The Metropolitan Strategy

In December 2005 the State Government released it's policy document to guide the planning of Sydney's population growth until the year 2031. This document is called the Metropolitan Strategy.

The policy requires each Council to prepare a Residential Development Strategy (RDS) to plan for accommodating it's share of the population growth.

The greater metropolitan area of Sydney has been divided into Sub-Regions (comprising several municipalities), and each Sub-Region has been given a target number new of dwellings and employment opportunities that it must provide (based on the available housing stock and jobs in 2004).

Ku-ring-gai is part of the North Sub-Region which contains Ku-ring-gai and Hornsby Municipalities. The North Sub-Region is required to provide 20,000 new dwellings and 8,000 new jobs by the year 2031. Historically, the distribution of dwellings and population in North Sub-Region has been Ku-ring-gai 40% and Hornsby 60% and it is reasonable to assume this will continue. Therefore, Ku-ring-gai is required to provide 8,000 new dwellings in it's RDS (although the requirements for Ku-ring-gai alone are not explicitly stated in the strategy).

However, for some reason, Council has already planned or approved 15,000 new dwellings - almost double the State Government's requirement under The Metropolitan Strategy - with the smaller neighbourhood centres (like Eastern Rd, Princess St and South Turramurra) still to be done. Yet some "Liberal Faction" councillors continue to push for even more development.

A detailed analysis of Council's plans compared to The Metropolitan Strategy is HERE

The Metropolitan Strategy is a public document that anyone can access. It is available on the internet at www.metrostrategy.nsw.gov.au. You can access the main policy document by clicking on the "City of Cities" icons and then clicking the "documents" link in the very top right hand corner, or by clicking HERE. There are also a number of historical consultation documents on the home page which may be of interest. 

The complete Metropolitan Strategy is quite large (250Mb) and not easily downloaded. Friends of Turramurra has made extracts of relevant parts of the Metropolitan Strategy that are small enough to download - an index of these is available HERE.