Labor faces internal housing battle in PM’s heartland

5 hours ago 2

With proud Marrickville resident Anthony Albanese in The Lodge, Sydney’s inner west has become the centre of Australia’s political universe.

It’s also the centre of one of the more pressing political issues of our time – how to build more housing in a central part of Sydney which has historically been pathologically opposed to development.

The area is full of progressive Labor-Greens voters fully supportive of high-density, affordable housing in every suburb – barring their own. It’s the kind of place where people read Ezra Klein’s Abundance book for fun.

Little surprise then that there are a multitude of views around how best to build, baby, build among influential Labor figures in the PM’s own backyard.

Inner West Council, led by Mayor Darcy Byrne, is planning buildings of six to 11 storeys in Ashfield, Marrickville, Dulwich Hill and Croydon, which are all serviced by train lines.

The council, led by ambitious Labor mayor Darcy Byrne (a good mate of Albo) objected to Premier Chris Minns’ Transport Oriented Development scheme and, in May, revealed its own plan to boost density, which involves buildings of six to 11 storeys clustered around Ashfield, Marrickville, Dulwich Hill and Croydon.

Cue fury among some residents’ groups in those suburbs, disgruntled at having to bear the brunt of the council’s density reforms. They pointed to the fact that the inner west’s leafier areas such as Balmain, Rozelle and Annandale were spared the brunt of the development. To be fair, none of those suburbs is on a train line.

Earlier this month, local Labor MP Jo Haylen, who was a minister in the Minns government before that silly business with taking chauffeured cars to a boozy birthday brunch, wrote to Byrne to voice those residents’ concerns. Some of the suburbs slated for the most development sit in her Summer Hill electorate.

In a letter seen by CBD, Haylen urged Byrne to “give serious consideration” to the feedback on the plan provided by her community.

“Residents have raised with me their views including the need to address an equitable distribution of new homes – particularly that the plan proposes a significant amount of new homes in Marrickville, Dulwich Hill and Ashfield as opposed to on Parramatta Road and/or to the north and east of the LGA,” she wrote.

CBD hears Haylen backs the plan, and wrote to Byrne merely to do her job as an MP and highlight her community’s concern on a contentious issue.

Byrne, meanwhile, told CBD the council was working with the state government to fix the housing supply crisis.

“Our plan to deliver more than 30,000 new homes is ambitious, and the public exhibition period is the right time for concerns and amendments to be raised.”

Local submissions to council closed this month, so we can assume Byrne will be faced with far more dissenting views in the days to come.

Book club

The period following a federal election brings the inevitable flurry of political tomes by pundits. Last month, CBD revealed that formidable columnist Niki Savva (yes, she does write for the Herald) would be releasing a book, appropriately titled Earthquake, just in time to send seismic rumbles through various Liberal Party Christmases.

Also getting in on the act is University of Western Australia politics professor and Daily Mail Australia political editor Peter van Onselen. His book, The Hollow State: Power Without Purpose in Australian Politics, is due for an October release from niche right-leaning press Wilkinson Publishing.

It feels a slight step down from Hachette, which published PVO’s 2021 book on Scott Morrison, but then again, PVO’s own recent career arc has been chaotic. He went from The Australian and Sky News to Network Ten and The Project before joining Daily Mail Australia last year as political editor.

In a curious move for a pundit, PVO has built a career out of marrying savvy analysis with being prominently wrong (his “kisses of death” were the stuff of legend).

More recently, he quit as Network Ten’s political editor in 2023, and was then successfully sued by his former employer for breaching a non-disparagement clause in his redundancy agreement (for which he trousered $165,000) by writing an article in The Australian calling the broadcaster “the minnow of Australian television”. To be fair, he got that one right.

PVO told us his new book was a project some years in the making; a lament at the hollowing-out of modern politics by both sides of the aisle he hoped would be “half scholarly, half populist”.

Any kisses of death to look out for?

“The only prediction is it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Van Onselen said.

Back to school

A mere 11 weeks after the May 3 election, federal parliament has returned. Everyone wanted to put their feet up after that gruelling election campaign, we guess. Or hike the Great Wall of China.

The pollies have slowly begun to trickle back to Canberra, and on Sunday night, CBD’s spies spotted Labor frontbenchers Murray Watt, Jenny McAllister and Tim Ayres enjoying a pre-sitting dinner at Compa in the Canberra Centre. Expect more of that.

During the downtime CBD brought you several updates about the great staffer exodus, and had some sport at the expense at the PM’s chief of staff Tim Gartrell, for what we thought was his weirdly school prefect attitude to his underlings oversharing happy snaps with the prime minister on social media. Obligations under the ministerial staff code of conduct or something.

But maybe he had a point: word has reached CBD of a former staffer whose profile on the dating app Hinge once included a selfie with … the prime minister.

Anthony “Aphrodisiac” Albanese? Somehow, we don’t think so.

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