Politicians and powerbrokers trying to solve our cities’ housing crises are eyeing suburban golf courses. They’re approaching the issue the wrong way
Listening to former New South Wales premier Bob Carr pontificate recently about the virtues of using golf-course land to solve the current housing crisis is galling, but we’ve heard it all before. He’s far from the first public figure with minimal – if any – knowledge about golf to sprout the same knee-jerk response and see it as a long-range solution.
But lest I play the man too much and not the ball, I must get to the point: the specious attack on suburban golf courses needs to stop. And it needs to stop through better education of the non-golf-playing public as to the benefits of the sport and the importance of the space that golf courses occupy in a sprawling urban environment.
As well as being a course architect of considerable note, Harley Kruse is also an expert in landscape management and biodiversity on golf courses. Like many people attached to golf, he laments the recent decision by current NSW premier Chris Minns to reduce Sydney’s ultra-busy Moore Park Golf Course to nine holes from 2026 in a bid to create more housing and revamp the parkland (despite 189 hectares of it sitting right across the road at Centennial Park).
The area of Sydney immediately south of the CBD has undergone an overhaul in the past 10 to 20 years, with previously unfashionable suburbs like Redfern, Waterloo, Zetland and Green Square becoming modern residential hubs in a convenient location. However, the growth has come with minimal attention to the surrounding road infrastructure or consideration for retaining non-developed land. As my colleague Brad Clifton points out: for a place called Green Square, there’s not a lot of green space.
Down the road from Moore Park and Green Square at Waterloo, where apartment buildings have been rising faster than Tiger Woods’ net worth, there’s a genuinely concerning scarcity of green space amid the rampant development.
“They’re addicted to getting new ratepayers and lining the coffers with all the rates they can charge by having more development,” Kruse says. “The whole thing’s a bit narrow-minded. Bob Carr came out and said what a great visionary Chris Minns was to create a new park. Well, he’s not creating a new park as such, he’s just repurposing an existing piece of parkland. He’s not taking a derelict old building site and turning it into a parkland; he’s just re-allocating the land use from golfers using the land to non-golfers, really. So he’s not actually being that visionary.
“It needs calling out for what it is. [Minns] could go and say, ‘We’re going to go and plant 1,000 new trees.’ But equally, the golf course could probably go and plant 50,000 Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub (ESBS) species throughout it, maybe more. A couple of hundred thousand plants could be planted throughout that golf course of the ESBS species and do far more for the biodiversity of that part of Sydney than [turning it into parkland would].”
While it’s easy to point fingers from within the golf industry at those outside it, there has been a distinct lack of consultation of people with extensive expertise within the game by those outside golf making the big decisions.
“The question with Moore Park is: who’s come up with the idea?” Kruse asks. “Why are they taking nine holes? Why not, say, take away six holes? How did they come up with the magic number of, ‘Well, they don’t need nine holes,’ and take nine holes? Maybe six holes in the right location is better than nine holes that are sitting along South Dowling St. Who’s going to put a picnic blanket out looking over a four-lane freeway with trucks and buses and cars in peak hour?
“Rather than a physical land grab of nine golf holes, the question is: does it need to be nine holes, does it need to be those nine holes? Have they actually had a golf-course architect look at what are the best holes to take back?”
As an alternative, Kruse prefers the idea of shared used if Moore Park can’t be retained as 18 holes, seven days a week. The compromise should not be on the land but on time. Kruse advocates keeping the golf course as 18 holes but having periods during each day and each week when parts of the course become annexed for different use, such as picnics, exercising and other outdoor recreation. Such a model is already in place at the Home of Golf at St Andrews, where the Old Course closes for play every Sunday so that the space can be enjoyed by non-golfers.
Another relevant voice in this debate belongs to Steve Smith, a former course superintendent known in online circles as ‘The Golfing Greenkeeper’. He recently made a valid point about the differences in care and maintenance between golf courses and parks.
“Golf courses are home to so many species of flora and fauna. Some more obvious than others, some more widely known than others,” Smith wrote on LinkedIn in early November. “When maintained well, golf courses are a sanctuary for urban biodiversity on a significantly larger scale than any park could ever be. Why? Because all decisions made are environmentally centric. Golf courses function best when working in harmony with nature, not fighting against it.
“Next time you go to a park, look around and consider just what is being done during maintenance to foster the local environment. You’ll quickly see the answer is very little, if anything at all…”
[PHOTO: Getty Images/Matt King]
