HIA Executive Director Tasmania Benjamin Price said the same pattern had cost Tasmania reform after reform, with housing supply the biggest casualty.

"Councils are now openly saying they don't have the expertise to assess proposals of this scale. The answer being proposed now, right across the state, is an independent body with specialist planning expertise, assessing projects on their merits and outside local politics," Mr Price said.

"That is precisely what Development Assessment Panels were designed to do, and that legislation was defeated in last year. Some of the loudest opponents then are calling for independent pathways now."

Mr Price said the reversal mattered less than what it revealed.

"DAPs were not lost on their merits, they were lost on misinformation. Twelve months later the argument has quietly collapsed, because the moment a project comes along that councils themselves can't assess, everybody wants the very thing we were told was dangerous.

"This is the common pattern in the Tasmanian planning debate. Reform is argued hotly and rarely on the substance of what is actually on the table. We debate the fear rather than the proposal, the reform is lost, and then a few years later we discover we needed it."

Mr Price said housing had borne the heaviest cost of that pattern.

"Our concern doesn't relate to the approval of data centres, but this debate is symbolic of every planning reform in this state.

"Every planning reform that gets shouted down on something other than its merits shows up later as a home that didn't get built, a subdivision that took three years instead of one, and a Tasmanian family priced out while they waited.

"Tasmania has a housing supply problem that is in large part a planning problem. We will not fix it while the planning debate is conducted this way. Data centres are simply the most recent example going around."

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