor reporting, and it applies to every Victorian council.

Boroondara's VicSmart applications meet the 10 day statutory standard 79.28% of the time, yet the median elapsed time to a decision is 23 days. Both are correct.

The statutory clock stops when a responsible authority requests further information and restarts when it is provided. Elapsed days count continuously from receipt. A file can therefore sit for weeks in calendar time while remaining inside its statutory period. The cohort shows the same pattern, at 87.30% within time against a 14 day median.

The gap between the two is itself informative. It is a rough indicator of how much of the elapsed time is spent waiting on applicants after an information request, which is why this brief reports both rather than choosing one.

The council attributes the $30.60 million surplus against a $14.53 million budget to higher operating grants of $6.16 million, primarily due to the early receipt of 2025-26 Federal Assistance Grants, together with higher interest income of $4.95 million, unbudgeted capital grants of $3.78 million and higher user fees of $0.52 million, partially offset by a reduction in cash contributions of $2.35 million.

On rates concentration the council states that the 2024-25 result is consistent with 2023-24 levels, noting that it received 50 per cent of the 2025-26 Federal Assistance Grant allocation.

The consequence is arithmetic. Adjusted underlying revenue in 2024-25 includes half of a following year's grant allocation. That inflates the denominator, which flatters the adjusted underlying ratio and suppresses the rates concentration ratio in the same year. Neither ratio is wrong. Both are affected by a payment schedule set in Canberra, and the effect reverses in the year the allocation would otherwise have fallen.

The council forecasts the adjusted underlying result falling from 7.73% in 2025 to 4.80% in 2026 and 4% in 2027, while rates concentration rises from 75.31% to 78.50% then 80.70% by 2029.

Falling underlying margin and rising dependence on the single revenue source that is subject to a statutory cap is the combination that matters. The council states plainly that it receives a very low level of financial assistance from the Victorian Government and that rate revenue will continue to be a key source of funding.

Neither figure is a Place AU projection. Both are published by the council in its own audited Performance Statement, and both are visible to any reader who opens it. What internal reporting does not do is put the two series beside each other and against a peer set.

Place AU does not construct a composite index or an overall ranking of councils. Three reasons, in order of weight.

A single score hides the thing the reader needs, which is where the gap actually sits. Boroondara ranks first of five on staff turnover and last of five on VCAT outcomes. Averaging those into one number destroys both findings.

The measures are not commensurable. Cost per application, median days and a satisfaction index out of 100 have no common denominator, and any weighting applied to combine them would be a Place AU judgement presented as a government figure.

The publisher of the underlying data sets a condition on its use. The LGPRF full data set is released on the basis that it will not be used to aid the publication of overly simplistic league tables of councils, and that the variation commentary published alongside each figure is considered in any analysis. This brief carries that commentary wherever a council has provided it, and reports position within a named set rather than a rank across all 79 councils.

Six permits and one withdrawal. No refusals. Three of the six cite Clause 53.23, the affordable housing pathway. The withdrawal and one of the permits are the same site at 691-693 Burke Road, Camberwell: a fourteen storey mixed use proposal was withdrawn on 26 June 2025 and a Clause 53.23 application for the same development was determined on 20 October 2025.

Five of the six sites sit on or immediately beside the Burke Road spine through Camberwell and Glen Iris, which is the same geography the finalised Camberwell Junction Activity Centre Plan covers. The concentration is the finding. Development in the council's principal activity centre is being determined through two state pathways at once.

The median time from receipt to determination across the six permits is 124.5 days. This brief does not compare that with the council's own median of 116 days for standard applications, because every application in this table is a large mixed use or apartment proposal and the published council figures are not split by development scale. A comparison between the two medians would be arithmetically possible and analytically wrong.

As codified pathways absorb more of the caseload, the applications left to council are disproportionately the contested ones. A council whose remaining discretionary caseload is increasingly weighted toward difficult applications should expect its median days to rise and its VCAT success rate to come under more pressure, without anything about its practice having changed.

That is a reason to track the composition of the caseload alongside the performance ratios, and a reason to be careful about setting a target under the new framework against a historical run rate drawn from a differently composed caseload. Section 06 takes that up.

Every basis in the table above is drawn from a historical run rate. Section 05 sets out why the caseload that produced those historical figures is not the caseload the council will be deciding in 2026-27.

The codified pathways move the simpler applications out of discretionary assessment. If that continues, the residual caseload becomes harder on average and a target set at the cohort median on 2024-25 composition may be materially more demanding in 2026-27 than it appears now.

The practical recommendation is procedural rather than numerical. Whatever target is adopted, record the caseload composition it was set against, so that a future variance can be explained by composition where composition is the cause. The framework requires a target and a variation commentary. It does not prevent a council from documenting the basis at the point of adoption, and doing so protects the council when the variance is later questioned.

These are drafted so they can be asked in an open meeting without presupposing an answer. Each maps to a signal above.

On the VCAT measure: of the matters set aside at VCAT in the last reporting year, how many turned on a ground that the deemed to comply provisions removed, and how many turned on other grounds?

On timeliness: what is the council's within time performance for standard applications alone, excluding VicSmart, and how has that moved over three years?

On the long tail: how many standard applications took more than twice the median time to decide, and what did they have in common?

On revenue: what is the forecast effect on the 2025-26 adjusted underlying result of the Federal Assistance Grant allocation brought forward into 2024-25?

On renewal: which renewal projects were deferred in 2024-25, and what is the effect on the sealed roads and footpaths condition measures?

On targets: what caseload composition was assumed when the 2026-27 planning timeliness target was set?