0°C | Saturday October 11, 2025 
NSW Labor has pledged more housing around the Metro station developments in North Sydney and Crows Nest. Shadow planning minister Paul Scully said that the two inner city developments needed to raise their housing targets in order to help justify the cost of the entire Metro system, estimated at over $60 billion.
Original bullish plans for development at the two locations have been scaled back in the face of resident and local community pressure.
“I’m worried we’re again failing to align population growth and public transport investment,” he told the Committee for Sydney’s Sydney Summit earlier this month. “When we get the opportunity to deliver more
affordable and key worker housing near metro stations, we should be taking it.
“We can’t pretend we don’t need more nurses, paramedics, police officers, teachers, cleaners or hospitality workers closer to Sydney CBD. We do, and the Metro provides an opportunity to do that.”
Labor candidate for North Shore Godfrey Santer concurred: “One thing that sticks in my mind when this issue is raised is Ken Livingstone, former Lord Mayor of London. He was attacked about high rise going up in London. And he said “I had no problem with high rise, as long as they pay their way.” So as far as I’m concerned, on the one hand we have this crying need with North Sydney’s primary industries that are health and medical, and other service industries, and yet the people who work in that area are in the lower-paid spectrum and they just cannot afford to live here. So they’ve got to commute from afar to get here, which is a shame.”
Santer added: “I know from my experience with my own daughter and her family, there are a lot of young aspirationals who want to live and work close together and they want to have a lifestyle which doesn’t involve a quarter acre block and driving miles to go wherever they want to go. Some of them aren’t even interested in buying a car. But they still need to have accommodation as well.”
That said, it was important to be balanced in planning, Santer said, adding that developments which had negative impacts on existing residents, especially in terms of solar access, needed to be tempered. He told the Sun that there were examples of this in the Crows Nest and Wollstonecraft areas which had gone too far.
With NSW Labor comfortably ahead in the polls and Chris Minns set to be the next premier, Santer said that Labor had to take a realistic and pragmatic approach to government.
He doubted for example, that Labor could reverse the Western Harbour Tunnel project but did indicate it would look at improvements in delivery. As an example he cited the example of the design of the Warringah
Freeway Upgrade which intends to restrict some ingress and egress from Ernest St. “Everyone will have to use Military Road. So all the good citizens of Mosman think this project is going to be good for traffic but by our calculations it will add 10% to the traffic in Military Rd,” he said.
“Then there’s the whole question of what they’re doing to Whaling Road, Alfred Street North and High Street with the government knocking all the trees down.”
CHALLENGER: Santer also criticised the media characterisation of Teal independent candidate Helen Conway as the main challenger to incumbent Felicity Wilson, when recent polling had shown Labor ahead of the teals.
“The Teals, God bless them, can never expect to be in government,” Santer said. “And when you’re in that situation, you can say lots of things because you don’t have to engage in the art of compromise.”
He also rejected the media characterisation of the Teals as “community based,” inferring it was demeaning to the local ALP branch members working to support him.
“A philosophical objection I have to the Teals is summed up by Kylea Tink. She was running around saying, Look, we’re anti-party. We’re not subject to big party organisation. Well, she was financed by a
multi-squillionaire.”
“I was preselected by local branch members,” he emphasised, rejecting the idea that only an independent could be community-based.