News Baton change in political outlook from Fairwater, on Double Bay's Seven Shillings Beach, aka Atlassian Cove
Baton change in political outlook from Fairwater, on Double Bay's Seven Shillings Beach, aka Atlassian Cove
Jonathan ChancellorDecember 8, 2020
Lady Mary Fairfax, the last owner of the Fairwater harbourfront estate at Double Bay once boasted she was enrolled at Harrington Park, her country estate on the outskirts of Sydney, because her vote mattered more there.
The longtime society doyenne died last year, with her executors recently securing a record setting $100 million.
The property had cost £5,350 when bought by her media dynasty forebears in 1901, when the Federation saw the first conservative party local member.
The electoral pendulum has swung from the ruling Liberal Party representation, but its pricey property has been near endlessly on the rise.
With Sydney house prices having a $980,000 median price, there are almost no opportunities to buy houses at this level across the electorate.
It has the highest valued residential property in the country, given its proximity to the harbour and the coast.
The residential land value alone - before improvements - of the Woollahra municipality sits at $37 billion.
It is $29 billion in the Waverley municipality.
The Wentworth electorate has more haves than have nots among its 103,810 electors.
Indeed the AFR columnist Christopher Joye speculated before the poll that the affluent Wentworth voters "might inflict massive financial losses on themselves in what is one of Australia's most investment-orientated electorates."
Celebrities aplenty, longtime society page doyennes and newbie A-listers, plus even a few rogues call the eastern Sydney suburbs home.
The local estate agents who get around in flash cars, are constantly setting record prices, albeit amid rising homelessness.
The famed Bondi Pavilion on the iconic beach has provided shelter for rough sleepers under its arches.
Just across the water, the retailer Mark McInnes recently sold his uninhabitable North Bondi penthouse for $11.5 million to aged care provider Mark Moran who intends a Tobias Architects fit out.
TV star Larry Emdur sold last year on the cliff at Dover Heights for a record $11.5 million to accountant Anthony Bell.
The Lowy family picked up a neighbouring beachfront at Camp Cove for $14.2 million taking their holding to three blocks.
Coastal Tamarama has seen prices hit $13 million when DJ Annie Conley bought the home of pioneering fashion retailer Robbie Ingham.
The local Tama Surf Living Saving Club president was the Labor candidate Tim Murray.
At nearby Bronte, which got the $2 million Federal Government grant during the campaign, a record $16.5 million was paid several years ago by a former Keating Government staffer, Seamus Dawes who is now a merchant banker.
Former state and federal Labor politicians had something of an inland retirement village around Woollahra with the likes of Paul Keating, Graham Richardson and Neville Wran, all owning there at times.
The departing local member Malcolm Turnbull, with wife Lucy, bought their house, once known as Le Gai Soliel for $5.4 million in 1994, and its likely to be worth $60 million, being on the electorate’s priciest peninsular where prices have hit $61.8 million.
Centennial Park saw a recent record $16.5 million when tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and wife Kim sold Braelin, their renovated 1918 home to art gallery owner Gene Sherman and her husband Brian.
The Atlassian co-founder went on to buy Fairwater, topping the national price record by nearly $30 million on the $71 million just next door on Seven Shillings Beach, which has now been nicknamed Atlassian Cove.
An active climate change advocate, Cannon-Brookes tweeted Saturday night that he'd happily fund the mooted independent, Jane Caro's challenge against former Prime Minister Tony Abbott in Warringah.
Double Bay was one of the 12 booth's won by Liberal candidate Dave Sharma among the electorate's 35 booths.
Kerryn Phelps is the local doctor, who resides not far away in Potts Point. Her large medical practice has seen patients through the years including former Channel Nine boss Eddie McGuire. Liberal senator Trent Zimmerman declared he ranked among the practice's current clients.
High profile publicist Roxy Jacenko and husband Oliver Curtis recently spent $6.5 million on a Vaucluse home having previously been renting a luxury Bondi Beach apartment block developed by film maker Rebel Penfold Russell, where Hugh Jackman stays in his trips down under.
Bar baron Justin Hemmes lives in The Hermitage at Vaucluse which the hotelier family have owned since paying $500,000 in the 1970s recession.
Tycoon James Packer has sold out completely, though his mum, Ros, who attended a Dave Sharma fundraiser, remains at Cairnton, the longheld 2,450 sqm family estate at Bellevue Hill while his ex wife, Jodee Meares, owns at Watsons Bay.
John Ibrahim has owned for over two decades at Dover Heights having paid $1,165,000 in 1997.
There was a brief stay at Vaucluse by Salim Mehajer who rented a mansion overlooking Diamond Bay, before he was forced to vacate last year after owing $18,000 in rent.
Of occupied private dwellings in Wentworth around 17 percent are freestanding houses, with 20 percent semi-detached, row or terrace houses, and ortownhouses.
Some 61 percent of the dwellings are apartments, making Wentworth the most densely populated electorate in the country.
All up some 70,000 privately owned dwellings.
Around 44 percent of the dwellings are rented, at a $610 a week median, well up on the $380 NSW median, according to the 2016 Census.
For owners, the median monthly $3000 mortgage payments is well up on the $2000 NSW median mortgage.
The are declining numbers of boarding houses along with not enough crisis refuges.
Social housing is available, but sparsely so in the east. Anglicare recently estimated less than one per cent of private rental properties in Wentworth's are affordable for low-income earners.
There are NSW Housing Department flats on Neild Avenue, Paddington in the cosmopolitan heartland of the electorate, plus pricey Ramsgate Avenue, North Bondi.
Bridge Housing, an organisation that owns properties and manages properties owned by the NSW Land and Housing Corporation (LAHC), the public housing authority within the NSW Department of Family and Community Services (FACS), has 213 dwellings available in the Waverley municipality and 16 in the Woollahra municipality.
The cheapest recent sales have include a $491,700 Bondi Beach studio apartment, a $607,000 one bedder in Bellevue Hill and a $640,000 one bedroom apartment in Vaucluse.
A one bedroom with views of iconic Bondi Beach might set you back $2.8 million.
And a car space needs an extra $300,000, but good luck finding one.
Jonathan Chancellor
Jonathan Chancellor is one of Australia's most respected property journalists, having been at the top of the game since the early 1980s. Jonathan co-founded the property industry website Property Observer and has written for national and international publications.
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