Money at stake in Star tower proposal goes to the crux of Sydney's planning issues

A short stroll toward Darling Harbour from where the Star casino wants to build a 237-metre hotel and apartment tower in Pyrmont, the Maritime Museum is running an exhibition: "Bligh - Hero or Villain?" William Bligh, the fourth governor of NSW, might have something to say about the Star’s travails.

But the money at stake also goes to the crux of the issue: if everyone who controlled waterfront property in Sydney was able to put as many apartments on their land as they could, everyone surely would. The owner of the corner store across the road from the Star would. So would the owners of the office block and the Vietnamese sandwich shop. This might all work out fine.

The department was also obliged to consider the City of Sydney’s hostility to the proposal. That obligation reflects the wording of planning laws, which in turn reflects the fact that politicians, on all sides, say to the world they think councils are important: “Local planning is a function of local government and there is no place for the state government to override or second-guess the decisions of the community,” the former premier Nick Greiner once said, in a speech quoted by Stokes.

The GSC’s only instruction is that Pyrmont should be an “innovation corridor”. Does this mean the tower should be allowed? Who knows. The Star argues that it does; others question the relationship between luxury apartments and “innovation”. The City of Sydney, which has the job of trying to implement the GSC’s vision, clearly thinks innovation means something different: it has spent the past year or so trying to come up with ways to get new businesses to open in Pyrmont.

Or maybe someone did, but the Star nevertheless thought it could get its tower approved. Which also might have been fair enough, based on what has gone before. “Planning is all about precedent,” says John Mant, a former commissioner of the Independent Commission Against Corruption and a consistent critic of decades of planning policy. “If you give somebody an extra floor then the people next door have an extra floor.

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