Why do you build me up?

It's been three months since a meeting between the NSW Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Planning Diane Beamer and Mayor of Ku-ring-gai Adrienne Ryan raised hopes for the liberalisation of planning policy in the area.

"This approach offers the best hope of controlling our destiny," said Ryan in February. So far, it seems, progress with the government has been slow, steady and absolutely impossible to prove. Save our Suburbs' Tony Recsei says that the state isn't justified in maintaining its hold on Ku-ring-gai's built future.

"The State Government believes that every local government authority must get its share - now if there are 50,000 people coming into Sydney every year, you've got to change the whole of Sydney - everything must change - to absorb the people.

"Australia's got a huge area and the urban areas take up 0.25 per cent of it, yet we're going up. We're not Japan and we're not Holland and we're not Hong Kong. We need satellite cities linked by high-speed transport, not urban consolidation," he says.

The way things change is that sprawling, low density areas like Ku-ring-gai absorb the blows like everyone else. The two photos here and on the cover were taken of a multi-storey apartment development - one of many proposed or approved in Ku-ring-gai - going up on Tryon Road in Lindfield.

East Lindfield resident Gary Swavley, explains why he took them.

"Well, it was opportunistic because I had the camera in the car, but I'd also noticed the fence going up and it was just a bit of a shock. You read about areas being zoned for development and but when you actually see it, it drives it home. They were starting on the nicest homes, and it was just sad really."

"It's changing the character of the area. That area of Lindfield in particular is like an old world village and it's going to totally change it," he says.

Tony Recsei agrees. "Ku-ring-gai will be irrevocably changed; trees will be knocked down, there'll be traffic congestion, atmospheric pollution, the stormwater won't soak into the ground because there'll be too much hard surface.

It's going to change the nature of the whole place if the process continues," he says.

"It's been a natural progression of events that has a logical conclusion, unless the government's policy changes."

Minister Beamer says that an exemption from the ties binding Ku-ring-gai's self-sufficient planning power, the much-maligned State Environmental Planning Policy (SEPP) 53, will come off only by hard work and good behaviour.

"We're working with Ku-ring-gai [Council] to develop their town centre plan and when they show me progress on that, I'll consider the exemption.

"I don't have a time frame in mind, but I've been mindful of the fact that they are progressing and I'm willing to talk to the council about this," she saysRecsei remains sceptical.

"I don't think that council can do anything. They're [the government] just not going to accept a residential strategy until that quota, the number of people they plan to fit into Ku-ring-gai, is achieved.

"The communities have no say, developers have the say. And they give big donations to political parties and its an extremely undemocratic process. And they're the people who decide what's going to happen to Ku-ring-gai. But in the overall scenario, there's not much council can do," he says.

Adrienne Ryan assured the Observer, as she has assured the people before, that what Beamer says is true. But when and at what cost?

"I don't think they'll ever exempt Ku-ring-gai from SEPP 53," says Ku-ring-gai councillor Laura Bennett.

Tony Recsei agrees again."All that can be done is for the community to get together and put pressure on the government to change its policy," he says.