One recent Saturday at Moore Park Golf Course, I watched a teenager and a 70-year-old play together for four-and-a-half hours. Two strangers, separated by generations, walking 18 holes side by side through the middle of Sydney.
There are not many places left in this city where that still happens.
And yet in early May, the NSW Government formally confirmed it will cut Moore Park Golf Course in half to make way for a new 20-hectare park.
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At first glance, this sounds like a simple conflict between golfers and park users. It is not. Sydney absolutely needs more open space. The communities of Green Square, Waterloo and Zetland deserve better parks, better recreation infrastructure and better urban amenity.
But Moore Park is no longer really about golf. It is about whether governments still believe consultation, evidence and business cases matter once a political decision has already been made.
For the past two-and-a-half years, I have led the Save Moore Park Golf Course campaign. During that time, more than 32,000 people signed a petition supporting the retention of the 18-hole public course. Golf Australia, Golf NSW, the PGA of Australia and Moore Park Golf Club worked together to develop alternative proposals that delivered an additional 20 hectares of public open space while retaining an 18-hole public golf offering.
Those proposals were never seriously considered.
Instead, the process increasingly became an exercise in validating a pre-determined outcome.
The clearest evidence arrived in the government’s own “What We Heard” report. The report openly acknowledges that members of the golf community “did not support the reduction of the course from 18 to nine holes and wanted alternatives to the current plan to be explored”.
It also acknowledges that the eventual shift from a proposed nine-hole course to a 12-hole course emerged only because of sustained backlash from golfers and industry stakeholders.
Yet despite documenting overwhelming opposition from the local community, the government has presented the final outcome as though consultation broadly endorsed its direction.
More revealing still is how the consultation itself was framed.
The public was not genuinely consulted on whether an 18-hole public course should remain. The government’s consultation process instead proceeded from an assumed premise that 20 hectares would already be removed from the course footprint. People who attended in-person sessions were met with an opening line of “the decision has been made”. The discussion was never about whether the decision was right. It was about how to implement it.
That is not consultation. It is process management.
I say this with some understanding of how these processes are supposed to work. Before this campaign, I served as executive director of precincts in the NSW Government, overseeing major place-based economic appraisals and strategic projects. I understand how Treasury business cases are meant to operate. I understand the discipline required to justify major public investments.
The Moore Park process fails that test.
The Full Business Case obtained through parliamentary process is extraordinarily damaging to the government’s position. It found that retaining the existing 18-hole public golf course produced the strongest economic and social return for NSW. The base case generated a Benefit-Cost Ratio of 2.4 and a Net Present Value of $272.6 million.
The report concluded, in plain language, that none of the redevelopment options produced better socio-economic returns than retaining the existing course.
That should have been the end of the conversation.
Instead, the government proceeded anyway.
Even more remarkably, the final configuration now being pursued was never properly tested in the business case at all. The original redevelopment modelling assessed various 12-hole configurations. The public was initially presented with a nine-hole concept. The government has now settled on a compressed 12-hole compromise which still carries many of the unresolved safety, usability and operational concerns identified throughout consultation.
The financial contradictions are equally difficult to ignore.
The government continues to promote a $50 million commitment for the project. Yet the broader business case identified delivery costs vastly exceeding that figure once enabling infrastructure, access improvements, safety measures and park construction are fully accounted for.
Crucially, the business case also recognised something rarely discussed publicly: Moore Park Golf Course is not a failing public asset. It is one of the most heavily utilised public golf facilities in the country and generates substantial recurring revenue which funds half of the yearly budget of the Greater Sydney Parklands network.
Destroying productive public assets to compensate for other planning failures is not good urban policy.
And that is ultimately what this decision represents.
The government’s central argument has been that the rapidly growing sea of Meriton apartment complexes require more shared open space. That argument is legitimate though with a large asterisk. But it also raises a far more uncomfortable question: why were these communities approved at such density without embedding sufficient local open space in the first place?
The answer lies in decades of planning decisions across Green Square, Waterloo and Zetland, where significant residential uplift was approved without securing enough large-scale public parkland within walking distance of the communities being created.
Now, after the towers are built and the density realised, governments are attempting to retrofit open space into the precinct by cannibalising an existing recreational asset that was already functioning successfully.
This is not visionary city planning. It is a desperate, ill-informed attempt to right Clover Moore’s wrongs.
The irony is that Moore Park already sits adjacent to one of the largest urban parkland systems in the country. Centennial Parklands encompasses more than 360 hectares of public open space immediately next door. The issue was never the total absence of regional parkland. The issue was the failure to embed enough local green space inside the renewal precincts as they were being developed.
The result is a policy response that now pits different forms of public recreation against each other unnecessarily.
Golfers are framed as occupying too much land. Park users are framed as deserving access. In reality, both groups are users of public recreational infrastructure, and both could have been accommodated through better planning and a more balanced design approach.
That possibility was repeatedly raised by stakeholders, the community and the Moore Park Golf Collective in three alternative proposals. It was simply never meaningfully pursued or evaluated.
This is why the Moore Park story matters beyond golf.
Because if governments can ignore their own consultation findings, override their own business cases and proceed with predetermined outcomes regardless of the evidence presented to them, then public trust in government processes inevitably collapses.
Communities stop believing engagement matters.
Consultation becomes theatre.
And once that happens, every public asset in Sydney becomes vulnerable to the same logic: decide first, justify later.
Moore Park Golf Course was established in 1913 so ordinary Sydneysiders – including those who could not access the private clubs of the eastern suburbs – had somewhere to play. More than a century later, it remains one of the few genuinely accessible public golf courses in Sydney.
The question facing the government now is larger than whether 18 holes remain intact. It is whether evidence-based public policy still exists when political convenience points in another direction.
Because when the captain’s call collides with the evidence, and the evidence loses, the public notices.
