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What's This All About?

In June 2003 Pyrmont residents formed a community organisaton called Friends of Pyrmont Point. These people came together to fight the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authorities’ plan to hand the former Water Police site over to developers. The site, on Elizabeth Macarthur Bay is about 1.8 hectares and is one of the few remaining pieces of publicly owned foreshore land in Sydney.

In late October a petition with 6,050 signatories was presented to Upper House Greens member, Sylvia Hale who arranged for Independent Lower House member Clover Moore to present the petition to the Lower House.  We continue to publicise the issue, lobby politicians and seek public support in order to restore this land to  public use as a park. The signatures just keep coming and are now approaching 7,000 in total.

About the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority

The Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA) does not own the former Water Police site. They administer it for the people of NSW.

Early in 2002 a group of concerned citizens, The Pyrmont Community Group, lobbied SHFA and Andrew Refshauge, the then Minister for Planning, to run a design competition to promote the best use of this publicly owned land.

Meetings between the group and SHFA began in October 2002 and, although this was supposed to be a consultative approach, the parameters were set by SHFA alone. They set the constraints and conducted the entire operation according to their own agenda. The option of restoring the site to parkland was not mentioned and the community’s preferred choice was excluded from the process. The brief they gave the architects did not take into account the critical open space needs of residents. Hopes of genuine input in the decision-making process were dashed. In the end, and notwithstanding all the worthy statements, the brief for this design competition came down to one simple formula: how to fit a minimum of 100 residential units plus commercial space into an area 25% smaller than was envisioned in the original 1996 Planning Study. Residents were asked to vote on designs that involved buildings up to 15 storeys high. The winning design in the competition provides 5000 square meters of public open space. The bulk of this is footpath – only 900 square meters are set aside as a plaza.

Population Facts and Figures

Sydney City Council planners have a “generally accepted” ratio for open space of 2.8 hectares, or 28 square meters per person. Census data collected in August 2001 shows that the actual ratio at that time was only 14.14 square meters a person. The Sydney City Council area, which includes Pyrmont and Ultimo, tops the list of suburbs where people are having children. There was a 239.8 % jump in children under the age of four in the five years to the end of 2001.

This is the most significant publicly owned foreshore land in Sydney. Pyrmont is desperately short of open space. We must not give away one of Sydney Harbour’s most easily accessible sites for private housing.