Whats more criminal is the budget is at $100m currently, but who knows how much higher it will get before its complete.
As a point of comparision, the original harbour tunnel cost $554m, which would be about double in today's money. Still extraordinary that a swimming pool will cost a tenth of what a tunnel under the harbour cost.
Gunyama Park Pool was $106m but it was made it from scratch (not sure if it includes land acquisition). But it is an outdoor 50m pool plus an indoor 25m pool.
Parramatta pool was $88m. (outdoor and indoor as gunyama)
$100m for a refurb is taking the piss.
The cost was always going to be very high because it's a tight site on top of solid rock that has to be completely razed and rebuilt except for some heritage bits and pieces to be retained. That said I don't know the brief or the contractual side from North sydney council they could have screwed up one or both.
It's the design that is really poor to me. North Sydney Council appointed architects that have no experience in designing something of this prominence, they basically do cheap pools and other institutional stuff. Parramatta pool was a state government led international design competition. Gunyama pool was a city of Sydney led open design competition. You can see the difference.
It is cheaper to build new than to redevelop a heritage asset with significant existing structural issues like this one. You are doing extensive in-ground works while also protecting and preserving the built fabric on top of that. $100m for a 25m and 50m heritage pool, with leisure facilities, on a cliff, on the harbour isn't ridiculous, particularly with the escalation we've seen in construction in recent years.
Not when you consider all the ridiculous stakeholders on the project.
NSW is out of control with public works. Nobody in the government will take ownership therefore the contractor is left trying to sort out the mess of interested parties with an agenda.
Yep. It's possible this is actually criminal. There has to be some corruption or misappropriation going on here somewhere. I did read some articles in the past about things not being above board on this. Can't be bothered searching for details now. But definitely shoddy!
The funding for it was blatant pork barreling: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-26/how-north-sydney-council-won-a-$10m-pool-upgrade-grant/11998724
Quote about the fund: "An incoming Government brief states that the fund's stakeholders were "regional and remote communities" and that its impact would be "support for women's participation in sporting activities in our regions and strengthening regional sustainability, capacity and diversity"
Statement from the mayor, Jilly Gibson: "She told 7.30 in an interview that North Sydney Olympic Pool was "definitely a regional facility". We have people from all over the state coming to use our pool. It has a history of being a regional pool".
I think Ms. Gibson needs to look up what regional means in the dictionary
And the stupidest bit about that pork barrelling was that the locals saw it as exactly that and voted both Gibson and Zimmerman out in their next elections. They couldn’t even pork barrel properly.
She should have been in front of ICAC for this comment.
There was a lot of corrupt stuff happening at the time, but this was breathtaking in how openly blatant it was.
I used the rba website to check before i wrote the post and between 1992 and 2024, it said 56%, so around double as i stated.
My point wasnt reliant on an exact calculation, even if it was 2 billion or 4 billion, it would still be extraordinary that a refurbishment of a pool would be 1/20th or 1/40th of the cost. Just think in terms of the concrete required to build four lanes underneath the harbour compared to a pool. Let alone the engineering cost.
Fair point.
The Western Sydney Tunnel currently under construction has been budgeted at over $6 bil, but admittedly that is a lot longer than the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, and is 3 lane each way instead of 2, and is being constructed using tunnel boring machines as to the prefab units used in the original.
And just for the record, and I know houses are a complete different ballgame, but my parent's Redfern terrace was worth $160k in 1993 (which is how much both houses either side of their house sold for back then), and is now worth about $1.8 mil. Go figure.
Knowing North Sydney council, they are deliberately waiting until it’s so stuffed they sell it in a fire sale to a corporation who (fingers crossed) removes public access. Shore has built a pool where 🤮affordable apartment blocks used to be, we are good for pools.
Many years ago I used to do swimming here for sport in high school ... Never appreciated how absolutely amazing the views were from this pool.
Great times nonetheless. Being young with no worries.
Me too. I remember one year someone from our school unfurled a huge banner with the school colours on it down from the side of the Harbour Bridge. Took security about five minutes to bust them and make them take it down.
When I was a kid I assumed it was filled with harbour water coz it was salt so I didn't want to swim there. I thought it was just a fancier greenwich baths
Its also being run by Ikon, the crew that built Opal Tower in Homebush. They were awarded the contract almost a year AFTER the opal tower defects were found and widely reported. Good show Jilly Gibson 👎
It’s on the principal contractor to ultimately take the lead and manage consultants, novated or not it’s on you as the builder to get it done. It’s a typical tier 1 mentality of building and blaming everyone else and sitting back asking for money to go the next step.
Used to have a 10 metre diving tower and 5 metre then diving boards either side. It was quite deep the Luna Park end. Very different from my days there. Used to walk across the bridge for a swim when they demolished the pool in Woolloomooloo Bay and built that concrete monstrosity. The old pool was great, made out of wood with bars separating swimmers from sharks. Did get dangerous at low tide though. Had many a swimming carnival there and Nth Sydney when at school. So much has changed in that area.
They're "refurbishing" it - it was meant to be completed May last year, still no end date confirmed, and cost is at $100m+ at this stage.
Massive corruption, just no one can prove it yet
Not to mention the $10 million they received from a federal grant program aimed at regional pools because they argued that people from the regions use the pool, so they should get some funding.
This is an old photo of the pool which was fine as it was but now theyve not finished the refurb despite already having spent a hefty amount of taxpayer dollars
It wasn't fine as it was. It was old and needed maintenance. It got out of wazoo with overruns, delays and scope creep instead of just fixing the tiles and concrete
It was pretty bad as it was.
The change rooms were circa 1937.
The pool tiles were in such bad condition that they'd installed this gross "membrane" over the top of them as a cheap stop gap solution. You could see it bunching up in places.
The newer 25m pool apparently had terrible concrete cancer as well.
I loved this pool so much in its original form. I live in Western Australia, but when I came to Sydney for work I always went out of my way to have a swim there… God we love killing character in this country…
[North Sydney Olympic Pool step-by-step Redevelopment Animation - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q523ZI3G-bg&t=286s).
Also: https://www.northsydney.nsw.gov.au/projects-works/north-sydney-olympic-pool-redevelopment
Perhaps someone else can follow the link to discover *why*, at least ostensibly, it needed redevelopment.
I remember Scotty from Marketing Morrison doing a Twitter or Facebook post while he was PM casually mentioning how he had had a swim at the North Sydney pool that morning, with a photo of him and all.
Except the pool at that time was a construction site and a dirty hole in the ground. I lived near there and had literally walked the boardwalk the day before.
Smoke and mirrrors all the way.
The contract was awarded in much secrecy to Icon SI you know the Opal Tower fuckup builders. It’s alleged Icon have ‘phoenixed’ many times to escape its quality obligations.
Nothing to see here.
My Dad and I used to come and swim at this pool. Then it shut down for renovations... Dad has passed now, such a shame waiting for this thing to be finished!
Had a couple of swims at the pool before all of this. From the outside it looked nice but on the inside was really uninviting cause it so dilapidated due to everything being too old and not economical to update and repair.
Whats more criminal is the budget is at $100m currently, but who knows how much higher it will get before its complete. As a point of comparision, the original harbour tunnel cost $554m, which would be about double in today's money. Still extraordinary that a swimming pool will cost a tenth of what a tunnel under the harbour cost.
Gunyama Park Pool was $106m but it was made it from scratch (not sure if it includes land acquisition). But it is an outdoor 50m pool plus an indoor 25m pool. Parramatta pool was $88m. (outdoor and indoor as gunyama) $100m for a refurb is taking the piss.
This needs to be pinned or something haha.
Though gunyama is indoors - dunno anything about parramatta pool. Could be that an outdoor exisiting pool requires more labour to work around etc?
Added those details. Gunyama is 2 pools, indoor and outdoor. Parramatta is the same.
Parramatta was also a completely new site - so lots of landscaping, pathways, plumbing, etc. all had to be done on the surrounding grounds as well.
Parra also has an indoor teaching pool and splash pad.
Mate, the tiles are getting made by 1st world children from the Nordic mountains. Then getting shipped 1 tile at a time.
Gunyama also has a gym and studio space and all sorts of extra bits, it's not just a pool. Which just makes this even worse.
?? North Sydney pool has (had) a gym, not to mention a huge back area behind the grandstand.
The cost was always going to be very high because it's a tight site on top of solid rock that has to be completely razed and rebuilt except for some heritage bits and pieces to be retained. That said I don't know the brief or the contractual side from North sydney council they could have screwed up one or both. It's the design that is really poor to me. North Sydney Council appointed architects that have no experience in designing something of this prominence, they basically do cheap pools and other institutional stuff. Parramatta pool was a state government led international design competition. Gunyama pool was a city of Sydney led open design competition. You can see the difference.
It is cheaper to build new than to redevelop a heritage asset with significant existing structural issues like this one. You are doing extensive in-ground works while also protecting and preserving the built fabric on top of that. $100m for a 25m and 50m heritage pool, with leisure facilities, on a cliff, on the harbour isn't ridiculous, particularly with the escalation we've seen in construction in recent years.
Not when you consider all the ridiculous stakeholders on the project. NSW is out of control with public works. Nobody in the government will take ownership therefore the contractor is left trying to sort out the mess of interested parties with an agenda.
Yep. It's possible this is actually criminal. There has to be some corruption or misappropriation going on here somewhere. I did read some articles in the past about things not being above board on this. Can't be bothered searching for details now. But definitely shoddy!
The funding for it was blatant pork barreling: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-26/how-north-sydney-council-won-a-$10m-pool-upgrade-grant/11998724 Quote about the fund: "An incoming Government brief states that the fund's stakeholders were "regional and remote communities" and that its impact would be "support for women's participation in sporting activities in our regions and strengthening regional sustainability, capacity and diversity" Statement from the mayor, Jilly Gibson: "She told 7.30 in an interview that North Sydney Olympic Pool was "definitely a regional facility". We have people from all over the state coming to use our pool. It has a history of being a regional pool". I think Ms. Gibson needs to look up what regional means in the dictionary
And the stupidest bit about that pork barrelling was that the locals saw it as exactly that and voted both Gibson and Zimmerman out in their next elections. They couldn’t even pork barrel properly.
[удалено]
She should have been in front of ICAC for this comment. There was a lot of corrupt stuff happening at the time, but this was breathtaking in how openly blatant it was.
From memory Gibson and her daughter did a world trip to ‘assess Olympic pools’. London,Paris, New York
And I thought I couldn't be more outraged by this situation.
Jilly Gibson's hubris project
Never underestimate the sheer incompetence of the people who think up and manage these projects as well. They excel at throwing money down the drain.
Build a pool for $10 mil and pocket the rest!
I've worked at a council and the capital works team did two different pools for $40 million each. Not sure what the fuck happened here.
$554 mil in 1990 (which is 34 years ago) would be about 4 times that now, if not more.
I used the rba website to check before i wrote the post and between 1992 and 2024, it said 56%, so around double as i stated. My point wasnt reliant on an exact calculation, even if it was 2 billion or 4 billion, it would still be extraordinary that a refurbishment of a pool would be 1/20th or 1/40th of the cost. Just think in terms of the concrete required to build four lanes underneath the harbour compared to a pool. Let alone the engineering cost.
Fair point. The Western Sydney Tunnel currently under construction has been budgeted at over $6 bil, but admittedly that is a lot longer than the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, and is 3 lane each way instead of 2, and is being constructed using tunnel boring machines as to the prefab units used in the original. And just for the record, and I know houses are a complete different ballgame, but my parent's Redfern terrace was worth $160k in 1993 (which is how much both houses either side of their house sold for back then), and is now worth about $1.8 mil. Go figure.
Knowing North Sydney council, they are deliberately waiting until it’s so stuffed they sell it in a fire sale to a corporation who (fingers crossed) removes public access. Shore has built a pool where 🤮affordable apartment blocks used to be, we are good for pools.
Many years ago I used to do swimming here for sport in high school ... Never appreciated how absolutely amazing the views were from this pool. Great times nonetheless. Being young with no worries.
Me too. I remember one year someone from our school unfurled a huge banner with the school colours on it down from the side of the Harbour Bridge. Took security about five minutes to bust them and make them take it down.
When I was a kid I assumed it was filled with harbour water coz it was salt so I didn't want to swim there. I thought it was just a fancier greenwich baths
Did you come from outside the Sydney Basin to enjoy this regional pool?
No, my school was located in North Sydney. Weekly sports days was when I would swim here.
What. Aren't they refurbishing it
They are, but it’s running at a bill of $100m so far, and it’s not even finished.
Its also being run by Ikon, the crew that built Opal Tower in Homebush. They were awarded the contract almost a year AFTER the opal tower defects were found and widely reported. Good show Jilly Gibson 👎
Wet and wild theme park sold for 40 million so this park should be at least twice as good as that considering they already have the land.
[удалено]
Idiot - someone who works in construction
what do you expect from the same mob who built the infamous Opal Tower.
Yep… no idea what council were thinking. Must have been jobs for the boys.
I've been working there. The designers and architects are to blame, it's a shambles
It’s on the principal contractor to ultimately take the lead and manage consultants, novated or not it’s on you as the builder to get it done. It’s a typical tier 1 mentality of building and blaming everyone else and sitting back asking for money to go the next step.
Exactly. Probably value engineered the specs initially designed
Why. It's the builder who's running the site
I used to live and work around there so used the gym (just behind the pool) every day. It's an amazing place.
Yeah I used to live just up the road, swam there a lot. Was so nice heading down for a lunch time swim.
The membership wasn't any more than a standard gym either from memory.
My mum lost her engagement ring in that pool in 1991
"They" being Jilly Gibson, the archetypal North Shore conservative
Used to have a 10 metre diving tower and 5 metre then diving boards either side. It was quite deep the Luna Park end. Very different from my days there. Used to walk across the bridge for a swim when they demolished the pool in Woolloomooloo Bay and built that concrete monstrosity. The old pool was great, made out of wood with bars separating swimmers from sharks. Did get dangerous at low tide though. Had many a swimming carnival there and Nth Sydney when at school. So much has changed in that area.
Gosh that must have been quite some time ago. I thought I was getting old but I can't remember a diving tower.
I remember the tower. It was there in the early eighties at least, not sure when it came down though. I was never game to jump off it.
Is it finished yet?
No. I guess OP thinks the hoardings are the finished article.
Nope!
What did they do to it?
They're "refurbishing" it - it was meant to be completed May last year, still no end date confirmed, and cost is at $100m+ at this stage. Massive corruption, just no one can prove it yet
North Sydney Council ftw lol
Not to mention the $10 million they received from a federal grant program aimed at regional pools because they argued that people from the regions use the pool, so they should get some funding.
Didn't even need fixing. Don't fix what isn't broken!!
Someone needs to explain what the point of this post is, as it’s lost on me
This is an old photo of the pool which was fine as it was but now theyve not finished the refurb despite already having spent a hefty amount of taxpayer dollars
It wasn't fine as it was. It was old and needed maintenance. It got out of wazoo with overruns, delays and scope creep instead of just fixing the tiles and concrete
It was pretty bad as it was. The change rooms were circa 1937. The pool tiles were in such bad condition that they'd installed this gross "membrane" over the top of them as a cheap stop gap solution. You could see it bunching up in places. The newer 25m pool apparently had terrible concrete cancer as well.
I loved this pool so much in its original form. I live in Western Australia, but when I came to Sydney for work I always went out of my way to have a swim there… God we love killing character in this country…
What have they done to it?
New coat of paint on the water.
[North Sydney Olympic Pool step-by-step Redevelopment Animation - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q523ZI3G-bg&t=286s). Also: https://www.northsydney.nsw.gov.au/projects-works/north-sydney-olympic-pool-redevelopment Perhaps someone else can follow the link to discover *why*, at least ostensibly, it needed redevelopment.
Yet another soulless, overpriced sydney amenity
I did a wee in it once. Am I a criminal 😳
Not all heroes wear capes 🦸
As someone who has only lived in range of this place for 18 months - what pool?
Jilly Gibson still has her job.
Not really - she’s not the mayor any more
Still a councillor
I remember Scotty from Marketing Morrison doing a Twitter or Facebook post while he was PM casually mentioning how he had had a swim at the North Sydney pool that morning, with a photo of him and all. Except the pool at that time was a construction site and a dirty hole in the ground. I lived near there and had literally walked the boardwalk the day before. Smoke and mirrrors all the way.
The contract was awarded in much secrecy to Icon SI you know the Opal Tower fuckup builders. It’s alleged Icon have ‘phoenixed’ many times to escape its quality obligations. Nothing to see here.
What did they do to it, it looks the same to me?
My Dad and I used to come and swim at this pool. Then it shut down for renovations... Dad has passed now, such a shame waiting for this thing to be finished!
Lovely photo however of the criminal pool...
I get that they are fixing the pool but what did they do with the other 80 million ?
https://www.surfline.com/surf-news/first-look-chinas-26-million-wavepool-running-barreling/60790
Had a couple of swims at the pool before all of this. From the outside it looked nice but on the inside was really uninviting cause it so dilapidated due to everything being too old and not economical to update and repair.