The NSW Libs have picked a side in the housing war. Now they face their next fight

2 hours ago 3

Opinion

October 16, 2025 — 5.00am

The NSW Liberals are finally having their come-to-Jesus moment.

Opposition Leader Mark Speakman will launch the Liberal Friends of Housing group next week, alongside the staunchly pro-housing Young Liberals and the lobby group Sydney YIMBY. Speakman’s Damascene conversion on housing inspired him to push for the establishment of the group, with the backing of the party’s management committee, which is in place to sort out the dysfunctional NSW Liberals.

NSW Liberals leader Mark Speakman will support Premier Chris Minns’ sweeping changes to the state’s 50-year-old planning laws.

The opposition has also agreed its position on NSW Labor’s sweeping changes to the state’s 50-year-old planning laws. The Liberals will support Labor’s overhaul to planning, which is designed to deliver more housing more quickly.

This decision is significant. The Liberals, even after their 2011 landslide election victory, tried to do something similar with the antiquated planning act but failed. Now Labor will have that win.

Until recently, the Liberals’ approach to housing policy has been scattered and ill-disciplined. Only last year, Speakman’s Liberal team was trying to pass laws to stop Labor’s signature housing policy of increasing density around public transport. The Coalition tied itself in knots trying to insist this did not mean it was against more housing, but that is precisely how it looked.

For a brief time, Speakman adopted a bureaucratic term devised by the Productivity Commission – ADIMBY (appropriate development in my backyard) but saw the error of his ways. No one was going to embrace that clumsy acronym. Not everyone in his party room is happy with the binary bluntness of being either NIMBY or YIMBY, but like it or not, that is how the housing debate is framed.

An artist’s impression of how masterplans and rezonings might look around Crows Nest.

Now, after much hand-wringing and internal differences, the NSW Liberals – whose electoral hopes rest on appealing to more young voters – have decided not to stand in the way of housing.

On the surface, this unusually mature approach for an opposition party could not be further from how their federal colleagues are behaving, as they remain locked in open bitter warfare, not with federal Labor but with each other. While the federal Liberals are, as senior frontbencher James Paterson described it this week, on a “mass public therapy session”, their NSW colleagues appear united and pragmatic. But do not be fooled. Cracks in the NSW Coalition are emerging. The Nationals are planning their own splinter religion over renewables and some Liberals are questioning their beliefs.

To keep their junior cousins calm, the Liberals needed to add a series of amendments to Labor’s planning legislation which will be voted on this week. The jittery Nationals, who have been pushing for a moratorium on renewables, wanted an iron-clad guarantee that proposed fast-tracked approvals will not apply to major non-residential developments such as mines, waste incinerators, transmission lines, wind farms or solar farms.

While the Liberals and Nationals have accepted that they must work with, not against, the government on the housing crisis, their own big internal battle is brewing over the very issue that they so successfully delivered in government.

The country-leading renewable energy rollout, which was championed and kick-started by former Liberal environment minister Matt Kean, is shaping up to be a deeply divisive issue in the Coalition, pitting Nationals against Liberals and even Liberals against Liberals in the lead-up to the 2027 election, now less than 18 months away.

NSW Nationals leader Dugald Saunders has been very vocal about the renewables rollout, arguing for “the need for a pause and stocktake on all projects across the state”. At the same time, his party voted to abandon Australia’s commitment to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 at the Nationals state conference in Coffs Harbour in June. (Saunders has not committed to that policy position, but said all motions from the conference would be considered).

This week, Liberal upper house MP Rachel Merton praised the Queensland government’s decision to keep its coal-fired power stations open until at least 2046, describing the move as “good news for consumers, families, small businesses and industry in that state”.

“Prioritising reliable, cheap and plentiful energy over taxpayer-funded, environment-damaging net zero ideology is nothing … but common sense,” Merton posted on Facebook. “Our community is demanding an honest conversation,” she continued, “about the real cost of the renewables transition to the economy, the environment, and our standard of living.”

Similarly, in August, Liberal MP for Goulburn Wendy Tuckerman sensationally quit Speakman’s frontbench in protest over her party’s handling of a renewable energy bill. She warned that the “rapid and poorly managed transition to green energy and the rush to renewables” was greatly hurting her electorate. She had no choice, she said, than to take a stand against a bill that had been rushed through and relinquish her role as local government opposition minister.

On the other side of argument, meanwhile, is the Liberals’ energy and environment spokesman James Griffin, who has vigorously defended the Coalition-devised renewables road map.

“The road map enjoys bipartisan support in this parliament, and rightly so,” Griffin, a leading moderate and leadership hopeful, told the lower house in August. “It represents one of the most ambitious energy transition plans in the country.” But can the Coalition claim to still have a coherent energy plan when it is so divided?

The Liberals have accepted that the housing crisis is so pressing that they must be united in their stance or risk finding themselves on the wrong side of history. The same cannot be said about their approach to energy. Their federal colleagues are tearing themselves apart over energy policy and net zero and the NSW Coalition may well find itself in the same space, leaving its renewables legacy in tatters.

Alexandra Smith is the NSW state political editor.

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