‘Stranded Sydney’ got the topic right and the diagnosis wrong

For five days last week, The Sydney Morning Herald ran Stranded Sydney, an investigative series on the infrastructure failure unfolding across Sydney’s urban fringe. It documented what residents in Riverstone, Marsden Park, Box Hill and Austral have been living with for years: roads built for farm traffic carrying suburban populations, schools at capacity before they open, bus services rerouted without notice, a complete absence of the basic facilities that turn housing estates into communities.

The reporting was solid. The human stories were genuine. The historical work tracing how zoning controls were progressively loosened was the kind of journalism this debate has been crying out for.

The closing article asked how Sydney could build new suburbs better. It could have landed on a conclusion that spoke to the issue of how power and politics pervert optimal urban outcomes, but instead retreated to the editorial line that it must somehow be the NIMBYS (which is to be expected when you give the final say to a 24-year-old YouTuber and Sydney YIMBY activist). The result was a story whose conclusion floated free of its evidence.

What actually made Oran Park work

Oran Park, the SMH told us, succeeded because the developer “stuck to that initial masterplan” and was “motivated to [put infrastructure in] early.” Greenfields Development Company has, to be fair, done genuinely good work at Oran Park. But the structural reason that work was possible was almost entirely missing from the article.

Oran Park is one of the most heavily planned greenfield developments in New South Wales. Since rezoning in December 2007, it has been governed by an interlocking framework of statutory controls including the Growth Centres State Environmental Planning Policy (SEPP) (now the Western Parkland City SEPP), the Oran Park Precinct Development Control Plan (DCP), the Camden Local Environmental Plan (LEP) 2010 and various developer levy mechanisms for funding infrastructure.

These instruments did not merely regulate development at the margins. They established the masterplan and identified where transport, schools, open space and town centres would be located. They embedded infrastructure sequencing, set tree canopy targets, building heights, lot sizes and design principles, and created the long-term framework within which Oran Park evolved.

The walkable town centre, the shopping centre that opened in 2014, the schools integrated into the suburb, and even the carpark deliberately preserved for a future metro extension were all outcomes anticipated within that strategic framework.

The major landowners were also deeply involved in shaping the Indicative Layout Plan and contributions framework from the outset. This collaboration was essential to producing a plan that was financially viable, implementable and capable of surviving changing market conditions, government priorities and political cycles. It also created a high degree of trust between the developer, council and state agencies.

That trust mattered because planning instruments alone do not deliver infrastructure. In Sydney’s growth areas, infrastructure sequencing is often fragmented, market-driven or dependent on separate utility programs. Without extensive works-in-kind delivered by the developer – well beyond formal contribution obligations – there would have been little meaningful alignment between land use and infrastructure delivery at Oran Park.

This is the part largely missing from the series’ framing. The “long-term thinking” was not simply private vision operating independently of government, nor was it regulation overriding the market. It was strategic planning doing what it is supposed to do: coordinating land use with infrastructure, sequencing growth properly, and creating the conditions under which private investment can deliver public outcomes the market alone would not reliably produce. Oran Park worked because the planning framework was strong, the developer was collaborative and capable, and the interests of the public and private sectors remained aligned over time.

The contrast with Austral and Leppington North, also in the south-west growth area, is instructive. These precincts were rezoned around 2014 with a competent Indicative Layout Plan, but delivery quickly stalled. Sydney Water – citing low expected lot demand, though others have suggested asset-sweating for dividend returns to government played a role – was slow to invest.

 The local council was slow to finalise its contributions plan. Land ownership was fragmented, which meant no large landowner had the capacity or incentive to deliver hero works-in-kind. The plan existed. The execution did not.

The result is a precinct progressing slowly, with infrastructure trailing development and many of the indicators of the failures the newspaper spent its series documenting. Same growth area. Same starting framework. Different execution context. Very different outcomes.

The NIMBY-sprawl myth

The series finale gave space to one of the more durable myths of the housing debate: that NIMBYism in established suburbs is what drives sprawl on the urban fringe. As a YouTuber told the paper: “To me, NIMBYism and urban sprawl are intertwined. We have more urban sprawl because so much of the time NIMBYs don’t want apartments in their neighbourhood.” The impact, he said, is that “people are then forced to move out to places with no infrastructure.”

It is an intuitive argument. It is also wrong on the evidence.

For almost two decades – across every cycle for which we have data – Sydney has delivered roughly 85 per cent of its new housing as infill development in established suburbs and 15 per cent as greenfield development on the fringe.

This was the split through the 2010s, including the record housing boom of 2017–18, when Sydney was approving the most apartments in its history. The split only changed during the post-COVID period, when the federal HomeBuilder grant – a demand-side intervention specifically incentivising detached housing – distorted the market toward greenfield, briefly pushing the ratio closer to 50/50.

As HomeBuilder’s effects have washed out of the system, the split has been normalising back toward 85/15.

The point is structural. Sydney is not a city that has been refusing to build apartments. It is a city that has been building apartments at scale, in established suburbs, for decades. The infrastructure failure on the urban fringe is not the consequence of inner-city residents blocking density.

It is the consequence of greenfield growth proceeding without adequate strategic planning, infrastructure sequencing or funding mechanisms – exactly the failure the SMH series spent four days documenting before its final article reached for an explanation that contradicted its own evidence.

There is also a false dichotomy embedded in the NIMBY-sprawl argument. The housing market is not a single substitutable good. Buyers of greenfield housing in Riverstone are not the same buyers who would otherwise purchase apartments in Woollahra. Different housing submarkets serve different cohorts at different life stages, different price points, and different locational preferences. Building more apartments in established suburbs is necessary but it does not eliminate demand for greenfield product. Pretending otherwise lets the policy off the hook of having to make greenfield growth work properly.

The pattern the series missed – power, politics and planning

The series spent four days documenting the infrastructure failures of the north-west growth area and one day celebrating the success of Oran Park. What it did not do – what would have made it a genuinely transformative piece of journalism – was connect those two stories.

Oran Park works because of strategic planning. The north-west growth area is failing despite strategic planning, because the strategic planning has been progressively undermined.

What the series did not document was the institutional history that explains both the successes and failures of Sydney’s growth centres. The Growth Centres Commission was established in 2005 specifically to adjust the timing and scale of land releases in the north-west and south-west in step with infrastructure delivery. For its brief existence, the Commission played a critical role – coordinating works-in-kind alongside state and council infrastructure investment, ensuring contributions were spent at the right time and place, and adjusting to changing market conditions while focusing on places that worked.

The market slowdown and the GFC eroded the contributions pool. In 2008, many of the Commission’s functions were centralised to Treasury and a remaining Development Corporation, and there was a simultaneous lessening of focus by state government infrastructure agencies. There was insufficient impetus to resist property industry calls to discount contributions, while state agencies returned to their own siloed investment portfolios, often outside the growth centres entirely.

The mechanism is not complicated. Successive NSW governments have systematically weakened the infrastructure funding mechanisms that strategic planning relies on as a panic reaction to normal market downturns in housing. The state infrastructure contribution was cut by 75 per cent. Local contributions were capped.

This pattern of state government allowing rezoning without funding the infrastructure to support it has historical precedent. In 1970, the NSW government legislated the Land Development Contribution Act, establishing a 30 per cent betterment levy on the increase in land value when rural land was rezoned for urban use in the Sydney region. It was, for its time, a sophisticated and well-designed mechanism for capturing public value created by public planning decisions. Over four and a half years, it raised approximately $17 million.

It was abolished in 1973 after sustained political pressure from landowners who had stopped enjoying windfall gains. The academic verdict written shortly afterwards was unsparing: the abolition was “in effect, a gift from the NSW Labor opposition and the NSW government to the landowners, at the expense of future land users.” Much like the current opposition’s calls to cut the meagre Housing and Productivity Contributions, the government of the day claimed the levy was raising land prices when announcing its abolition but showed no interest in ensuring abolition reduced them.

The ACT, by contrast, has operated a substantial betterment levy continuously since 1971 – now the Lease Variation Charge – which raised $53 million in 2018–19 alone. Same federation. Same era. One jurisdiction captured public value created by public planning decisions. The other gave it away.

Learning from the politicised infrastructure funding discounts and cuts, the NSW Productivity Commission’s own 2024 review of developer contributions concluded that rezonings should not proceed without infrastructure funding contributions plans in place. The state government’s response has been to do exactly the opposite.

In the Stranded Sydney series a Committee for Sydney representative proffered: “Was the planning useless, or was the planning helpful until the politics interfered and made it useless?”

This is not a planning failure. It is a deliberate policy choice – to allow rezonings to proceed faster than the infrastructure that should accompany them, to significantly water down the developer levies intended to fund them, to gift uplift to landowners without capturing meaningful value back for the community, and to accelerate housing supply targets without funding the schools and hospitals and transport that growth requires.

When the same state governments that have engineered this failure now lecture councils about housing supply and announce their next round of planning deregulation, they are diagnosing a problem they created and prescribing more of the medicine that caused it.

How the controls get killed

This is not abstract. It is happening in real time. In November 2021, the NSW government announced a ban on dark roofs, minimum canopy requirements and tree planting obligations – precisely the kinds of controls that would have produced more liveable western Sydney suburbs.

The Wilton Growth Area Development Control Plan (DCP) went further, requiring backyards large enough to accommodate a significant tree. Within a year, after sustained lobbying from the development industry, the government abandoned both the dark roofs ban and the Design and Place SEPP.

The Wilton requirement was criticised on the same basis. These were not radical proposals. They were modest design controls aimed at addressing the urban heat island effect that western Sydney experiences in increasingly extreme form. They were killed because they imposed costs that the developers did not want to bear.

The Appin lesson

The SMH series mentioned, almost in passing, that the NSW government has now capped the far south-west suburb of Appin at 2499 homes until infrastructure arrives. The article presented this as part of the government’s strategy to break the cycle of infrastructure-last development.

It is worth understanding how Appin came to be in this position in the first place. Appin was rezoned for tens of thousands of homes against the long-standing strategic NSW government greenfield approach and Wollondilly Council, which had identified the area as inappropriate for large-scale urban development given its isolation from existing infrastructure, its proximity to drinking water catchments, and the absence of any sequenced delivery plan. The rezoning happened anyway, after sustained lobbying from landowners and developers who had acquired land speculatively in anticipation of an upzoning that the strategic planning framework explicitly did not support.

The cap on Appin is not a triumph of strategic thinking. It is a damage-control measure for a rezoning that proceeded against strategic advice. Appin is a cautionary tale for what unsolicited proposals through pathways like the Housing Delivery Authority can produce: rezonings that override the established strategic planning framework, speculative landbanking by developers betting on future approvals, and infrastructure deficits the state government must then manage retrospectively at public expense.

The lesson of Appin is not that we need more flexibility in the planning system. It is that we need less. Strategic planning works when it is enforced. It produces ad hoc disasters when it is overridden by political dealmaking for the benefit of well-connected landowners.

What the series should have said

The Stranded Sydney series had everything it needed to land a different conclusion. What it did not do was follow the logic of its own evidence. The story is not that western Sydney was let down by “useless planning” while Oran Park was rescued by a visionary developer. The story is that strategic planning, when properly resourced, properly funded and properly enforced, produces good outcomes – and that the systematic erosion of strategic planning by successive NSW governments, under sustained pressure from the development lobby, is what has produced the urban fringe disaster the SMH spent the week documenting.

The NSW government has abolished the Greater Cities Commission, established the Housing Delivery Authority (HDA), and is now applying the same uncoordinated approach to inner and middle-ring Sydney that produced Riverstone in the west.

The HDA does not require infrastructure coordination. The Low and Mid-Rise Housing Policy does not require meaningful affordable housing. The Transport Oriented Development (TOD) SEPP draws circles on maps and applies uniform density without regard to site context, infrastructure capacity, heritage or topography.

Every one of these reforms makes the next Oran Park less likely and the next Riverstone more likely.

The infrastructure failure in western Sydney is not the consequence of governments allowing too much development. It is the consequence of decades of political interference in planning and funding decisions, driven by interests in fast rezonings, low contributions and ad hoc approvals against the public interest that good strategic planning is supposed to serve. Western Sydney’s infrastructure crisis is not a cautionary tale being heeded. It is a cautionary tale being repeated.