Abstract: Once upon a time in the Land of Oz, planning involved professional planners who used their multidisciplinary knowledge to develop strategies and design the communities in which we live. Nowadays, planners attempt to balance “the built and natural environment, community needs, cultural significance and economic sustainability” (PIA, n.d.). Early Australian planning sought to bring together the best of both the urban space and English country life (Sandercock, 1990). These early planners were also those that felt that physical arrangements of low-density urban areas would lead to the building of community and improve social integration (Sandercock, 1990). In order to accomplish this, planners historically cleared forests, filled in or otherwise contaminated rivers and leveled hills and mountains in order to build cities and towns (Campbell, 1996). In the early 1990’s, however, several ‘sets’ of realization took hold and new phenomena, such as economic planning and the rise of environmental enthusiasm became increasingly incorporated into urban planning (Campbell, 1996). Equally, planners have previously followed an almost prescriptive or scientific approach to planning during the modernist period. Planning was seen as a technical profession, where strict analytical planning following Patrick Geddes’ Survey-Analysis-Plan was the way (Hajer et al., 2010). In this ‘style’ of planning, scientific knowledge and the ‘planner as an expert’ were paramount. There are still a large number of practicing planners who were trained in this manner. More recently, there seems to have been a shift away from planners and their technical planning to a situation where politicians have taken over much of the direction and control of planning.