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Abstract
Metropolitan planning strategies are a critical tool for achieving urban sustainability. The last significant evaluation of metropolitan strategies in Australia was undertaken in 2004. In this review it was identified that the sustainability construct is filtrating into the strategic understanding of planning. However, it was inconclusive whether these early signs of incorporating the sustainability imperative would be consolidated within the emergent wave of Australian metropolitan planning. Since the evaluation, state governments have released updated metropolitan planning strategies for the nation's five major urban regions, and in 2011, a new national urban policy was released by the federal government. It is timely to reconsider whether the concept of sustainability has been consolidated into this new wave of metropolitan planning strategies, something that Gleeson et al. observed was emerging. The aim of the paper is, therefore, to ascertain current positions on environmental sustainability in five Australian metropolitan planning strategies and the National Urban Policy. We argue that both the state and federal governments' policy documents in fact offer little in transformative change, but offers seeds of change, or at least an alternative outlook towards positive change for a more sustainable society.