Accepted in principle, refused in public

Randwick City Council's ordinary meeting of Tuesday 28 July 2026 moved into closed session at 9.44pm and returned to open session at 9.56pm. In those twelve minutes it disposed of six confidential items, resolutions 198/26 to 203/26, each recorded as carried unanimously. The meeting closed at 9.57pm.

Two of the six concerned student housing on Anzac Parade, Kingsford. In each, Council accepted a developer's letter of offer in principle, expressly subject to the Land and Environment Court granting development consent, and delegated its General Manager to revise that offer to add an affordable housing contribution. Neither resolution states an amount for that contribution.

Sixteen days later, on 13 August 2026, the Randwick Local Planning Panel refused both applications unanimously, on fourteen numbered reasons at one site and seventeen at the other. One reason in each was that the applicant had not supplied the information needed to work out the affordable housing contribution.

Both court items were listed on the public agenda by address, DA number and court proceeding number, and an objector deputation was received in open session on each before Council moved into closed session. Council published the resolved words in its open minutes. What was not published were the reports and the letters of offer themselves.

01The two offers Council accepted in principle

Item CP31/26 became resolution 199/26. It was moved by Cr Magner, seconded by Cr Martin, and carried unanimously. The item concerns 494-516 Anzac Parade, Kingsford, development application DA/113/2026, and Land and Environment Court proceedings 2026/00182508. The operative words are narrow and worth reading closely, because they are the part of these two files Council published.

Item CP32/26 became resolution 200/26, moved by Cr Rosenfeld, seconded by Cr Hamilton, carried unanimously. It accepted in principle the terms of a letter of offer dated 27 January 2026 for 345-355 Anzac Parade, Kingsford, DA/152/2026, court proceedings 2026/201070, on the same conditional wording, although clause (a) omits the word "attached" used in 199/26. Clause (a)(i) notes "the community infrastructure contribution of approximately $577,600 and amend the schedule of community infrastructure works and any residual monetary contribution, as required;". Unlike its twin, resolution 200/26 contains no dollar figure for section 7.12 at all. Its clause (b) records that the requirement "is to be removed from the letter of offer and addressed as a condition of consent, if the application is approved".

Both items were closed under section 10A(2)(g) of the Local Government Act 1993, "as it deals with advice concerning litigation, or advice that would otherwise be privileged from production in legal proceedings on the ground of legal professional privilege." Both appeared on the public agenda by address, DA number and proceeding number, and an objector spoke to each in open session before the closed session began. The resolved words were published. The reports and the letters of offer were not.

02The two refusals the panel handed down sixteen days later

The Randwick Local Planning Panel met in public at 1.00pm on Thursday 13 August 2026. Item D57/26 refused DA/113/2026 at 494-516 Anzac Parade on fourteen numbered reasons, carried unanimously. The building is described in the panel's resolution as "construction of 9-storey mixed use co-living student housing containing 358 student accommodation rooms with 5 ground floor retail spaces and 4 car spaces", with a basement containing 100 bicycle spaces.

Item D58/26 refused DA/152/2026 at 345-355 Anzac Parade on seventeen numbered reasons, also carried unanimously. That building is described as a "part 5 and part 9 storey mixed use building" containing 251 student accommodation rooms, with one car space, 50 bicycle spaces and 12 motorcycle spaces.

At 494-516 Anzac Parade, reason 5 of the fourteen reads:

That is the contribution the General Manager had been delegated to add to the letter of offer sixteen days earlier. At 345-355 Anzac Parade, reason 15 of the seventeen runs wider, taking in the community infrastructure contribution as well:

The counts matter. Contributions are one reason of fourteen and one of seventeen. The remaining reasons cover zone objectives, building height, floor space ratio, design excellence, amenity and contamination, and at 345-355 Anzac Parade also heritage, active street frontages, floor to ceiling heights and landscaping, along with reason 16, that WaterNSW "intends to refuse to issue General Terms of Approval" over the information supplied about the basement design. Neither refusal rests on the contributions point.

The minutes record the panel as Chairperson Steven Layman, expert members David Epstein and James Lidis, and community representative Stephanie Schofield, with declarations of pecuniary and non-pecuniary interests recorded as nil. No councillor is listed as present.

One thing is absent from those minutes. A case-insensitive search of their full extracted text returns zero occurrences of "appeal", "court" and "deemed". The published minutes make no reference to the Land and Environment Court proceedings, or to the offers Council had accepted in principle on 28 July. That is an absence in the document. It is not evidence about what the panel was or was not told.

03The mechanism to watch, a deemed refusal that moves the decision to the Court

The thing that makes these two files behave differently from an ordinary development application is not in the minutes of either meeting. It is in the panel's own business paper, which explains why officers recommended refusal in the first place.

From that point the file runs on two tracks that never have to meet. On one, the public benefit is negotiated in a letter of offer, considered in closed session under the litigation ground, and accepted in principle subject to the Court granting consent. On the other, the panel records a formal refusal in public, on numbered reasons, in a room where no councillor is recorded as present, and on a panel whose published composition contains no councillor seat. Both are Council positions. Neither cancels the other, and neither the panel's published minutes of 13 August nor Council's minutes of 25 August join them.

A refusal is not the end of a decision. It is Council's public position inside a live appeal.

The third closed item that night shows what changes and what does not. Resolution 201/26, item CP33/26, accepted in principle a letter of offer dated 1 September 2025 for 153-157A Anzac Parade and 7 Addison Street, Kensington, DA/1125/2025, on the same conditional formula, but "subject to the RLPP granting development consent", the panel and not the Court. That item was closed under section 10A(2)(c) rather than the litigation ground, and its clause (b) does update a section 7.12 figure, $38,980,069.00 giving $974,501.73. The conditional offer is the standing method. What differs across the three is who decides, which confidentiality ground applies, and whether the numbers are fixed on the page.

04The affordable housing contribution that appears in no published document

Clause (a)(ii) is identical in both Kingsford resolutions. It delegates the General Manager to "revise the letter of offer to incorporate an affordable housing contribution consistent with Council's Affordable Housing Plan for Kensington and Kingsford town centres;". No amount follows, in either resolution. The letters of offer themselves are unpublished, so there is no document in the public record from which the figure can be read.

The report sets out how the figure would be arrived at. Clause 6.26(2) of RLEP 2012 allows the consent authority to impose a condition requiring an affordable housing contribution equivalent to 5 per cent of the total floor area of the part of the building intended to be used for residential accommodation, and clause 6.26(3)(a) allows a co-living development to satisfy that in money. The clause allows the condition. It does not itself require a contribution. And the calculation runs off a residential floor area figure the officers say the applicant had not provided.

The community infrastructure side of the 345-355 Anzac Parade file drew the same finding under clause 6.17. The assessment records that "Insufficient information has been provided regarding the nature, extent, value and delivery of the proposed community infrastructure relied upon to justify the additional uplift." A letter of offer had been submitted, but the officers found the infrastructure in it had not been sufficiently "defined, quantified or documented" for Council to verify the relationship between the uplift sought and the benefit proposed.

The published record shows that a contribution is to be added. It does not show how much.

05What the record says against this reading

The accepting resolutions are not silent about student housing. Clauses (d) to (h) of 199/26, 200/26 and 201/26 carry a block of Council's own objections to the pattern of development in the two town centres, the same block that appears as clauses (c) and following of the open item CP27/26 that night, resolution 180/26, which entered a voluntary planning agreement under section 7.5 of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 for 399-405 Anzac Parade, 2-4 Sturt Street and 19-21 Bunnerong Road, Kingsford. It is standing wording used across at least four resolutions on 28 July.

The last clause of that block commits Council to continue advocating to the NSW Planning Minister, the Hon Paul Scully MP, for "a moratorium on commercial student and boarding house accommodation in the Randwick LGA". The position is on the record elsewhere too. The ABC reported on 30 March 2026 that members of Randwick City Council voted unanimously to reaffirm in-principle support for a moratorium on any further commercial for-profit student accommodation in the local government area, and quoted Randwick Mayor Cr Dylan Parker: "A factor of 10 to one is pretty hard to justify."

The refusals also track material already on the file. The panel business papers record 35 unique submissions by way of objection for DA/113/2026, applicant Cedar Pacific Investment Management Pty Ltd, cost of works $90,637,470.00, and thirteen unique submissions received during the public notification period for DA/152/2026, applicant Greenfort Project Development Pty Ltd, cost of works $73,925,500. The Kingsford East Precinct general meeting of 19 March 2026 resolved to make a formal submission on both applications "requesting that more commercial and retail Gross Floor Area is provided on the ground floor of these developments and that student amenities be moved to another floor." Reason 1 in D57/26 echoes it, finding the ground floor tenancy size inconsistent with the zone objectives and inadequate to enhance the function of the Kingsford Town Centre including Meeks Street Plaza.

The panel is a separate body. Randwick's own page states that it consists of four voting members, a chair, two independent expert members and a community representative, that "The four (4) voting members for each panel meeting will be selected by the Chair", and that members are "not permitted to discuss any matter that is to be considered by the panel with Councillors, the applicant, their consultants, submitters" or others with an interest, outside the panel meeting. The published composition contains no councillor seat, and no councillor is recorded as present on 13 August.

06Where the two appeals stand, and what we asked Council

The other appeal cannot be found in the same window. A case-number query on 202600182508, the 494-516 Anzac Parade proceedings, returned no hits at all, and a party query on Cedar Pacific returned the same. The published list window ran from 28 August to 25 September 2026, and the detector works, because the identical query on 202600201070 returns one hit. The absence is real, but it establishes only that the matter is not listed in that window. It is not evidence that the appeal has ended.

Nothing has been published by way of judgment either. An advanced search of the Land and Environment Court collections on NSW Caselaw on 3 September 2026 returns zero results for file number 2026/00182508 and zero for 2026/201070, and a body search for "Anzac Parade" in those collections for 2026 returns two decisions, neither about these sites. No current suppression or non-publication order affecting either proceeding was found, and one neighbouring Randwick decision opened for the check records its publication restriction as nil. That is a negative search result rather than a clearance, because a court list cannot display such an order.

Twelve days after the refusals, on 25 August 2026, Council went into closed session at 10.28pm and took up item CP36/26, Affordable Housing Delivery Program and Processes, closed under section 10A(2)(d). Resolution 232/26, moved by Cr Gordon and seconded by Cr Magner, is recorded as CARRIED, not as carried unanimously. It endorsed site selection criteria for purchasing existing buildings as affordable rental housing, and an investigation into 127-129 Boyce Road and 18 Green Street, Maroubra, along with adjoining land at 133 Boyce Rd and 20 Green St. An amendment moved by Cr Hay and seconded by Cr Burst, which would have endorsed instead a strategy of purchasing privately held land near Prince of Wales Hospital for essential workers including nurses and midwives, was lost.

A case-insensitive search of those minutes returns zero occurrences of "Kensington" and zero of "Kingsford". Every address named in resolution 232/26 is in Maroubra. Clause (d) endorses three other high scoring sites for later investigation, and those sites are not identified in the published minutes because the report itself is confidential, so this is not the same as saying no Kingsford site was considered. The same minutes contain no mention of 494-516 or 345-355 Anzac Parade, of either proceeding number, or of the Land and Environment Court in a planning context. The panel agenda for 10 September 2026 lists a single item, 62 Mons Avenue, Maroubra, DA/526/2026. As at 3 September 2026 the published council record on these two sites stops at the 13 August refusals.

THE RORT put three questions to Randwick City Council. First, what affordable housing contribution amount, if any, has been incorporated into each revised letter of offer under the delegation in clause (a)(ii) of resolutions 199/26 and 200/26. Second, whether either revised offer has been executed or placed before the Land and Environment Court, and whether the panel's findings of 13 August changed the amounts. Third, whether Council will publish the CP31/26 and CP32/26 reports and letters of offer once the proceedings are determined. As at publication Council had not answered any of the three, and nothing in the published record answers them either. Any answer Council gives will be printed here in full.

If it’s a rort, we cover it.