{"id":10016,"date":"2026-05-12T20:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T20:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/10016\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T20:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T20:28:09","slug":"liv-golf-has-triggered-a-turf-war-in-adelaides-park-lands-here-are-the-battlelines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/10016\/","title":{"rendered":"LIV Golf has triggered a turf war in Adelaide’s park lands \u2014 here are the battlelines"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the green belt that encircles Adelaide, a “golf war” has broken out.<\/p>\n

While Saudi Arabia is involved \u2014 albeit distantly and indirectly \u2014 the main players are much closer to home and include environmentalists, the city council and the SA government.<\/p>\n

The current battleground is an area called “Possum Park”, which is part of the Adelaide Park Lands but also covers the North Adelaide Golf Course.<\/p>\n

It’s the friction between those two identities \u2014 between the park’s roles as habitat and sporting facility \u2014 that has caused political conflict to erupt.<\/p>\n

Here’s a look at how we got here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What’s caused the stoush?<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, LIV Golf \u2014 as well as hundreds of trees.<\/p>\n

For the past four years, an Australian leg of the Saudi-backed event has been held in Adelaide, which has become arguably the most successful stop on the breakaway tour.<\/p>\n

In February last year, when more than 100,000 fans packed the Grange Golf Club for the 2025 tournament, SA Premier Peter Malinauskas announced the event would be moving to a “brand new world-class, Greg Norman-designed championship golf course” in North Adelaide.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Fans<\/p>\n

Fans celebrated at the Grange Golf Club in 2025 after an announcement about the event’s future. (ABC News)<\/p>\n

At that point, Adelaide’s Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith described the plans as a “win-win”.<\/p>\n

“[The North Adelaide course] is an amazing asset and over the years the council has maintained and preserved it and invested in it, but about 10 years ago we knew that it needed a major upgrade,” she said last year.<\/p>\n

But a lot can change, and now Ms Lomax-Smith is among the plan’s greatest critics.<\/p>\n

Months after the initial announcement, the government revealed about 600 trees would be cut down to make way for the $45 million redevelopment of the course, which is also set to host the men’s and women’s Australian Open golf tournaments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The golf course redevelopment has divided public opinion. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)<\/p>\n

Despite grave doubts about the future of LIV Golf after Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) withdrew its funding<\/a>, the process of removing trees kicked off this week, as did a number of protests at the site.<\/p>\n

“Right now, what’s going on in this park land is anything but care \u2014 it’s just unwarranted destruction,” said protester Hayley Wilson.<\/p>\n

“But really the trees are just a flashpoint for us. The bigger issue for us is the lack of transparency.”<\/p>\n

\"Protester<\/p>\n

Protester Hayley Wilson opposes the redevelopment. (ABC News)<\/p>\n

What are the park lands?<\/p>\n

For those outside of South Australia, or indeed metropolitan Adelaide, it might be hard to quantify why so many are against the current plans.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The park lands are a protected area of greenery, a series of unbroken parks, that surround the CBD and the adjoining, but connected, suburb of North Adelaide.<\/p>\n

Weird uses of Adelaide Park Lands<\/a><\/p>\n

A snake park and cattle yards are among the colourful history of the green space which loops around the city of Adelaide.<\/p>\n

The idea of establishing a green belt around the city dates back almost 200 years. The park lands were included in Colonel William Light’s original plans for Adelaide in 1837 as “a place for public recreation”.<\/p>\n

As early as 1838, settlers were admonished by the acting governor of the day for cutting down trees there, and today, the parks include walking paths, playing fields and waterways.<\/p>\n

They have previously hosted a quarry, a reservoir and a sewage farm, and have been used for horse racing and grazing land for sheep and cattle.<\/p>\n

The golf course at North Adelaide opened in 1905 on land that, according to the club, “was leased at one guinea per year from the Adelaide City Council”.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The North Adelaide golf course ahead of trees being cut down. (ABC News: Brant Cumming)<\/p>\n

But the park lands are meant to be a space protected from development, and are covered by the Adelaide Park Lands Act, which acknowledges the area’s “special status, attributes and character”, and asserts the need for the “world-class asset to be preserved as an urban park for the benefit of present and future generations”.<\/p>\n

Under the act, the park lands are managed by an authority which is “a subsidiary of the Adelaide City Council”.<\/p>\n

But in the middle of last year, the SA Labor government passed the North Adelaide Public Golf Course Act 2025, which contained a clause to override “any other Act or law of the state”, effectively placing the course under government control.<\/p>\n

What do opponents say?<\/p>\n

That move appears to have converted the Lord Mayor’s initial optimism about the redevelopment into outright opposition.<\/p>\n

\"Jane<\/p>\n

Ms Lomax-Smith stood beside the premier when the plan was revealed, but has since expressed reservations. (ABC News)<\/p>\n

Ms Lomax-Smith, who is a former Labor minister, yesterday told 891 ABC Adelaide she thought the government had “got it fundamentally wrong in the park lands”.<\/p>\n

“The legislation took away all the legislative controls, all the checks and balances,” she said.<\/p>\n

At a council meeting last night, she doubled down, saying the North Adelaide Public Golf Course Act had been passed at “warp speed” and set a “very troubling precedent for how the third tier of government \u2014 the closest to the people \u2014 will be treated by the state government into the future”.<\/p>\n

“[The act] effects more than 10 per cent of the Adelaide park lands. It allows the state to incorporate additional land if they wish,” Ms Lomax-Smith said.<\/p>\n

“I suspect that when we look back from the vantage point of 2036 \u2014 our city’s bicentenary \u2014 citizens will recognise this decade as the period in which the greatest damage was done to our most precious civic asset, our park lands.”\"A<\/p>\n

Protesters hold placards at the site. (ABC News: Bethanie Alderson)<\/p>\n

Greens MP Robert Simms has described the redevelopment of the course as a “vanity project”.<\/p>\n

“Giving Peter Malinauskas and Labor more control over the park lands is a bit like giving Count Dracula the keys to the blood bank \u2014 they keep sinking their teeth in, and they’re going to keep doing so until there is nothing left, unless the community steps up and unless the community takes action,” he said on Tuesday afternoon at a press conference.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“This is a waste of public money in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, and that $45 million could be spent on other priorities.”<\/p>\n

How has the government responded?<\/p>\n

SA Premier Peter Malinauskas hasn’t budged on the plans and has insisted they will provide benefit for the wider community.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“The renovation of the golf course stacks up even if you just look at it from a community perspective and a golf tourism perspective,” he said last week.<\/p>\n

Environment Minister Emily Bourke on Tuesday rejected criticisms of the North Adelaide project, saying the removal of trees had been conducted in a way that minimised impact on local wildlife.<\/p>\n

“We’ve got four fauna experts on the ground every day through this process \u2014 we are taking it seriously,” she said.<\/p>\n

“We want this to be an incredible golf course experience, but we also want the environment to be protected along the way.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Protesters have been in a stand-off with authorities. (ABC News: Bethanie Alderson)<\/p>\n

Ms Bourke said only a fraction of the site’s 9,000 trees were being removed, and that the new laws required the government to compensate for what would be lost.<\/p>\n

“Six per cent are being removed,” she said.<\/p>\n

“We’ve already made it a legislative requirement that if one tree is removed, three trees need to be replaced when that happens.<\/p>\n

“That’s why we know that there’ll be over 1,700 extra trees and plants in this area, which will actually increase the canopy coverage of this site.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Workers at the North Adelaide golf course redevelopment site removing possums from trees. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)<\/p>\n

Ms Bourke said it was the government’s intention to not just replace felled trees with saplings, but to put “mature trees back into this site as well”.<\/p>\n

“The golf course was something that the local council were always going to invest in anyway \u2014 they just didn’t have the capital to do so,” she said.<\/p>\n

“As a state government, we can step in and provide that support.<\/p>\n

“We want to protect everything here \u2014 in the sense of the environment, the sporting opportunities, the tourism opportunities.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the green belt that encircles Adelaide, a “golf war” has broken out. While Saudi Arabia is involved…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[395,2675,1359,11168,1358,11169,3889,11170],"class_list":{"0":"post-10016","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-adelaide","8":"tag-adelaide","9":"tag-golf","10":"tag-golf-course","11":"tag-liv","12":"tag-north-adelaide","13":"tag-park-land","14":"tag-parklands","15":"tag-possums"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}