Disclaimer: Opinion pieces represent the views of the named author, not the editorial position of The Daily Wollongong. We aim to publish a range of perspectives from across the Wollongong community.
Opinion26 June 2026
Wollongong can't keep treating the Sydney train line as an afterthought
Every infrastructure conversation in the Illawarra eventually comes back to the South Coast Line — and every time, we settle for less than we should.
By Alex Carmody · Transport columnist
“Wollongong is a 90-minute city pretending it's an hour from Sydney. That gap is costing us jobs.”
If you've commuted from Wollongong to Sydney in the last decade you already know the story: a service that takes 90 minutes on a good day and well over two hours when something — anything — goes wrong on the line.
The political answer has always been to talk about "future planning" while quietly accepting the status quo. That used to be tolerable when the Illawarra was a steel town with predictable working patterns. It isn't anymore.
More than 20,000 Wollongong residents now commute to Sydney for work. Many of them would happily live closer to where their employer is — except they can't afford it. The train line is the connective tissue that makes the local economy work. We should be treating it like one.
Opinion25 June 2026
We need to talk about who actually benefits from foreshore housing
Wollongong's coastal building boom looks great in render. The reality on the ground is messier — and a lot less local.
By Mia Hollander · Urban affairs writer
“The promise was housing for Wollongong. The result is a sea wall of two-bedders priced for Sydney.”
Drive along Cliff Road this weekend and count the cranes. Then count the locals who could realistically afford to live in any of the apartments going up beneath them.
The planning case for these developments has always rested on a simple bargain: greater density in exchange for more housing supply. The unspoken caveat — that the supply would actually be aimed at locals — has been quietly forgotten.
Council can fix this. Mandatory affordable-housing quotas, properly enforced, would change the calculus for developers without slowing approvals. The political will is the missing ingredient.
Opinion24 June 2026
Quietly, Wollongong is becoming a real tech city
While Sydney's startup scene gets the headlines, something interesting is happening on the south coast — and most of the country hasn't noticed yet.
By Jordan Pike · Business columnist
“The next generation of Illawarra graduates doesn't have to move to Surry Hills to build a company. That's new.”
Five years ago, the standard career story for an ambitious University of Wollongong graduate was simple: do a few years locally, then take the train north for good.
That arc has bent. The combination of remote work, lower rents than Sydney and a small but growing cluster of homegrown software companies has made it possible — for the first time, really — to build a tech career here without leaving.
It is fragile. It depends on housing not getting worse, the train line not getting slower, and the local council resisting the temptation to chase the next shiny mega-project at the expense of the small businesses doing the actual work.