The Princess St Car-park, also known as car parking Area 6 at Canterbury Racecourse has this month been Rezoned to High Density Residential, despite promises made by Local and State Government politicians and bureaucrats that no change of Zoning would happen without extensive public consultation and reference to a Master-plan governing the whole of the Historic Canterbury Park Racecourse ! Back in 2021 , after uproar from the general public over plans by the ATC to carve off this carpark and redevelop it into HD Residential, the Local and State Govt’s worked together to create what was known as the “Canterbury Racecourse Coordination Committee” to develop a Master-plan for the site as a whole to effectively prevent the whole Racecourse site turning into an urban concrete mega complex by the ATC carving off bits at a time for HD development without much thought to much needed open-space and parkland to compliment it. However up till now, no Master-plan has ever been publicly released and unfortunately the Canterbury Bankstown Council has recently plotted with State Planning and the ATC to do the very thing the Master-plan was supposed to prevent ! The Council recently submitted their vision for a new Canterbury town Precinct to the State Govt’s TOD (Transport Orientated Development) program, however recommending HD residential housing stretching well outside the TOD recommended 400m from the transport hub (Canterbury Station) , to double nearly that distance and seemingly only to purposely include the ATC owned racecourse land, the Princess St car-park ! The Councils submission was quickly adopted and Gazetted via the TOD process, aided by Premier Minns’s new “Housing Delivery Authority” is designed to fastrack development, especially in these transport corridors, so it went thru very quickly. Everybody, including CRAG were simply caught off-Guard buy how fast this all happened and without any real Exhibition period or Community Consultations like the old Gateway process we were more familiar with. CRAG’s spokesperson wrote to the Planning Minister and local State representative to no avail requesting this decision be urgently reviewed in light of a lack of any publicly exhibited Masterplan and the fear of it destabilizing the popular Canterbury Night Race meetings which depend on having this parking available for the nearly 9000 attendees on busy nights, not to mention it being non compliant with the Planning Permission to run Night Racing events at all which were gazetted back in 1998 ! CRAG is still waiting for a reply from the Planning Office.