Between Westconnex, Southconnex, light rail and Sydney Metro there’s barely a sector of Sydney not currently in a state of upheaval.
It’s an infrastructure investment that Sydney has desperately needed for decades and a positive sign of the city’s economic health. But as with all change there comes disruption affecting people’s lives and livelihoods, some for good, others not so good.
The NSW Government is pursuing a commendable agenda to rebuild Sydney and taking every media opportunity to brand itself as the infrastructure government. Barely a week goes by without a ministerial announcement about a new road, rail or urban renewal project, making hard hats and hi-vis vests part of a new political dress code.
Yet all these media pronouncements, which should be music to the ears of those looking for relief in a city straining at the seams, are creating a level of unease stemming from the vacuum of information that follows once the headlines have been made.
The F6 announcement is a case in point. There are many arguments in favour of this piece of road infrastructure which has been touted for 50 to 60 years, far longer even than Badgerys Creek airport. But once an area is identified for a major project, or raised from the dead, there are a whole range of implications.
Affected residents may choose to sell and cut their losses or wait and see whether this time the road does in fact go ahead and along the route proposed so many years ago. Six decades is a long time to quarantine such a large tract of land casting a shadow over the lives and future planning of residents and businesses. But then for many years planning in NSW consisted of a commitment-shy series of thought bubbles.
Now that the cobwebs are being dusted off the proposal, the government has a duty to be utterly transparent, making information easily accessible not just to residents but the wider public, any of whom might have a future interest in its plans. This is not happening.
As real estate agents our role is to provide informed advice to our clients, both vendors and prospective buyers. We run the risk of failing in this duty for lack of good, clear information. And then there is the question; just whose responsibility is it to provide full disclosure especially if in doing so it acts against the best interests of the real estate agent’s client, the vendor. Given the potential conflict the onus must surely fall on the government to provide clear and easy to access information about its future plans.
Without a doubt both RMS and NSW Planning have plenty of content on their websites but clarity is not a word you would use to describe many of the documents and reports.
Putting aside the unforgivable lapse in the Land Titles Registry, that led to more than 200 people buying homes on the route of the F6, the scale of urban renewal proposals is so immense that it is nigh on impossible to keep abreast of every potential development in planning, roads and rezoning.
If the Government wants to keep the people of Sydney on-side they need to be more transparent and provide facts and information, written in plain English, devoid of spin.