There was no choice.

Win and you lose. Lose and you lose.

That's what Premier Gladys Berejiklian was facing in trying to bat on with her government's council amalgamation policy.

Sure it's embarrassing, sure it's damaging, but what else could she have done?

The situation was this.

All councils - merged or with mergers pending - have elections on September 9.

The High Court of Australia granted Woollahra Council leave to appeal its amalgamation with Waverley and Randwick after a protracted battle in the state courts.

A date was to be set for late this year or early next year.

If the government won the case, the premier would have been in a position of sacking democratically elected councils only months into their three-year terms.

That was completely unpalatable.

Not only would that have it given the merger protesters legitimate "anti-democracy" ammunition all the way until the March 2019 state election but put her own Liberal candidates for council in limbo.

If the government lost the High Court case, the policy would have been dead anyway and could have set a precedent to "unscramble" the councils that have already merged.

What was that about lose-lose?

Ms Berejikian had no choice but to scrap the policy, Chris O'Keefe writes.

Publicly Ms Berejiklian says the responsibility sits with her and her cabinet for the mess they are in. Privately, senior MPs are shooting all of this back home to former Premier Mike Baird.

It was he and his staff who pushed for a secret independent KPMG report to justify the whole process. That didn't have to happen.

A decision could have been made to go to what's called the Boundaries Commission and the protesting councils wouldn't have had the legal legs they now do.

There are some serious questions about how the former premier handled all of this or at least around the advice he was getting.

Regardless of the blame-shifting though, Ms Berejilian can't get away from one fact.

Her fingerprints smudged this policy when she significantly changed it in February.

A month into the top job she cancelled mergers in the courts for councils in regional NSW but not in Sydney. That's the moment when she made this her own.

Instead of taking a big Panadol for this giant headache and walking away from all legal action, she pushed on.

It was admirable at the time, but hindsight has proven this issue has the potential to keep on biting, no matter how many people say "the public don't care".

The greyhound racing ban, fire and emergency services levy, privatisation of regional hospitals, moving the entire Powerhouse Museum to Parramatta.

All back-flips, broken promises, U-Turns, or "policy shifts" in less than 12 months.

Greens MP and anti-amalgamation campaigner David Shoebridge said "every one of these wounds has been self-inflicted."

Opposition Leader Luke Foley also hit out at the government.

"If the government has to ditch so many of it's big decisions maybe they are a pretty poor government," he said.