Today marks the final day when 18 holes will be accessible at 113-year-old Moore Park Golf Course.
The six-year saga involving the Sydney CBD layout, the New South Wales Government and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore reaches its nadir tomorrow when the course officially closes eight holes ahead of a proposed redevelopment to become a 12-hole entity.
It was the unlosable war that golf in this country somehow contrived to lose.
RELATED: Moore Park Golf Course to be cut to 12 holes from July
An interim 10-hole layout (comprising Moore Park’s first to 10th holes) will be in play from July 1 and continually while the course is redeveloped into a 12-hole offering, which has an expected re-opening date of 2028. There will be no change to clubhouse or driving-range operations during the course redevelopment.
‘A complete lack of empathy’
“I can’t believe we’ve got to this point. It’s a sad day,” said a despondent Jared Kendler in an impassioned Twitter/X post last Saturday morning.
The tireless defender of Moore Park, and the club’s vice-president, has been vocal in his disdain towards the redevelopment plans throughout the process. Kendler was among the field of 120 players who used last Saturday to tour the full golf course for the last time on a weekend.
“No one’s using anything but the golf course this morning,” Kendler noted of the surrounding area, which non-golf-playing politicians insist is needed for other pastimes and activities.
Few have been more strident in their support of Moore Park remaining as 18 holes than Kendler, who has a professional background in the banking industry and worked as a treasury bureaucrat in the Berejiklian NSW Liberal Government. But this is anything but a personal battle – it’s one for Sydney’s golfers.
Kendler laments even the thought of fences being erected, let alone the sight of them on the Moore Park course. He says the impact on the city’s golf-playing community will be immediate.
RELATED: Moore Park is no longer really about golf
Due to the time of year and winter’s shorter daylight hours, there won’t be capacity to allow golfers to simply “go around twice” (which was one of Cr Moore’s erroneous suggestions when quizzed about her proposal). Kendler estimates 60 golfers per day at most will be able to complete two laps, such is the overall demand for tee-times. Even looking long-term, rounds of 18 or just nine holes will be limited compared to the 100,000 rounds played on the course in 2025.
Many golfers will be left with no option but to look elsewhere to play, and ‘elsewheres’ aren’t readily available. The parts of Sydney closest to the city are not flush with publicly accessible golf options. But the politicians remain unconcerned.
“The most disappointing aspect of all this is the complete lack of empathy from the decision makers,” Kendler said when reached by Australian Golf Digest yesterday afternoon. “Golfers here now don’t know what the future holds.”
Also distressing for Kendler and all golfers who fought to retain Moore Park as 18 holes is the futility of it all.
“Even their own business case said: keep it at 18 holes,” Kendler says of the official business case that revealed a benefit-cost ratio of 2.4 and a net present value of $272.6 million for the existing 18-hole layout.
“Every single redevelopment option is worse for the people of NSW than doing nothing,” Kendler wrote on LinkedIn last November. “As someone who has led major public-sector appraisals, I cannot overstate how extraordinary and how concerning that is.
“They’ve tried to make this a culture war – because everything is a culture war now,” Kendler says today.
RELATED: Mystery surrounds soil testing at Moore Park Golf Course as redevelopment debate continues
Such futility is set to be laid bare in the coming weeks and months. Even as fences go up across the golf course, there is likely to be no early activity in the much-vaunted redevelopment. As Kendler says, there is no contract in place with a construction company, no course architect officially engaged to redesign the course, there are no heritage approvals, there is no directive about which trees can be touched, while soil tests, engineering studies and the like are also yet to be conducted.
In every way, the NSW Government’s concept looks like an idea without a plan.
Problems from within
Part of Moore Park’s plight was the lack of a co-ordinated and cohesive voice from within golf to quash the downsizing before it became policy.
Golf Australia and Golf NSW have long maintained their distance (although both organisations received funding from the NSW Government to stage professional events such as the Australian Open and NSW Open). Golf NSW is independently strong and does not need the national body to the same extent the other state bodies do. That’s why it remains the only state not under the OneGolf umbrella. Also at play are the physical limitations on Greater Sydney, where further growth is prevented by an ocean on one side and a mountain range on the other. It is not a city blessed with space for more golf courses.
If Moore Park were located in any other state, it might have stood a stronger chance. Yet beside internal politics and geography lies an inescapable, eyebrow-raising truth: at a time when golf has never been more popular, one of the busiest courses in the country is being cut to 12 holes.
“Moore Park may unfortunately be just the tip of the iceberg. Every Sydney and NSW golf course on crown land is in jeopardy under this current state government,” Kendler says, alluding to courses as established and prestigious as The Lakes and Bonnie Doon, which sit upon leased land.
“And there are more golf courses under construction in the city of Hobart right now than there are in all of NSW. There’s just one, in the Hunter Valley – Lovedale Farm.”
How, then, did it get to this point?
The Moore Park Golf Collective – comprising Golf Australia, Golf NSW, the PGA of Australia and Moore Park Golf, and formed to preserve Moore Park as 18 holes – lacks a genuine head-kicker. Imagine if golf had a Peter V’landys-type character that presented a significant obstacle to any ambitions to mess with the game.
Whether it’s golf’s fractured administration setup, its internal power struggles or its collective lack of a united voice, our sport was not loud enough on this occasion to be heard above the political spin and bluster.
So whether you’re a Sydneysider or not, whether you’ve ever played golf at Moore Park or not, spare a thought for the golfers who regularly traversed one of the busiest golf facilities in the country and now won’t. The message from their experience is clear: not every golf course is safe.
