The one question Chris O'Keefe has over Rosehill Racecourse debacle 04:10

I feel like I'm the only one stating the obvious with Rose Hill Racecourse. That the plans to turn it into 25,000 apartments, they are premature and they are riddled with problems. And I think the spin around the selling off of Rose Hill Racecourse has been amateur and unfair too. Unfair for the racing industry and unfair for the members of the Australian Turf Club. The members who own the asset that is Rose Hill Racecourse.

Rose Hill is theirs and theirs only to sell. The members of the ATC. But I've got some more information on where all this is at. And Chris Minns isn't going to like this. But the issue that needs to be settled is this. How much money can selling Rose Hill and building apartments deliver for the ATC and the thoroughbred industry as a whole? How much money can this thing raise? The problem is nobody can answer this properly.

Some say, oh, it could be as high as sort of $6 or $7 billion. Others say, oh, no, that's fanciful. It's a lot less than this. Now, behind the scenes, there are a whole bunch of reports that have been commissioned to stack this up, to see exactly what kind of money could be raised selling Rose Hill off, and that report will then be taken to the membership to convince them to do it. But I know for a fact that developers are warning both the ATC and the government that

that this five or six, this five, six, seven billion dollar figure, it's fanciful. Because there is no Australian developer that has that kind of money to make an upfront payment. So forget that. No one's going to come in, hand over the cash and buy the whole site. Won't happen. So what you could have to do is sell off plots, almost like a land release program. And you stage it over a period of time because you can't flood the market with the same product

Otherwise, you'll affect the sale price. You'll be selling apartments a hell of a lot cheaper than you hope to. So you're potentially talking sort of 10, 15, 20 years to realize the full proceeds of the sale of Rose Hill. And the way things are with building at the moment, the fundamentals of which are unlikely to change in that time, there might not be many developers willing to grab those sites anyway because they can't make money from them.

So if the $6 or $7 billion to save racing by selling Rose Hill is untrue, is a furphy, is it really worth it? Is it really worth selling it? Well, the answer is no. Of course it's not. So here's my question. Why did the ATC and the Minsk government so enthusiastically go down this path when none of the work had been done? Why did they make claims of big dollar windfalls on the front page of the Telegraph and the Herald?

and do these big media events and talk about the closure of Rose Hill and put a date on it, as well as, oh, we're going to open a track at Horsley Park, when none of that work had been done. Are the Premier and his team embarrassed by this? They certainly aren't talking about the sale of Rose Hill anymore, are they? Because they know what I'm saying is true.

So was it New South Wales Labor so desperately trying to get a good headline on housing that they just sold the voters an empty box? Or were they sold snake oil by the ATC? One of those is the truth, because the members of the ATC are the ones who have been, in my opinion, disrespected through this process.

It is up to them what they should do with their property. Not the government, not the media, not racehorse trainers, not anybody else.

but the membership of the ATC, because they will make the decision that suits the club that they pay their fees to be a member of. That's how these things work. And if they think they're getting $6, $7, $5 billion, it ain't going to happen. So I would say this is even more dead in the water than I thought it was.