Clover’s Town Hall Square would long outlast the small-minded fools trying to kill it

Pushing into her third decade as lord mayor, Clover Moore still has plenty of fans in Sydney – although I’m no longer really one of them.

Moore has been a trailblazer as the city’s first popularly elected female lord mayor, amassing nearly a quarter of a million first-preference votes over six elections. She has helped make Sydney a much better place to live and work, and has been a role model for women in political leadership.

But the 80-year-old has stayed too long, and failed to orchestrate anything resembling a succession plan. Hubris and complacency have also crept in, gifting her haters something of substance to complain about. She is notoriously prickly about criticism. And her continued flirtation with the idea of running for a fresh term in 2028 only serves to highlight how her record-breaking reign has clouded her judgment.

However, none of that means Moore’s latest project, the $94 million Town Hall Square redevelopment, is the dud its opponents paint it to be.

I have watched in amazement over recent months as well-organised groups plot to kill the City of Sydney’s four-decade-long plan to turn a block opposite Sydney Town Hall into much-needed open space.

The campaign has been led by the Business Sydney lobby outfit, retail giant Woolworths, the “Shoppies” union and Planning Minister Paul Scully, with The Daily Telegraph stepping up as their megaphone. The vested-interest alliance has sprouted all sorts of arguments as selfish as they are short-sighted.

The lack of pushback to this effort is astounding. Sensing the risk of the project succumbing to pressure, the council has largely stayed quiet in the hope that the noise will just go away.

Moore’s plan would see seven council-owned buildings demolished between George and Pitt streets, including one housing a Woolworths supermarket, and replaced by a plaza featuring 30 native trees, a water installation, seating and lighting. The views the square will open up of three sandstone gems – Town Hall, St Andrew’s Cathedral and the Queen Victoria Building – will be breathtaking.

If you listen to the haters, you might think the fate of Sydney’s economy rests on this 5000-square-metre block – even though it represents just 0.17 per cent of the size of the Sydney CBD. You might also think Moore dreamt up the whole thing yesterday as some kind of retirement vanity project, when the opposite is true. The City of Sydney has been planning the park since 1985, and the project enjoys largely bipartisan support on the council. Expensive? Sure. But the council believes it can deliver the whole thing for $94 million – well down on its budget of $150 million.

There was similar pearl-clutching about a decade ago when the City of Sydney council and then-Coalition state government pushed ahead with building light rail down a pedestrianised George Street. It has long been forgotten that NSW Labor – which is leading the charge against the Town Hall Square idea – opposed the light rail project, claiming it would be a “disaster” and function like the “Berlin Wall”, dividing east and west. The line Labor insisted would destroy Sydney is now a raging success, triggering billions of dollars of investment and renewal. No one in their right mind would argue we should go back to a George Street clogged with cars and buses.

Labor also once opposed the conversion of the Sydenham-Bankstown line to metro rail, which will open by the end of the year and change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who use the service. The party also attempted to cruel the new Powerhouse project in Parramatta, but will quite happily cut the ribbon and claim political credit when the first visitors turn up next month.

See the pattern here? Time and time again, Labor underplays its role as custodian of central Sydney. The one thing it did get right was adopting former prime minister Paul Keating’s vision for a new headland park at Barangaroo, which restored the pre-European settlement shoreline of Sydney Harbour. It was a rare good call.

More recently, Labor has failed to honour a 2023 election commitment to revamp the down-and-out Circular Quay, despite blowing nearly $108 million on planning with nothing to show for it. A new public square behind the neo-gothic Registrar General’s building off Macquarie Street is also languishing.

A plan devised by Keating and former Sydney lord mayor Lucy Turnbull to give the whole of Macquarie Street – home to the most architecturally and historically significant collection of public buildings in Australia – a much-needed glow-up remains sitting on the government’s desk. The scheme would restore vast tracts of land to the public and better link the city with the Domain. Short of a terrific $27 million revamp of the forecourt outside the State Library, nothing has happened.

Also gathering dust are concept plans to transform underutilised land to the west of Sydney’s glorious Central Station into a park and amphitheatre. The site, tentatively dubbed Central Square, would be a cousin to Town Hall Square and link up with the new Atlassian office tower and a revamped Railway Square, which has seen better days. The idea has huge potential, but Labor has shown little interest.

This is the record of the same mob which now claims it should be allowed to dictate the future of Town Hall Square. Rather than playing politics ahead of next year’s state election, Scully should be using his time as planning minister to get on with these major stalled projects, or deliver new housing targets which are running woefully behind.

Instead, Scully has allowed himself to be roped into an anti-progress campaign. The most shameless member of the alliance is Woolworths, which has known since 1985 that its landlord planned to raze the building for the plaza (a demolition clause has been in its contract for ages) yet has the hide to act shocked and surprised when those plans are finally enacted.

Corporate spinners have done a masterful job pretending that the demise of Woolworths’ premises would rob the CBD of a large supermarket. That claim is rubbish; the idea that Woolworths would not want or be able to find a new location is fanciful. The council is also trying to work with the chain on finding alternative space nearby for the store and its staff.

The campaign against the square relies not on sound planning principles, but vibes, nostalgia, corporate interests and an intense desire to deny Moore a victory towards the end of her long career. Regrettably, Town Hall Square is now a great idea being dragged down because it is intrinsically linked to Moore. Scully appears so keen to undermine the lord mayor that he has seized control of the project to ensure the council can’t make the final call on whether the project goes ahead.

Should the political heat calm down and the project be completed, Sydneysiders will wonder why we didn’t get on with it sooner. In time, Town Hall Square will rank alongside Hyde Park and a car-free George Street as a space Sydneysiders can’t imagine living without – long after a certain planning minister is forgotten.

Bevan Shields is a senior writer and former editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.

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