Objectives of the NSW Heritage Strategy

Aboriginal communities, history and culture are fundamental to understanding and recognising the stories, values and practices in our state’s heritage. This means being truthful about the history of our state and making the heritage system work for Aboriginal communities.

We will give Aboriginal communities a strong voice in how significant cultural heritage is identified and safeguarded under the Heritage Act.

The population is diverse but many people in New South Wales do not see their culture, stories or traditions reflected in the heritage we conserve.

We also know there are a range of cultural, social and physical barriers that restrict and discourage access to heritage. We will work directly with communities to make heritage more inclusive and accessible.

Heritage must encompass the multitude of our state’s stories and experiences to be a meaningful and true reflection of our past. We will develop new and different types of heritage recognition to capture a broader range of heritage, from cultural practices to cultural landscapes.

We’ll also make it easier for everyone to nominate items, ensuring our system reflects the diversity of New South Wales.

The Heritage Act is the basis for protecting state significant heritage in New South Wales. Introduced in 1977, the Act has not kept pace with community understandings of heritage or modern regulatory approaches.

We will create modern legislation to protect and conserve heritage in New South Wales that retains the strong foundations of the current Act, while providing a broader range of tools for government and communities to protect and manage heritage effectively.

The NSW Government will make heritage processes faster and simpler by improving policies, systems and data that support owners, local government and government agencies to identify and manage heritage.

We need to ensure these tools are simple and accessible, and that information is up to date and useful, to encourage the conservation, activation and adaptive reuse of heritage items.

The NSW Government is responsible for ensuring our state significant heritage is protected and that development proponents, owners and custodians comply with the rules set out in the Heritage Act.

We need to ensure that the systems and resources are in place to support owners and regulators, in line with broader environmental compliance approaches.

Local councils list and manage items and conservation areas with local heritage significance on their local environmental plans. Managing local heritage involves carefully balancing many needs and interests. We need to ensure that councils have the guidance they need to identify, assess and manage local heritage.

Owners and custodians face complex challenges in caring for our heritage. The NSW Government can empower heritage owners and custodians with targeted and timely education and guidance.

We will deliver up-to-date technical advice to support conservation, adaptive reuse and climate resilience. We will also support the development of heritage trades training initiatives to ensure the skills needed for conservation are available.

The conservation, celebration and activation of heritage requires long-term funding. While the NSW Heritage Grants Program provides valuable support to owners, it is consistently oversubscribed, limited in scope and not open to NSW Government agencies. Feedback during consultation highlighted the need for a more reliable and re-focused funding model – one that enables proactive heritage management, not just reactive support.

We will investigate new funding approaches that enable proactive heritage management and build a more resilient, future-focused system.

Heritage provides considerable benefits to New South Wales but these are hard to measure. The lack of an agreed method for valuing the many benefits heritage provides means its contribution is poorly understood and often undervalued. This in turn makes it hard for government agencies to adequately maintain and manage their heritage assets.

We will create a robust evidence base to support more efficient and consistent decision making, including a standard method of valuing and prioritising NSW Government heritage assets to help agencies manage and conserve their assets.