Lakemba Mosque returns to Sydney planning panel after 2025 refusal of prayer loudspeakers

Australia's best known mosque is waiting on a second planning decision about four loudspeakers.

The Lebanese Muslim Association, which owns Lakemba Mosque in south western Sydney, has lodged development application DA-518/2026 with the City of Canterbury-Bankstown for the installation of four loudspeakers on the mosque's existing minaret. The New South Wales Planning Portal records the matter under portal reference PAN-633533 at 67 Wangee Road, Lakemba, publicly exhibited from 20 May 2026 to 9 June 2026, with ten documents on file including an acoustic report and a statement of environmental effects. The consent authority is Canterbury-Bankstown. As at 17 August 2026 the portal still lists the application as under consideration.

It is the second attempt. A first application, to broadcast the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, from speakers mounted about 20 metres up the minaret, went to the Canterbury-Bankstown Local Planning Panel in August 2025. City Hub reported on 10 August 2025 that the speakers were costed at about 22,000 dollars, that council staff had recommended refusal citing "significant noise" and "unacceptable amenity impacts", and that 328 public submissions had been received. Noise modelling lodged with that application predicted the call reaching 92 decibels and being audible for roughly 100 metres. Council's report accepted that the proposal met the site's zoning rules but found the impacts unacceptable in the form then before it.

What happened next is itself contested. The Australasian Muslim Times reported on 26 June 2026 that the panel refused the original application on noise impact grounds. The association's spokesman, Gamel Kheir, has pushed back on that description, telling News Corp papers that the association had simply been asked to submit additional noise modelling and that the revised application does exactly that. The same report quotes him saying the debate has "shifted beyond planning to targeted hostility" and that the association installed additional CCTV cameras after receiving death threats, a claim consistent with City Hub's August 2025 account of an escalation in online abuse.

The duration of the broadcast is also reported inconsistently. The 2025 proposal, as described in council's assessment, was for the adhan to play for up to 15 minutes each Friday at midday. The Australasian Muslim Times, writing about the revised bid in June 2026, put the recitation at around three minutes, once a week. Neither the Planning Portal listing nor the PlanningAlerts record of DA-518/2026 states a duration on its face; the description is simply "installation of four (4) loudspeakers to the existing minaret of Lakemba Mosque".

Elected councillors will not decide it. Since 2017 legislation, development applications of this kind in Greater Sydney are determined by independent local planning panels. The Department of Planning states that a panel comprises a chair and two independent experts appointed by council, plus a community representative, and that the experts must hold qualifications in fields including architecture, heritage, law, planning or the environment. The department also lists the triggers for panel determination, among them proposals that receive a high number of complaints and proposals that are sensitive, including those involving heritage buildings or other community assets. The department notes that initial changes to the panel system under the Planning Systems Reforms Act 2025 took effect on 16 January 2026 and are intended to return more development to local determination.

That has not stopped the council chamber arguing about it. The Greek Herald reported on 31 July 2026 that independent councillor Barbara Coorey called for stricter noise regulations while councillor Khal Asfour moved a motion arguing that places of worship should have equal freedom to broadcast religious sound, invoking bells at St Charbel's Maronite Catholic Church at Punchbowl. Coorey disputed that those bells ring on Fridays. Councillor Saud Abu-Samen told residents that if they were annoyed by the sound they should "close your windows". Councillor Harry Stavrinos told the Daily Telegraph he believed Asfour's motion was politically driven.

The objections are not uniform. Comments forwarded to council through PlanningAlerts and published there raise noise amenity, cumulative impact, precedent, and an argument that council planning should remain religiously neutral in a suburb shared by many faiths. Peter Kurti of the Centre for Independent Studies told the Daily Telegraph in June 2026 that the adhan would turn "a public space into, in my view, an extension of the mosque itself". The association's counter argument, reported repeatedly, is that no comparable objection is raised to church bells.

What is not known is when the panel will sit, or what its reasons will be. No determination date for DA-518/2026 has been published on the Planning Portal. The number of submissions received during the 2026 exhibition has not been published either; PlanningAlerts records only the eleven comments lodged through its own service and notes 161 people were alerted. Whether a refusal would be appealed to the Land and Environment Court is untested. The revised acoustic report is on the public file, but its predicted decibel levels have not been reported, and it is those numbers, not the argument about bells, that the panel is required to weigh.