Japan Plans Tourist City On The Coast
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday August 2, 1990
A Japanese company is planning to build a $1.7 billion tourist city with accommodation for 20,000 people on the far North Coast of NSW.
The project would be one of the largest and most expensive selfcontained tourist city developments undertaken in Australia.
Construction is scheduled to begin next June on a 1,000-hectare beachfront site near Kingscliff, about 10 kilometres south of Tweed Heads on the Queensland border.
The city, to be built in stages over 10 years, would include a hotel, condominiums and free-standing houses. It would also house shopping centres, a hospital, an artificial lake and two golf courses.
It would dwarf all previous and planned tourist village developments in the region, including Mr Michael Gore's Sanctuary Cove and another Japanese-backed proposal for a $250 million centre seven kilometres inland from Tweed Heads.
The plans were confirmed yesterday by the developer, Narui Norin Corporation of Fukushima, after the details were leaked to a Japanese newspaper.
But the president of the Tweed Shire Council said he knew of no development or building applications for the site.
It is the first overseas development for Narui Norin, a domestic woodchip company which recently diversified into the Japanese leisure industry. In May the company set up a Sydney-based subsidiary, Narui Gold Coast Pty Ltd, to oversee its Australian plans.
The company is believed to have bought the site early this year for about$25 million from a local consortium headed by property developers Mr Bob Ell and Mr Brian Ray.
A Narui Norin spokesman said yesterday he was not aware of any local opposition to the project.
The spokesman said the company was planning to sell 50 per cent of the village accommodation to Australians and the remaining 50 per cent to Japanese interests. He expected it would attract a broad spectrum of Australian and international tourists.
The company had budgeted for an outlay of $1.66 billion to complete the project, he said.
The planned cost is much higher, on a per-bed basis, than the recently announced $250 million proposal for a 5,000-bed village inland from Tweed Heads. This project is backed by the Tokyo-based Calconic Corporation.
Narui Norin owns five golf courses in Japan, its only previous leisure industry developments. The spokesman said the company had decided to invest in Australia because increasingly strict environmental controls were limiting its potential in Japan.
The Tweed Shire president, Mr Max Boyd, said the scale of the proposed development was way above what had been discussed by the previous owners of the land.
"The only comment I feel I can make at this stage is that the density seems to be very high," he said.
If the accommodation numbers were correct, the developers might be over-estimating the number of people the land could accommodate, he said.
* The office of the mayor of Kawasaki City has declined to comment on the controversy over a proposal for a resort in its Australian sister city, Wollongong, for the exclusive use of aged Japanese tourists.
The plan was branded as "exceptionally offensive and racist" yesterday by the South Coast Labor Council.
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald
