Two deadlines, and they are not the same
A Disability Inclusion Action Plan, or DIAP, is the document a public authority uses to set out what it will actually do to remove barriers for people with disability: access to services, information, employment, buildings. It is not optional. Under the Disability Inclusion Act it is required, and the state’s planning guidelines set the timetable.
The timetable runs on two separate tracks, which is easy to get wrong and worth stating plainly.
| Who | Review due | New plan due |
|---|---|---|
| Local councils | 1 July 2025 | 1 July 2026 |
| Departments and prescribed entities | 1 December 2023 | 1 December 2024 |
The council row follows the earlier cycle in which 2017 plans were reviewed before the end of 30 November 2022 and remade by the end of 30 November 2023. Departments and prescribed entities run on the four-year cycle in the Disability Inclusion Regulation 2014.
So the deadline that has just passed is the councils’ one. NSW has 128 local government areas. Every one of them was required to have a remade plan by 1 July 2026.
What the Act says happens to the plans
Councils do not simply publish a DIAP and move on. The guidelines are explicit that the plans go somewhere:
The DIA requires that public authorities provide the Disability Council NSW with their DIAPs. Public authorities are encouraged to use the DIAP reporting portal [add link once online] to provide their DIAPs. All versions of your DIAP should be provided, and information included as to accessibility of each, particularly PDFs. These will be published on the Disability Council’s registry of DIAPs.
Read that twice. The obligation is real and statutory: authorities must provide their plans to Disability Council NSW, and those plans are to be published on a registry. The mechanism for doing it is a reporting portal. And the link to the portal, in the published guidance that tells councils how to comply, is an unfilled editorial placeholder.
How old that placeholder is
This is the part that decides how the sentence above should be read, so we checked it
rather than assuming. The guidelines carry Updated November 2022
on their cover, and
the file’s own properties give a creation date of December 2022 and a last modification
of March 2023. They were revised after the Disability Inclusion Amendment Act 2022 passed.
They are also the current version. We reached the document from the department’s own DIAP page, last updated 28 April 2026, which links it as the guidance on developing DIAPs. So this is not a stale copy found in a search engine. It is what a council is pointed at today, and the placeholder has been sitting in it for close to four years.
We went looking for the registry
If the registry exists and is public, none of the above matters much: a resident could simply look up their council. So we tried to find it, on 18 August 2026.
- The department’s DIAP page itself links the guidelines and the plan documents. It does not link a registry.
- The former Disability Council NSW address on the department’s older domain now resolves to the departmental home page rather than a council page.
- A departmental URL for the Disability Council returns a page reading
Page not found
.
We report that as not found through those routes, not as proof that no registry exists anywhere. It may sit behind a portal, or under a name we did not guess, and we would publish a correction the moment somebody points us at it. What we can say is that a person who reads the guidelines, learns that plans are published on a registry, and goes looking for it as we did, does not arrive at one.
Why this matters more than a broken link
Our reading, offered as a view. A DIAP is one of the few disability obligations that is genuinely local. The NDIS is national and its disputes are fought at a distance; whether your council has planned for step-free access to its libraries, or for how it advertises jobs, is decided in your own town. The registry is the mechanism that makes that comparable, so a resident in one LGA can see what another has committed to.
Without it, compliance with a statutory deadline is checkable only council by council, 128 times, by a person who already knows the plan is meant to exist. That is not transparency failing dramatically. It is transparency failing quietly, which is the version that lasts.
The fix is also small. A published list of which councils have provided a plan, with links, would answer the question in one page, and the guidelines already promise exactly that.
What we are not saying
We have not checked whether any particular council met the deadline, and nothing here suggests any council has failed to. Councils publish their DIAPs on their own sites and many do it well. The gap is the central register, not the plans. Nor is this a claim that Disability Council NSW has done anything wrong: the body advises the Minister and reviews DIAPs, and where the registry sits in its work is not something the public documents settle.
Methodology
The deadlines and the quoted passage come from the NSW Disability Inclusion Action Planning Guidelines, downloaded and read on 18 August 2026 from the link on the department’s Disability Inclusion Action Plans page. The cover states Updated November 2022; the file properties give a creation date of 16 December 2022 and a modification date of 17 March 2023. The quoted paragraph is transcribed exactly, including the bracketed placeholder.
A correction to our own note. Our watch table recorded this deadline as 30 June 2026 and described it as applying to agencies. The guidelines say 1 July 2026 and apply that date to local councils; departments and prescribed entities were on 1 December 2024. Going to the primary document changed both the date and who it binds, and the table has been corrected.
On the registry search. Routes tried: the department’s DIAP page, the DIAP guidelines themselves, a departmental Disability Council URL, and the older agency-domain Disability Council address. That is a statement about those four routes on one day. We have not contacted the department or Disability Council NSW, and we would publish a response.
Primary sources
- NSW Department of Communities and Justice, NSW Disability Inclusion Action Planning Guidelines (PDF, cover dated Updated November 2022, downloaded and read 18 August 2026): the council timeframes including review due 1 July 2025 and new plans due by 1 July 2026; the department and prescribed entity timeframes of review by 1 December 2023 and new plans by 1 December 2024; the earlier 30 November 2022 and 30 November 2023 council dates; the definition of a public authority under the Disability Inclusion Regulation 2014; and the quoted paragraph on providing DIAPs to Disability Council NSW, the reporting portal placeholder, and publication on the Council’s registry of DIAPs.
- NSW Department of Communities and Justice, NSW Disability Inclusion Plan and Disability Inclusion Action Plans (page last updated 28 April 2026, read 18 August 2026): that the NSW Disability Inclusion Plan is primarily implemented through DIAPs required of each public authority, including local councils, and the link to the guidelines above.
- NSW Department of Communities and Justice, NSW Disability Inclusion Plan 2026-2029 (page last updated 30 April 2026, read 18 August 2026): the plan itself and its document set.
Know where the registry is, or work at a council that has filed? Tell us and we will check it against the sources above and log the outcome.