Its critics have called it ‘contemptuous’ and a ‘shocking breach of the public’s trust’. But who cares what the critics say when you have a former prime minister, a billionaire and some helpful tweaks to the law on your side? Bridie Jabour unpicks a quintessentially Sydney story

The rise and rise of Barangaroo: how a monster development on Sydney harbour just kept on getting bigger

The rise and rise of Barangaroo: how a monster development on Sydney harbour just kept on getting bigger

Question: when is a casino in the public interest?



Answer: when it is being built on public land as part of a development for the public good.

Huh?

This is a story that involves a lack of transparency, Liberal and Labor state governments acquiescing to the big end of town, the harbour foreshore, former prime minister Paul Keating, the billionaire’s son Jamie Packer and the right faction of NSW Labor.



It is the ultimate Sydney story.

It’s the story of a property deal. And there is no bigger property deal than Barangaroo.

To explain, let us go back to the beginning. The beginning of Barangaroo. Or at least somewhere close to the beginning.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sydney harbour in the early years of European settlement. Photograph: NSW Government

The land on the western side of the central business district was a key part of Sydney’s history long before the city had even taken shape.

For the Indigenous Cadigal people it was central to their life as a hunting and fishing ground. Rock engravings have been found in the area which date back 6,000 years and the wider area was occupied for at least 14,000 years before European colonisation.

From the 1850s shipyards were developed and the area became a major transport hub, but by the 1960s industry around the city had begun to decline. With the removal of shipping container operations to Port Botany from the 1980s, the 22-hectare site eventually became redundant – almost certainly the last time such a large parcel of land next to the CBD will be freed up for a complete developmental overhaul.

In 2006 the city got its first proper look at what the development could look like.

The previous year the state government had designated what should become of it – a redevelopment as parkland and commercial space – and launched a design competition. Now the winners were announced: a team made up of Hill Thalis Architecture + Urban Projects, Paul Berkemeier Architects and Jane Irwin Landscape Architecture.

The development would be in the public interest, former premier Bob Carr had promised. The brief set a minimum of 50% parkland, with a 14km foreshore walk. Commercial use would account for 75% of the development, with 25% residential.

The Thalis design had a harbourside park along the entire length of the waterfront, public streets and 389,511 square metres of floorspace – 233,170 sq m for commercial space and 34,560 for a hotel. The tallest building in the plan was 92m.

Ten years later, the proposed floorspace has almost doubled to 681,008 sq m. A six-hectare headland park at the northern end officially opened to the public on 22 August, but instead of parkland spanning the entire foreshore, there is now a separate “internal park”, which architects have predicted will be in shadow between 1pm and 3pm if the current plans for the buildings go ahead.

The site is now split into three parts: the 6ha headland park at the northern end of the site, the design of which was driven by former Labor prime minister Paul Keating; Barangaroo Central, 5.2ha reserved as cultural and recreation space; and Barangaroo South, a mixed used development of shops, restaurants, offices, apartments and a hotel.

The tallest tower – which will house apartments and the hotel – is now proposed to be 275m, which would make it the tallest building in Sydney. Three residential towers are proposed at 250m, 210m and 107m. Three more commercial towers will be 168m, 178m and 217m, with six lower buildings completing the design.

Oh, and the development now has a casino.

Barangaroo is a demonstration of everything that is wrong in contemporary Australian city-making Architect Philip Thalis

Spearheaded by billionaire James Packer, the casino will take its place in the tallest tower, which also boasts a residential penthouse apartment potentially worth $100m. Hotel rooms in the tower will cost about $40,000 a night and are intended for use by the high rollers Packer promises to attract. Only 2.5% of the residential development will be dedicated to affordable housing for key workers.

Carr had touted Barangaroo as a “historic opportunity to return a substantial part of Sydney’s foreshore back to the people”. So how did it come to this?

Well, as John Green noted about falling in love and asleep in the teen cryfest The Fault in Our Stars, it happened slowly, and then all at once.

Act 1: Two visions collide

The architect Philip Thalis, part of the team that won the initial design competition, views the evolution of Barangaroo as the archetypal story of modern Australia. “Barangaroo is a demonstration of everything that is wrong in contemporary Australian city-making,” he says. “Rampant privatisation, the weaknesses of the planning system [and] the failure of public authorities, our governments, to clearly understand what the public interest is.”

He calls his team’s winning design “Sydney proof”, meaning it divided the land into blocks with a network of public streets, making it as difficult as possible for one developer to take over the site. The design featured rooftop gardens, a floating harbour pool, the incorporation of shipping containers into flexible event spaces and “slender” office and apartment towers. Thalis was thrilled, but wary. He had been part of the team that won a design competition for the eco-friendly athletes’ village as part of Sydney’s bid for the 2000 Olympics, only to see it dumped after the city was awarded the Games.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An artist’s rendition of the plans for the site in 2006 (not identical to the Thalis plan). Photograph: Nsw Government/PR IMAGE

Enter stage right the former Labor prime minister Paul Keating. Keating looms large in this story. To Thalis he is the villain of Barangaroo, but to others he is its fairy godfather, who has stayed true to his vision. Especially to Keating.

Keating was one of the nine people on the panel that judged the competition. According to the jury report the decision was unanimous, but Keating says he always dissented.

“Philip [Thalis] has still got his nose out of joint that his very modest proposal didn’t get up and thank God for Sydney it didn’t,” he says over the phone from his Potts Point office.

Thalis and his team were dropped from the design process just months after being announced as the winners. No explanation was given, Thalis says.

Keating has openly taken the credit for booting the Thalis team from the project.

“They were just happy to see it as a big long line of indifferent buildings, what they call an industrial reuse,” he says. “When in fact what we needed was a completely new development, which is what we now have.”

Keating initially objected to Packer’s plan, taking issue with his proposal to put a casino in an area reserved for cultural space, but is now a staunch supporter of the current plan, with Lend Lease at the helm. He sees the imposing towers as the kind of ambition needed to reorient Sydney’s city centre and reinvigorate its financial district.



“Formerly the orientation of the city was always north towards Circular Quay,” he says. “The city will now look west for the very first time.

“If we had gone with the Thalis plan it simply wouldn’t have happened. It would have just been another big, long extended King Street wharf.”

The King Street wharf restaurant and tourist precinct, immediately to the south of Barangaroo, grew from the redevelopment of another huge industrial site, Darling Harbour, in the 1980s. Keating is far from alone in regarding it as a generally underwhelming row of bars and restaurants, with poor connections to the CBD and the theatre district.

The project trundled on for the next year. Keating remained involved in almost every facet, bordering on fanatical in insisting on his vision for the “northern headland” – destroying the straight line to the water created by the container deck and reconstructing something that gave an idea of what the headland looked like in the early years of European settlement.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Images from 2009 show how the headland proposal planned to restore something that resembled the original shoreline. Photograph: Barangaroo Delivery Authority

It was now that the area was officially named Barangaroo, to acknowledge the companion of Benelong, the Indigenous man known to the first European settlers, whose name was given to the point on the other side of the city where the Opera House stands. Barangaroo was chosen despite calls to revive the unofficial name “the Hungry Mile”, as the area was known when casual dock labourers gathered outside its gates in the hope of a day’s work.

By 2015 it had become known in some circles as the Greedy Mile.

Act 2: The hotel in the harbour

Barangaroo lies within the boundaries of Sydney city council, whose planning laws include rigorous environmental impact studies, tender processes, limits on building heights, trade-offs on design for the public good and affordable housing requirements.

Led by the independent and flamboyantly pro-green spaces mayor Clover Moore, the council has been seen by developers as a frustrating hindrance. But laws are laws and they have to be obeyed by everyone, even developers.

Unless.

Unless the laws are changed for particular projects. Enter stage right (though pretending it was coming from stage left) the Carr state government, which in March 2006 declared Barangaroo a “state significant site”.

That meant the planning minister (at that time Frank Sartor) became the approval authority for the planning and development of the site. Since then the council has had no say over Sydney’s biggest development in decades.

After the Thalis team was pushed aside, Sartor approved the concept plan for 388,300 sq m of floorspace in February 2007. A little over a year later a modification was lodged with the department that took the floorspace to 508,300 sq m.

By the end of 2008 the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority had ceded control of the project to the new Barangaroo Delivery Authority, with Moore as one of its six board members. About six months later the new Design Excellence panel was announced, to be chaired by Keating.

The project hummed along for 18 months. But just before Christmas 2009 Lend Lease moved from a bit player to a starring role, with the announcement that it was the preferred developer for stage one of Barangaroo – the southern part with the hotel and commercial towers. It was the first time a single developer had been granted seven hectares of city land with a capacity to build 500,00 sq m. The announcement was made on 20 December, when most senior journalists and talkback radio hosts were on leave.

Lend Lease proposed some radical changes, such as a 213m hotel on a pier extending into the harbour. And an extra 60,000 sq m of floorspace. Former NSW government architect Peter Webber worried at the time that “intruding on publicly owned water” would set a worrying precedent.

The chairman of the design review, another former government architect, Chris Johnson, conceded it was not good to fill in the harbour but the hotel would be an exception and had “good pizazz”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore Photograph: Marianna Massey/AAP

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The former prime minister Paul Keating, who forced through his vision for Barangaroo. Photograph: David Crosling/AAP

Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Packer, whose casino proposal created further controversy. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP

Public anger simmered over the summer and was visceral by the time Lend Lease officially submitted the Barangaroo Delivery Authority-approved plan the following August.

The National Trust’s director of core programs, Scott Woodcock, likened it to “privatisation of the harbour’’. Moore broke ranks with the rest of the delivery authority and declared the hotel unacceptable.

She resigned from the authority a little over a month later saying the site was being overdeveloped and the public were being shut out of the process.

Keating still supports the idea of the hotel on the water because of its “prettiness”. Moore has remained staunchly opposed.

“Profit and private interests are clearly being put ahead of public good. Barangaroo is public land owned by us all, but the Liberal/National Government is bending over backwards to install a casino, multi-million dollar apartments and parking that will only benefit developers,” she said as recently as April.

“... Barangaroo has been a shocking breach of the public’s trust by premiers Barry O’Farrell and Mike Baird and the former Labor government.”

Anger continued to fester. In 2010 the former chairman of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority Gerry Gleeson criticised the development and Keating’s role in it.



“I have serious doubts about the proposal in respect to: the height of the buildings, the bulk of the buildings, the pedestrian access,” Gleeson said. “It seems to contradict what have been accepted principles for development along the foreshore,” he told ABC’s NSW 7.30 program.

“I suspect that it’s to satisfy the greed of the developer, I think he’s in for some extra stories now. And, possibly careful here, I think it’s possibly to satisfy the ego of our former prime minister.”

When the park Keating had championed was brought up Gleeson responded: “Anyone could have thought of that.”

But the momentum behind Keating’s vision was rapidly becoming unstoppable. In the days before the March 2011 state election, with Labor facing humiliating defeat, planning minister Tony Kelly changed laws to allow Barangaroo to circumvent contamination laws, and approved Lend Lease’s 43-storey commercial tower and the Barangaroo Development Authority’s application to build the headland park at the northern end of the site. The park stretching the length of the foreshore was officially dead.

Act 3: Meet the new boss

Labor lost 32 of its 52 seats in the election, which brought Barry O’Farrell to power as the first Liberal premier of NSW in 16 years. Before the election O’Farrell had promised a review of the project and he stayed true to his word.

The review, delivered five months after the election, called the minister’s approval of the hotel on the water and the 140m tower “unfortunate”.

It said more effort should be made to build affordable housing for key workers – Lend Lease had set aside 2.5% of the apartments. City of Sydney council has repeatedly recommended a minimum of 10%, but preferably 20%, to align with its broader affordable and social housing targets for the city.

The review called the planning minister’s decision to approve work on the site without being provided a plan on how contamination would be remediated “inexplicable”, and found there had been a breakdown in trust between the council and the Barangaroo Delivery Authority.

It will be a vibrant, dynamic precinct which has something for everyone Barangaroo Delivery Authority chief executive Craig van der Laan

O’Farrell called on Lend Lease to move the hotel off the water “as an act of goodwill”, but did not move to change the planning approvals, and a review of the remediation plans found they were of a “consistently high standard”.

“Construction at Barangaroo is progressing well, with Lend Lease under way with building the shared basement for the three office towers, it sends a clear signal that NSW is back in business,” O’Farrell said in a statement at the time.

That progress left opinion deeply divided.

The council’s many submissions calling for lower towers, more affordable housing, less floorspace and more public space went unheeded.

In May 2011 Keating again let loose at Moore, after she lodged in the NSW parliament a petition with 11,000 names calling for an inquiry into Barangaroo. The Lord Mayor was derided by Keating as an advocate for a city “for sandal-wearing, muesli-chewing, bike-riding pedestrians”.

Keating invoked what he called “the metropolitan quality of the city”, but Philip Thalis maintained the results of his intervention amounted to nothing more than “Lend Lease-town”.

“On what was once public land, we’ve ended up with ... an exclusive outdoor shopping mall, an enclave of privilege and high prices, where you and I, if we wanted to go down there, walk through in our thongs, take the kids, we would feel quite out of place.”

But the chief executive of the Barangaroo Delivery Authority, Craig van der Laan, says in 20 years Barangaroo will have taken its place alongside the Opera House and Bondi Beach as “an essential part of the beating heart of Sydney”.

NSW to spend $100m next year on Barangaroo, with total cost to top $1bn Read more

“Barangaroo will be a place everyone will want to visit when they come to Sydney. At one level it will be admired as an ambitious project which kick-started a new wave of urban regeneration for Sydney, a showcase of sustainability and an integral part of the fabric of the city.

“But Barangaroo will be much more than that. It will be a vibrant, dynamic precinct which has something for everyone: a place to work, a place to live, a place to relax, a place to commune and enjoy amazing public art, a place to celebrate and a place to learn more about Australia’s rich Indigenous history and the future of the world’s oldest living culture.”

And Keating? He is more than happy to own the outcome.

“If I hadn’t been around the City of Sydney’s modest proposals, the Lord Mayor’s proposals, would have got up, and God knows where we would have been then.

“Well, I know where we would have been. We would have been at King Street wharf.”

Act 4: A preposterous gamble

On the sidelines the entire time, watching, biding his time and lobbying intensively was the media-heir-turned-casino-magnate billionaire James Packer. Where most people saw 1) legislation that restricted Sydney to one casino, 2) that Sydney already had a casino, the Star, almost literally a stone’s throw from Barangaroo, and 3) a development on public land that was supposed to be for the public good, Packer saw opportunity.

A world-class landmark resort on Sydney Harbour can be the catalyst to help turn the city around James Packer

Packer bought advertisements in Sydney’s Murdoch-owned tabloid the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper that has been unabashed in its support of Barangaroo and the proposed casino. Packer kept the paper on a drip feed of leaks during his campaign, which kicked off in February 2012 with his announcement that he wanted to build a six-star hotel at Barangaroo.

One would hardly believe headlines in the Telegraph and Sydney’s other newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, were about the same city, let alone the same development.

“James Packer’s plans for a stylish building at Barangaroo,” the Telegraph screamed in 2012.

“James Packer’s $2b Barangaroo development vision to help make Sydney a truly global city” an “exclusive” story was headlined in 2014.

“James Packer reaches for the sky with his new $1.5 billion Barangaroo casino resort” read another “exclusive” in 2013, which revealed Packer wanted his Crown Tower to stand 270m tall.

A story that contained criticism of the development, and questions about its probity from the former Liberal leader John Hewson, ran under the headline: “James Packer’s Barangaroo casino is high-roller heaven”.

Meanwhile the Herald ran stories such as “James Packer’s Barangaroo plan legally flawed, claims rival gambling operator Echo” and “Developer creep puts James Packer’s Barangaroo palace back in the spotlight”.

A comment piece in 2013 was headlined “James Packer rolls NSW Labor over Barangaroo casino”.



Packer promised to allow only appealing gamblers through the doors – rich ones. There would be no pokie machines; no great unwashed gambling away their wages.

Lend Lease began backing away from the hotel on the water in 2011, and in 2012 announced they were working on a plan with Packer to combine a six-star hotel resort with his proposed casino, but the exact location was still being decided. Then, in what was either a show of arrogance or a masterstroke of strategy, Packer proposed the hotel and casino should be put on Barangaroo Central – the part of the site designated as park and cultural space.

Keating and Moore, for once on the same page, came out swinging.

“I told Mr Packer I believed that no major hotel could or should be built north of the current Lend Lease perimeter, which is itself outside the public lands of Barangaroo Central. And to be clear about it; that no major hotel should be built in what is now reserved as public open space,” Keating said after meeting Packer.

Moore warned O’Farrell he could undo years of planning if he approved the idea “to plonk a clumsy Dubai-style hotel with a new mega-casino right in the middle of Barangaroo Central’’, but O’Farrell was enthusiastic from the beginning.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Work under way at Barangaroo in February 2014. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

“Any premier would be a mug if people are saying we want to invest a billion dollars in NSW not to at least hear those proponents out,” he said the week Packer floated the idea.

Packer was shameless in his pitch, even attempting to mine the alleged competitiveness between Melbourne and Sydney. He sighed in an “exclusive” comment piece for the Herald that after the 2000 Olympics, “I, like many others at the time, thought Sydney would catapult ahead and leave Melbourne in its dust.”

Almost “the complete opposite” had occurred. And why? Sydney had no Crown casino and hotel. (Melbourne, of course, has a Crown casino and hotel).

“A world-class landmark resort on Sydney Harbour can be the catalyst to help turn the city around, just as Crown assisted in the turnaround of Melbourne,” he wrote.

Packer spruiked the six-star hotel as his real interest and the casino as a necessity, begrudgingly shouldered. A hotel had always been part of the plan for Barangaroo, and Packer himself has acknowledged Sydney’s hotel shortage. A report by Tourism Accommodation Australia in 2012 found Sydney needed to add 5,000 rooms in less than 10 years to keep up with demand, and Lend Lease said in 2012 it had plenty of interest from potential partners wanting to develop the hotel at Barangaroo. But suddenly, according to Packer, a high roller casino was needed to make the hotel financially viable. Serendipitously, he happened to be in the casino business as well.

By June 2012 Packer had hired Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib, both previously senior figures in the NSW Labor right faction. Bitar served as NSW Labor’s general secretary and Arbib had been general secretary to the state branch before scoring a seat in the federal Senate. Both men were widely reported to have been instrumental in the political assassination of Kevin Rudd in 2010, and Arbib was a key player in Rudd’s original ascension to the leadership. Bitar was hired as a lobbyist by Crown in 2011 and about a year later Arbib was brought on board as a strategist at Packer’s private company.

Packer’s charm offensive was bipartisan – he also had the former Liberal senator Helen Coonan, a minister in John Howard’s government, on his books. Coonan resigned from the Senate in 2011 and a few days later took up an offer from Packer to sit on the board of Crown.

At the state level the only party that put up any tangible opposition to Packer’s plans was the Greens.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest How the plans looked in 2013. Photograph: Lend Lease/Barangaroo Delivery Authority

The process of approval for Packer’s casino was ... well, we don’t really know. Documents relating to it, such as the cost-benefit analysis, were kept top secret until the last possible moment. There was no public tender process and public submissions were not invited until this year, after Packer’s casino licence had been approved. Submissions were invited on the Lend Lease proposal which incorporates the casino, but the current planning minister, Rob Stokes, decided there was no need for public hearings before the department made its recommendation, and instead appointed an independent panel to assess it. A public meeting will be held by the Planning Assessment Commission before the final decision is made.

Packer went down the unusual route of approaching the NSW cabinet directly, using the unsolicited proposals process. The process was introduced in January 2012 – a month later Packer announced his casino proposal.

Legislation kept lining up for Packer in that kind of way. In August 2012 he had a meeting with O’Farrell. A week later O’Farrell introduced legislation to remove the requirement for projects to be independently evaluated before it was decided they did not need to go to tender.

On 6 September Packer formally lodged his proposal. A tender did not go out for a second Sydney casino licence.

Packer’s justification for not going through a tender process was that Crown would have won the tender anyway. “If there was a tender, it would be very hard to see how we wouldn’t win,” he was quoted as saying at a dinner at the Museum of Contemporary Art dinner in October 2012.

“… There has never been a billion-dollar casino built in the world without slot machines. There’s no one who is going to try harder than our company to build something special. This is more than just about money for me. I’m a great believer in Sydney.”

Labor, now in opposition, basically ushered the casino through. Anonymous Liberal sources were quoted in the Herald expressing astonishment that there had barely been a peep from the opposition.

“As a NSW cabinet member recently told me, the Liberals can’t understand why, if only for purely political reasons, Labor didn’t lift a withered finger while Packer’s Crown Resorts was handed its Barangaroo goldmine,” contributing business editor Michael Pascoe wrote in 2013.



“It should have been a gift issue for the opposition – ‘the premier in Packer’s pocket’ – but hiring the right machine men meant Labor was already in there to welcome him.”



Even the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority fought to try to keep the conditions of its casino licence agreement with Crown Resorts secret after granting it. A campaign by the Sydney Morning Herald and Greens politician John Kaye succeeded in having the documents released, and it was revealed the regulator had concerns about organised crime infiltrating the casino.

The project was given the green light by the NSW government in November 2013, about 18 months after Packer first announced the project.

Since then Keating has become a staunch supporter, particularly after Packer admitted it was stupid to propose the casino tower go on land reserved for cultural space. He labelled criticisms that private interests were triumphing over the public and concerns about the $100m apartment “silly nonsense”.

“The city’s got to get a bump somewhere and the bump it’s got is the new financial centre which wouldn’t have happened without Barangaroo, so it’s immaterial, relatively immaterial, whether at the top of Crown towers is an apartment worth X million or not,” he says.

“This is all silly jealousy stuff coming from the city council … you can’t afford to butcher such an enormous opportunity.”

Final act: The vision made concrete

It is a crisp August morning in Sydney, spring is in the air and everyone gathered is exclaiming how it is the first day they have not worn a coat in months. It will not be long before women are baring their legs and men are in open shirts.

Down on the harbour, some of “the streets of Barangaroo” have been opened to the public, though for the moment the public consists mainly of tradies on smoking breaks, and women in heels sipping Taittinger with men in dark suits at 11am.

True landmarks ... achieve this status through their excellence in design ... Height per se is not the yardstick National Trust submission

The event the perfectly coiffed are gathered for is the announcement that a David Jones department store will open at Barangaroo. Two men take the stage and take turns to pump out grand phrases: “the most exciting announcement for a long, long time”; “create an iconic destination”; “we want to sell dreams”; “change the face of retailing”.



Made public in March, the latest modification to the Barangaroo development revealed the plans for the 275m hotel-casino and the 250m, 220m and 107m apartment blocks.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barangaroo Reserve Park in September 2015. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP

Once again, the council lodged a detailed detailed submission arguing there was no public benefit for all the private gain.



The National Trust also objected, citing the “seemingly endless modifications” to the site, “each increasing the development density and height and which confirm the inherent defects in the current planning system”.

“Rather than gradually stepping down in height as it approaches historic Millers Point, the new Barangaroo Concept Plan Modification seeks to achieve the opposite and grows from 180 metres at the southern end to 275 metres at the northern end. This is put forward with meaningless arguments such as ‘bookending’ or creating a ‘landmark’,” the submission said.

“True landmarks such as the Sydney Opera House, or hotels such as the Savoy in London or Raffles in Singapore, achieve this status through their excellence in design and illustrious history. Height per se is not the yardstick.”

Paul Keating's boyhood dream realised as Barangaroo Reserve opens in Sydney Read more

The Sydney Observatory has complained that views of the night sky will be obscured by the proposed buildings.

The proposal has yet to be approved, but, based on history, a betting woman would say it is almost inevitable.

Keating, needless to say, is adamant that in 40 years the objections will be seen as petty squabbling and mean thinking by the council.

“Most of the public think it’s fantastic already. All of the silly stuff that the Lord Mayor managed to get into the Sydney Morning Herald for years now seems to be as hollow as it was then,” he says.

“People will crawl all over the headland park. Cities don’t get parks in the 21st century, maybe in [the western Sydney suburb of] Bankstown, but you can’t get a park in the core city. This is a new park which will allow the Dawes Point peninsula to be bookended with a park to the west, Barangaroo, and a park to the east, the botanic gardens.

“There’s got to be some big thinking about the future. In the long run, I think people will say, ‘thank God there was some foresight here and this space wasn’t butchered ... in the usual Sydney way’.”





Facebook Twitter Pinterest The site takes shape in August 2015. Photograph: Jonny Weeks/The Guardian

The two residential waterfront buildings, Anadara and Alexander, and the commercial buildings are already under construction at Barangaroo South. The headland park has been opened by Keating and the NSW premier, Mike Baird. The casino has its licence. This is not the beginning of something – it is already happening.

The head of the Barangaroo Delivery Authority, Craig van der Laan, calls it a triumph.

“Before we began construction, the site was a 22-hectare concrete deck – a disused container wharf. Out of that, we are creating something truly spectacular for the public with more than half of the site to be publicly accessible, and amazing public spaces created for the public to enjoy,” he says in an email to Guardian Australia. “We are very proud of what has been and will be achieved.”



