How Woollahra’s date with density may be a lose-lose for Sloane

September 10, 2026 — 5:00am

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If it looks like a wedge and quacks like a wedge, it’s probably a wedge.

Labor’s announcement on Tuesday that it will rezone land to build high-rise towers as tall as 34 storeys under a plan to construct 9400 new homes in Woollahra and Edgecliff in the eastern suburbs is a golden opportunity for the premier, Chris Minns, and a major headache for Liberal leader Kellie Sloane.

Woollahra has the potential to refocus the Labor’s messaging around housing. In late 2023, when Labor was first establishing housing supply as its raison d’être in government, it focused far more on the need to rebalance new housing supply from greenfield sites in the west into the north shore and eastern suburbs.

In November of that year, NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey gave a speech in which he highlighted Woollahra and two other eastern suburbs councils – Randwick and Waverley – as laggards on new housing supply. Those three LGAs had added about 7000 new dwellings over a decade, while Blacktown added five times that number. The decision to axe the Greater Cities Commission and fold it back into the NSW Department of Planning was partly about giving the government greater control of housing targets, which it felt were too low in the city’s east.

Since then, that emphasis, at least in terms of the government’s public communication, has gotten a bit lost.........

© The Sydney Morning Herald