Circular Quay should be Sydney’s crown jewel. Instead, $170m has been spent on nothing

Circular Quay is Sydney’s local infrastructure production of Waiting for Godot. There have always been grand visions and a plethora of plans, reports, artists’ impressions, concepts and competitions, but nothing seems to have been done of late.

The so-called gateway has not had a major overhaul since the 1988 bicentenary celebrations. Nevertheless, $170 million has been spent in the past nine years on the project with nothing to show for the money and the development mired in the planning stage.

There has been development around Circular Quay, but the Cahill Expressway remains the same.Credit: Janie Barrett, Flavio Brancaleone

The Herald’s Julie Power and Anthony Segaert discovered the $170 million in spending tucked away in NSW budget papers – plus $70 million more promised in the 2024-25 state budget.

The quay has been a challenge for Sydney since the 1940s when cars began to flood the city. The biggest single obstacle to its transformation is the Cahill Expressway. Connecting traffic from the east of the city to the Harbour Bridge, the expressway was opened in 1958 to take traffic out of inner-city streets, and has evolved into Sydney’s most reviled piece of public infrastructure.

Now, with light rail, ferries, trains, buses, taxis and cruise ships, the large transport interchange is frequently swamped with people, and the land managed by different government agencies.

That may explain why the area has attracted politicians and their visions. Former prime minister Paul Keating helped negotiate a significant height reduction on the redevelopment at East Circular Quay, various premiers and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore have weighed in, only to do little: in 2015, then-premier Mike Baird announced a $200 million redevelopment that came to nought; seven years later one of his successors, Dominic Perrottet, promised to transform the Cahill Expressway into a new public green space, but lost office.

Since winning office in May 2023, the Minns government has committed to a modest redevelopment of the precinct – an upgrade of the promenade and ferry wharves. Progress on the project is so slow that some involved feared the government had scrapped it altogether.

A consortium that won a design and financial competition handed over its initial design concepts in late 2024. Several sources involved with the project at different stages said the government was yet to respond.

However, Transport Minister Jo Haylen said the project to create a modern and accessible transport interchange with new ferry wharves and an upgraded train station is not dead. “We’re in the planning stages,” she said. “Our government is committed to the renewal of Circular Quay, but we’re going to do it in a way that is realistic.”

The much-criticised Cahill Expressway has a life of its own and is now too expensive to be removed. But Circular Quay is Sydney’s face to the world and, for the people of NSW, the embarrassment of waiting for something that never arrives thanks to government inertia is harder to accept when they are billed $170 million for basically nothing.

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