The $9 billion Moore Point mini city planned for the Georges River opposite the Liverpool CBD is dead. With it go 11,000 homes, 23,000 jobs and more than 10 years of planning.
Liverpool Mayor Ned Mannoun says Planning Minister Paul Scully could still revive the project with the stroke of a pen, while Scully says the developer walked away. The planning file records a third version of events, because the landowners themselves asked the government in March to kill the rezoning and keep their land industrial.
Moore Point died in a city that can't house the people already arriving. Net overseas migration added 306,000 people in the year to June 2025, 91,570 of them to NSW, and every one of them needs a roof. Labor's housing policy aims at buyers rather than builders, in a market it's happy to watch fall. Tanya Plibersek says there's never been a better time to buy, and housing minister Clare O'Neil refused four times to say she wants prices to rise. No developer commits $9 billion and 11,000 apartments to a market its own government wants cheaper, and at Moore Point, none did.
Once dubbed the Barangaroo of the west, Moore Point would have turned 31.4 hectares of industrial land at Moorebank into a waterfront district of around 21,000 residents. The plans included towers of up to 126 metres, a primary school for 1,000 students, 10 hectares of open space and around 2,500 build to rent apartments. The Daily Telegraph revealed the axing on Monday, reporting that developer Coronation Property rescinded its plans in May and that the government had privately told Liverpool City Council the project couldn't proceed because of flood risk.
The landowners asked to kill Moore Point
The decisive document sits in public view on the NSW Planning Portal. On 15 May the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure wrote to Landerer and Company, the Sydney law firm acting for the site's owners. The letter accepts a request the firm made on 13 March to withdraw the Moore Point planning proposal and keep the existing industrial zoning.
The department records the owners' grounds as "infrastructure and feasibility, material change in ownership". It considered that request alongside correspondence from Coronation Property and fellow landowner Leamac before concluding the rezoning "will not be finalised". The Gateway approval the project had held since April 2023, the government's green light for the rezoning to be worked up, was formally altered to no longer proceed. That leaves the site zoned for warehouses and factories, which is exactly what the owners asked for.
Liverpool City Council's own consultation page now states the proposal "has been formally withdrawn by the Proponents".
Ned Mannoun wants the minister to approve it with the stroke of a pen
None of that has softened the mayor, who called the decision "extremely disappointing".
"I'm that disappointed I don't even know where to start," Mannoun told the Telegraph.
"All I can say is if the minister wants housing, get his stamp out and approve this project," he said.
"He can approve tens of thousands of houses that are ready to be built ... with the stroke of a pen he could transform the housing market, creating good quality housing near a beautiful river, right next to a train station and a hospital."
"I've got people coming to my office crying because they can't afford to pay rent anymore," he said. "These are people who are on frontline jobs in very critical positions."
"If anyone wants to invest in housing and they saw how the New South Wales government treated this project, they would take their money and go to other places like Brisbane."
The mayor has spent years fighting the flood objection. When the Rosehill Racecourse housing plan collapsed in May 2025 he pitched Moore Point to Premier Chris Minns's government as the alternative, saying the first 1,000 homes could have families living in them by 2027 and that "Noah's flood is not a planning benchmark".
Paul Scully says the flood maths never worked
Scully's account is that the government approved the assessment pathway the developers asked for, and the developers then stopped working on their own plans.
"Following the declaration of the (State Assessed Planning Proposal) SARP in late 2024, the proponent's master planning did not progress," he told the Telegraph. "They advised the department they were progressing employment and industrial opportunities at the site, along with other residential development opportunities across greater Sydney."
"The site faced unique challenges, including vehicle limits for flood evacuation, which were unable to be overcome for potential residential development."
The flood problem was known long before this year. Moore Point sits on a peninsula bounded by the Georges River and Lake Moore. A 2022 flood study found a completed development would put around 25,000 vehicles on the site, the ABC reported in June 2025, while its escape routes can carry about 5,500 cars in a worst case flood.
The department's Gateway approval came with conditions requiring the evacuation question to be solved, and it never was. In December the department's Monica Gibson told a budget estimates hearing that Moore Point was "one of the most complex rezonings that we are doing in New South Wales".
Coronation blamed the planning system for the delay while the project was alive. When the government agreed in December 2024 to assess the rezoning itself, managing director Joe Nahas told The Urban Developer the new pathway would "cut through the red tape" after a decade in which, he said, the project had been "stuck in the system".
The withdrawal letter's word for all of this is feasibility, and the numbers behind that word have moved against apartments from every direction. Apartment building costs rose another 4.1% in the year to June and house building costs 5.9%, with houses recording their sharpest quarterly rise since September 2022, according to the Bureau of Statistics. Sydney home prices keep falling at the same time, so a tower that took 10 years to approve was headed for a market paying less for apartments that cost more every quarter to build.
Four of the six key sites went to market as the rezoning died
Both accounts leave out the sale of the land itself. Colliers and CBRE have been marketing 90,280 square metres at Bridges Road and Newbridge Road, Moorebank, described in the campaign as "four of the six key privately owned sites" in the Moore Point precinct. Expressions of interest closed on 27 May 2026, 12 days after the department's letter ended the rezoning.
The campaign was prepared while the project was alive, with income figures dated 30 April 2025, and it sells the planning upside hard, promoting an "imminent rezoning gazettal", the Gateway approval, the potential for 23,500 jobs and existing rental income from the site of more than $4.5 million a year. The listing was still online on Monday.
The department's letter doesn't say what the "material change in ownership" behind the withdrawal was. One News could find no public statement from Coronation or Leamac about the project's end.
Leppington doesn't replace Moore Point
Asked about the axing, Scully pointed to plans for around 11,500 new homes and up to 11,000 jobs at Leppington Town Centre over the next 20 years. That announcement is 6 weeks old, because the government finalised the rezoning on 26 June. It covers 440 hectares of mostly undeveloped land across the Camden and Liverpool council areas, roughly 20 kilometres from the Georges River site. The plans allow buildings of 3 to 30 storeys and set aside 3% of new homes as affordable housing in perpetuity.
Moore Point was a disused industrial site beside an established city centre, a train station and a hospital, the sort of housing every level of government says it wants. Its 11,000 homes now go back on the drawing board in a city where an average young couple is already $154,000 short of the median unit.
After more than 10 years of planning, the peninsula stays warehouses. On Coronation's website Moore Point was still listed as in planning on Monday, described as Sydney's newest river city with more than 11,000 homes to come.
