Ipswich City in South-East Queensland is among Australia's fastest-growing urban regions and sits within a catchment characterised by highly dispersive sodic soils, a history of extensive vegetation clearing, and degraded waterways. Ipswich City Council (ICC) has developed a progressively sophisticated suite of planning and technical instruments over the past two decades that explicitly recognise catchment-scale geomorphological processes as fundamental to waterway health outcomes. Despite this, geomorphic assessments submitted in support of development applications routinely remain bounded by the property boundary, treating the subject site as a closed system rather than as a node within a catchment network. This paper examines the gap between the catchment-scale intent embedded in ICC's planning framework and the site-scale reality of geomorphic assessment practice. The Ripley Valley Priority Development Area is presented as a case study in which geomorphic regulation is comparatively rigorous, yet the catchment-scale appraisal imperative has been explicitly deferred. The paper argues that meaningful geomorphic assessment in Ipswich requires sub-catchment and catchment-scale characterisation as a prerequisite to site-level analysis and makes recommendations for how this could be formalised within the development assessment process.