The long silent bureaucratic battle over north points
Ever had one of those long silent battles with bureaucracy that just seem to go on for ever?
Years go by. Governments change. Your kids grow up, leave home, come back for the cheap rent.
And still the "deep state" that is local government keeps on believing something that is so obviously wrong that it drives you crazy.
It becomes one of the true constants in your life.
They will always believe in this falsehood.
This is what has been happening, for the last few years, on the Peninsula.
You see the Peninsula has its very own North Point. I call it "Woy Woy North".
There's True North, Magnetic North, Map Grid Australia (MGA) and on the Peninsula - "Woy Woy North".
I can only assume that whenever the streets in the Peninsula were first laid out the surveyor who did the work was a bit of a rebel.
Instead of using magnetic north to lay out the streets he decided to use a slightly different direction about 7.2 degrees clockwise from true north.
You can see this phenomenon for yourself by looking at the Peninsula on Google maps.
As I get tired of telling council staff, Google maps are oriented to face north, or at least MGA which is very close to true north.
That's why on Google or any other map the streets are at a slight angle.
Don't get me wrong, it was a perfectly legitimate thing to do in those days as long as you labelled it MM (Magnetic Meridian) which our surveyor did.
He also drew a large ornamental arrow facing in that direction on his plans, which are preserved in the land registry office.
The arrow is labelled MM but a lot of people just see the big beautiful arrow and assume it's pointing north.
Many of these people are designers, and they go on to draw up plans for buildings with a north point that isn't actually pointing north.
When they do this, the plans have a north point arrow that is parallel with or at exact right angles to a street.
When you see that, it's pretty obvious, at least to someone who's not a council planner, that this is yet another example of the dreaded Woy Woy North.
Over the years, I've tried telling lots of council planning staff about this.
The number of cases we've seen at Peninsula news where the drawings for a development application use Woy Woy North as True or Magnetic north have been amazing.
At one stage I wrote a long email to the then director of planning requesting that they ask the land registry office to stamp the plans with a message saying something like "warning this is not true north".
However, that fell on deaf ears.
One council planner even told me that the 7.2 degree difference was due to "magnetic deviation".
One of the problems with an incorrect north point is that you get incorrect shadow diagrams.
Although 7.2 degrees doesn't sound like much it can make a huge difference to the accuracy of shadow diagrams depending on the time of day at least 30 minutes time wise.
So that the shadow labelled 12:0 pm is really 11:30 am and so on.
One of these cases went through numerous appeals, and even through the secret squirrel rubber stamp approval process that's laughingly called a conciliation conference at the Lands and Environment Court.
Apparently the "experts" swore that there was "no problem" with the drawings.
For years, I put up with this, even doubting my own sanity - perhaps Woy Woy North was really the one true north after all.
Then something happened that made me snap.
Not just one but two applications went through public exhibition on the council planning portal and into assessment with shadow diagrams that were so wrong that one of them couldn't have been any more wrong if they tried.
It had an upside down North Point.
The other one had a correct North Point but had somehow managed to get the shadows 90 degrees out.
So then I did what I should have done all those years ago and instead of writing to individual members of staff I raised a service request with Central Coast Council asking general manager Mr David Farmer to please, please fix it.
To my surprise, I got a nice reply back a few days later from a helpful sounding person in the council saying that "I have informed the section manager of development services who will flag this with the development planners who are conducting the pre-development reviews".
So after all this time, could this spell the end of the dreaded Woy Woy North? It's a huge feeling of relief.
Mind you, I'll be watching.
SOURCE:
Email, 10 Aug 2025
Frank Wiffen, Woy Woy